Eulogy For a Jester: The End of Tom Robbins

I am having difficulty imagining what a funeral for Tom Robbins should look like. Robbins – surrealist novelist, master of the outrageous, nemesis of the status quo – made a career out of mapping the frontiers of literary possibility, thumbing his nose at authority, even mocking Death itself. But now that the zany, boisterous, Dixie jazz band parade of his life has ended, it leaves us to ponder an aftermath resembling the detritus on Bourbon Street the morning after Mardi Gras. A mess? Most probably. But boy, what a time . . .

Robbins, who was born in 1932, lived longer than his contemporaries in the rock bands he reviewed during his days as a reporter. He found his way into the literary world following what he described as a “hillbilly” childhood split between North Carolina and Virginia and a stint in the Air Force (which included an improbable two-year posting to Strategic Air Command). Following his discharge, Robbins enrolled in the Richmond Professional institute where he served as editor and columnist for the school paper. He dropped out sophomore year and went on to hold posts at the Richmond Times-Dispatch and as an art critic for the Seattle Times. But it was after a 1966 meeting with Luthor Nichols, West Coast editor of Doubleday, that Robbins embarked on what was to be his life’s work as a novelist.

His first book, ANOTHER ROADSIDE ATTRACTION, came out in 1971. Featuring a cast of counterculture nonconformists, the plot revolves around the theft of the corpse of Jesus Christ, shaken loose from its underground tomb in the Vatican by an earthquake and stolen by the redoubtable Plucky Purcell. The event precipitates a cascade of improbable disasters which culminate in an escape via weather balloon from a US military base. The novel showcased the frequent word play and a non-linear narrative that characterizes much of Robbins’ literary output.

Robbins would spend the next five years composing his second novel, the cult favorite EVEN COWGIRLS GET THE BLUES. With over one million copies sold, COWGIRLS became a staple of hippie literature and cemented Robbins’ legacy as an American writer of significance. The novel follows the adventures of Sissy Hankshaw, a woman with abnormally large thumbs who uses her mutation to become a hitchhiker extraordinaire. In the course of her adventures, she becomes a model, marries a Mohawk Indian and beds a sexually rapacious cowgirl named Bonanza Jellybean. Even less linear than ROADSIDE, COWGIRLS reads like the world’s longest shaggy dog joke about sex, feminism, drugs, body odor, religion and yams. It continues to sell steadily and reading it remains something of a hipster rite-of-passage.

The next fourteen years would see Robbins produce three novels: STILL LIFE WITH WOODPECKER, JITTERBUG PERFUME and SKINNY LEGS AND ALL. PERFUME, arguably Robbins’ most accessible novel, found its way to the New York Times bestseller list in 1985. Despite its more conventional prose, PERFUME’s plot is no less eccentric than any of Robbins’ foregoing books. The story follows the quest of Alobar and Kudra, two lovers from the ancient Indo-European world, who stumble upon the secret of immortality. While seeking refuge from those who persecute them for this knowledge, they stumble into a conflict between two rival perfume makers both seeking to resurrect a lost fragrance from the Middle Ages. The plot also features dying gods, multi-dimensional shenanigans and a waitress named Priscilla. All in all, a Robbins tour-de-force slightly repackaged for the mainstream literary market.

In the third phase of his career as a novelist, Robbins began to encounter the limits of his craft. HALF ASLEEP IN FROG PYJAMAS (1994) places the reader in the driver’s seat, ‘you’ being the protagonist–a stockbroker reeling from the effects of a market crash over a surreal weekend. FIERCE INVALIDS HOME FROM HOT CLIMATES (2000) recounts the adventures of Switters, a 35 year-old paraplegic CIA officer. Both novels feature the trademark Robbins word play and leaps of fancy, but these grow strangely tiresome as both books develop.

It is as if, after decades of whimsy, Robbins sought to broach the more serious topics of global espionage and finance, only to discover that the voice he crafted for the fanciful Seventies and Eighties was ill-suited to moving beyond the subjective and psychedelic. His final novel, VILLA ICOGNITO (2003), returns to more fanciful terrain–a useful vantage from which to parody the Vietnam War and the post-9/11 world.

Robbins was very much a man of his time – product of the 1960s counterculture and individualist to a fault, he blazed a gaudy glitter-and-rainbow trail of postmodern surrealist fiction that remains among the most whimsical in the American literary canon. Whatever failings he might have encountered with his later efforts, he leaves us with a well-deserved reputation as a literary craftsman and iconic prose stylist. His death Sunday morning was confirmed by his friend and publisher, Craig Popelars. Robbins was 92.