I've known for a while that Robbins was like a foundational influence on especially Christopher Moore but also Cark Hiaasen and likely John Scalzi, so I figured I'd finally get around to reading this book of his, which we had on our shelves. Reading it, a large part of where Moore comes from with his prose--and his occasionally goody lewdness, though Hiaasen also has this in spades--and Scalzi seems to have some of it, but I get the sense he might have come to Robbins via at least one other writer (I have know idea who) under the Tom Robbins Influence. The prose has a strong whiff of baked to it, hallucinogenic and loopy and looping, routinely funny but also making strong points, sharply. The story is somewhere in that space between kaleidoscopic and fragmented, with what seems at first like a lot of POVs but which really comes mostly to like three or four; cause and effect sometimes seem at most loosely connected, the novel holds together mostly by an act of authorial will. I could honestly have done without the Von Däniken stuff, but the novel was written in the late 1970s, there are some things that were just going to happen; some of the countercultural-ish messages have likewise failed to age well. There's some didacticism at the end (in the epilogue especially) that leads me to think this is mostly intended as something like a satire, though forty-six years after its publication much of what it's satirizing seems unrecognizable (though not all). It's a readable and enjoyable novel, even if it is very much stuck in its own 1980.
No comments:
Post a Comment