Preposterous and Profound | Reading Tom Robbins
“To the extent that this world surrenders its richness and diversity, it surrenders its poetry. To the extent that it relinquishes its capacity to surprise, it relinquishes its magic. To the extent that it loses its ability to tolerate ridiculous and even dangerous exceptions, it loses its grace. As its options (no matter how absurd or unlikely) diminish, so do it’s chances for the future.”
The first Tom Robbins book I read was Still Life With Woodpecker. I read it for a book club that met once and never again.
Maybe it was Tom’s fault. He’s certainly no Jane Austen. Still, I’d guess that statistically, 91 percent of book clubs either completely fail, or just turn into wine parties, so I’m not in any hurry to blame the writer, even though writers are the easiest targets, in any given situation.
In any case, during that fateful first and last meeting, I was introduced to Mr. Robbins by the club leader, who I’d met once through a friend of a friend. I think I was invited because she wanted a high headcount and she knew I’d majored in Lit. I appreciated being included. Freshly graduated from college, I was waiting tables and realizing that the student loans I’d been living on during my four years of undergrad had been slowly but mercilessly accruing, aggressively awaiting my graduation so they could begin the merry process of haunting me for the next decade of my life. My closest friends had moved all across America, and left me, a girl with an astounding vocabulary and no practical survival skills whatsoever, alone.
I was a perfect candidate for a book club.
The leader passed her copy of Still Life around the table as she explained the reasons she’d chosen it for us. I don't remember what she said. I remember she had dyed-red hair. In hindsight, this seems significant, but at the time I knew nothing of Still Life With Woodpecker or its ginger themes.
I drove straight to Barnes & Noble from the meeting, not at all aware that there would come a time when bookstores that stayed open until midnight would be hard to come by, and bought a copy of my very first book club book. A weird title by an author I’d never read, whose profile picture was a grainy black and white thumbnail photo. He was wearing sunglasses.
Creep, I thought.
I couldn’t tell whether I loved or hated Still Life With Woodpecker. It was unlike anything I’d read before. Nevertheless, I devoured it. I couldn't and wouldn't put it down. I underlined lines like, “We may think we’re paying attention to this, that, or the other, but our dreams tell us what we’re really interested in. Dreams never lie,” and “The moon invented natural rhythm. Civilization uninvented it.”
Alas, like a true book nerd, I’d already been finished with Still Life for a week and a half when I got a group email from the moderator that she was going to postpone our meeting until further notice.
I never heard from her again.
_
I may have lost the book club, but I gained a faithful companion and guide, nonetheless.
I’ve been gradually making my way through Mr. Robbins’s books ever since. I don't leave home without him. I read Jitterbug Perfume on a girls’ trip to Costa Rica. I finished Even Cowgirls Get the Blues on a plane ride home from Paris. I spent a hot September laying on the beach, reading Skinny Legs and All. I think I like reading Tom Robbins when I’m on the move because that’s how he writes—like he’s got a plane to catch but first he’s gonna whisper an intricate and irreverent secret in your ear.
Tom Robbins books are simultaneously preposterous and profound. For example, in Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates, the main character spends the majority of the tale unable to touch his feet to the ground because a taboo has been placed on him by a South American shaman whose head is shaped like a pyramid.
Preposterous.
However, Robbins uses the outlandish circumstances of his characters to weave together powerful observations on humanity and culture, like this passage (which I double and triple underlined as I read),
“People feel tremendous pressure to settle down in some sort of permanent space and fill it up with stuff, but deep inside they resent those structures, and they’re scared to death of that stuff because they know it controls them and restricts their movements.”
Profound.
_
I found Tom Robbins at a moment in my life when I was lonely and broke; a very green, yet very disillusioned young dreamer, sharing a too-small apartment with a furniture hoarder and a Pisces, and wanting desperately to believe that my greatest, most inspired years were still ahead of me. I’d spend my entire twenties learning the hard way that all of life is, indeed, like a Tom Robbins novel.
Preposterous and profound.
“When we accept small wonders, we qualify ourselves to imagine great wonders.”
— Jitterbug Perfume
Suffice to say, I’ve never missed the book club. I got everything I didn’t know I’d shown up for that night.
Some great things were still ahead of me.