"'I don't know what system I'd prefer. But I do know that people who really excel at things - whether it's creating art or running a business - hardly ever make a big fuss about equality, except maybe on the scales of justice. Equal opportunity, yes. Equal results, impossible. The ones who're so upset about everybody not being the same, about competition, about standards of quality, about art objects having 'auras' around them, they're usually people with average abilities and average minds. And below average senses of humor. Whether it's a matter of lifting the deprived up or dragging the gifted down, they want everybody to function on their level. Some fun that would be.'"
Tom Robbins is an American novelist, perhaps best known for his first novel, 1971's Another Roadside Attraction. He lives in the Pacific Northwest, and has authored eight novels. His Even Cowgirls Get the Blues was adapted into a movie by director Gus Van Sant.
I hate to dismiss someone this way, but his style of fiction seems to belong to the late 60s/early 70s school of writing, in which drug references are soaked in generous helpings of sex and brought to a philosophical boil. While reading Skinny Legs and All Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow frequently came to mind, though Skinny Legs and All isn't nearly as obscure as Pynchon's most famous work. I was also reminded at times of the Illuminatus! Trilogy and even Philip K. Dick. All of these other books and writers would have been present during Robbins's period of ascendancy, and all speak to a time in American culture when it was cool to experiment with psychedelics, when it was cool to transgress sexual boundaries, and when it was cool to question authority.
Not that it isn't still cool to do one or all of these things, but now it's cool in a different way. We use different vocabulary to describe our various challenges to authority, and psychedelics, although still around, just don't carry the same sense of the mystery they once did.
Skinny Legs and All is a later work by Robbins, and even though I haven't read his other books I get the feeling that it explores themes that he probably investigated elsewhere. An aspiring painter and her new husband accidentally revive a Middle Eastern goddess by having sex in a cave, several inanimate objects begin a journey to Jerusalem, a religious zealot attempts to ignite World War III, and two older men, an Arab and a Jew, attempt to operate a controversial restaurant in New York.
Through it all Robbins speculates on the function of organized religion, the nature of God, sexual mores and - you guessed it - the meaning of life. And why should we care what Tom Robbins thinks about the meaning of life? Or of the function of organized religion? Or of the other countless themes which cross his desk? Because he's cool, man, so cool. Just check the picture on the back of the book. Scope those shades. Yeah, definitely cool.
Looking beyond the relative coolness of the author, I think that the book itself isn't terrible. I did not love it. I did not hate it. I was somewhere in the middle. It was a lot easier to get through than Gao Xingjian's Soul Mountain, which I also completed recently. But it lacks the philosophical insight of that other, more ambiguous work.
I didn't find the story told in Skinny Legs and All especially absorbing, but it's unconventional enough to be worth a look. It's not a groundbreaking work of fiction by any stretch of the imagination, and there are other "counter-cultural" novels that make it look puny by comparison, but the characters are interesting and the situations in which they find themselves are unique.
My biggest complaint about this book is the subplot involving inanimate objects. This subplot adds almost nothing to the book, and its presence seems to scream writer's block. I'm guessing the author felt that its inclusion added some much needed levity to the book, and perhaps also went some distance toward explaining a larger historical background, but it just wasn't necessary.
I doubt I'll be reading any of Tom Robbins's books in the future. I just don't feel any need to do so.
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