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That story illustrates a couple of things. The first is that Robbins made his mark as the official record-keeper of post-adolescents with an attitude problem. He stays popular because of the successive waves of 20-year-olds that wash up on his shores. Another Roadside Attraction By Tom Robbins
Even Cowgirls Get the Blues By Tom Robbins Bantam Books, 384 pages
I went through my obsessive Robbins phase between the ages of 19 and 22. I was given "Skinny Legs and All" by a friend's father, who lent us his car for a road trip from Vancouver to San Diego and included his copy of "Skinny Legs," which he had tried to read but "didn't get." I had just finished my first year of an undergraduate degree in English lit, which in Canada means large doses of the Margarets (Atwood and Laurence) and can make for a very melancholy teenager. Bumping down the Pacific Coast Highway, I fell into the story, surfacing only when I had to drive or when the curves in the road got too nauseating. "Skinny Legs and All" is about war and sex and religion and joy, and it was a complete revelation to me. I learned a heretic's history of Christianity, and it made me burn to go to Jerusalem. I started reading Robbins' books in reverse order, starting with the most recent and heading back to the halcyon days of the '70s. The books got weirder and weirder. By the time I got to "ARA" I had no clue what was going on but didn't really care. This changed when I grew up and got a job. I read "Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas" when I was 24, and the premise seemed kind of worn to me. I blamed Robbins, but then my mother told me that she had read him when she was in her early 20s, then abruptly stopped after "Cowgirls." There seems to be a limited window when you can feel his magic. I'm being polite. What my mother actually said is that Robbins panders to superannuated hippies. The overwrought metaphors, the Timothy Leary character in every book, the gimmicky plot lines seriously annoy some readers. As much as it pains me, there are Robbins haters in the world. A British newspaper once said Robbins writes like Dolly Parton dresses -- I don't think it was meant as a compliment. He has long been grouped with counterculture-gone-bestsellers like Richard Brautigan and Kurt Vonnegut, who, like Robbins, were required reading in the '70s, and all of whom, critics say, preached the '60s worldview well past its sell-by date. Robbins and Brautigan particularly caught flak for their oversexed-flower-child, nonlinear silliness, which, I might add, didn't hurt sales terribly much. A 1980 review of "Still Life With Woodpecker" in Washington Post Book World described Robbins as being close in style to Phyllis Diller; it said the "book is often fun, often as murdered with coyness that you could flush it without a thought of the dollars it cost." Although the review was positive overall, the criticisms are typical, the reason why he has never gotten much attention from the literary establishment. The review blurbs on Robbins' book jackets are completely free of quotes from the New York Review of Books. But, hey, Playboy is well represented. Robbins told the New York Times in 1993 that critics have trouble with his goofiness. "One reviewer said I need to make up my mind if I want to be funny or serious. My response is that I will make up my mind when God does, because life is a commingling of the sacred and the profane, good and evil. To try and separate them is fallacy." He also took a shot at critics over "Jitterbug Perfume," saying they "attack[ed] what is quirky and disobedient." So there. Robbins was born on July 22, 1936, in Blowing Rock, N.C., the grandchild of two Baptist preachers. His family moved to Virginia when he was quite young, and he was raised in a suburb of Richmond. His mother wrote religious material and encouraged him when, at the age of 5, he started dictating stories to her. He went through the usual writerly incubation process, leaving university early and hitchhiking across the country. In 1956, he was living in New York trying to make it as a poet when he was drafted and sent to Korea. While in uniform, he taught meteorology to the South Korean Air Force and ran a black market in toiletries. After leaving the Air Force, Robbins went back to Virginia, attended art school and worked for the local paper, the Richmond Times-Dispatch. Part of his job included choosing photos to illustrate a music-gossip column. At the time the paper refused to print photos of African-Americans. Not that Robbins cared -- he was warned twice when he chose published photos of black performers. He hit the miscegenation jackpot, though, when he published a picture of Sammy Davis Jr. and his new wife, Scandinavian actress Mai Britt. Robbins was fired, and left Richmond aiming to get as far as possible from Virginia while still living in the continental United States. He landed in the Seattle area, which is where he has remained off and on for 40 years, writing in a small house in the largest tulip-growing region in the States. Robbins has lived the classic hippie writer's life: multiple wives, internovel trips to obscure places, a child named after a '70s rock band. He has groupies who send him art based on his books, and readers are always telling him, "You changed my life." It stands to reason that, in person, he should be a bit of a blowhard, a charming blowhard, but a blowhard all the same. A Rolling Stone interviewer assigned to do a story on Robbins in 1977 figured he could show up, turn on the tape recorder and let the novelist do all the work. "What Robbins fan would have expected the new king of the extended metaphor, dependent clause, outrageous pun ... to be just about as talkative as a Puget Sound clam." So Robbins is either shy or simply not interested in spewing forth to reporters. What is known about his personal life is that he's married to his fourth wife, has a son in his 20s named Fleetwood, plays competitive volleyball, loves Virginia-grown tomatoes and tries to have a life outside his work. He resembles an aging cherub, with round cheeks and happy-looking crow's-feet.
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