Jitterbug perfume

TOM ROBBINS was born in 1936, in Blowing Rock, North Carolina, a fact to which his public reaction has been, "So what?" He attended Washington and Lee University in Virginia, where he was bored by the notion of becoming a perfect Southern gentleman. Like many young men before him, he went west, settling in Seattle and laboring for a while as art critic for a Seattle newspaper, work that he found "soul-deadening."

Robbins survived the tumult of the late Sixties by composing an absolutely original novel called Another Roadside Attraction, the cosmic irony and wit of which I insufficiently appreciated in my stuffy youth. The book's merits were perceived, however, by Luther Nichols and his chief at Double-day, the genial Sam Vaughan. Doubleday published it in 1971. Despite some encouraging reviews, Another Roadside Attraction sold poorly in its hardcover edition. Not until it was published in paperback by Ballantine Books did this novel begin to find its audience, mostly among young readers. By the time Robbin's second novel, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, was published in 1978, Robbins had gained fame and modest fortune from his first book. These were deservedly increased by his second, which featured big-thumbed Sissy Hankshaw hitchhiking her way into the New Age.

I have not read his third novel, Still Life with Woodpecker, but approached his fourth with the knowledge that it was already a best-seller as well as being critically favored. Does this affect my attitude toward it? Does this affect Robbins's attitude toward himself? The answer in both cases is: Not really. The coincidence of worldly success radically alters only those who worship success itself. The rest of us appreciate, or at least try to appreciate, the intrinsic quality of people and things.

Which brings us to the vegetarian mysticism of Jitterbug Perfume. "The beet," begins this book, "is the most intense of vegetables. The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. Beets are deadly serious."

Obviously, most people, even most vegetarians, cannot feel or express such emotions as these about vegetables. Indeed, I am quite sure that Tom Robins himself does not, each time he prepares or consumes a salad, think this imaginatively about the ingredients of it. Were he to do so, he would eventually find himself dealing with the inferior salads served in mental hospitals instead of the ones he currently enjoys. But poetry is licentious, and the poet-novelist, through his exaggerated metaphor, is able to convey the materialism that all people share. The Pope, too, likes his lunch.

It would not be possible to provide an adequate summary of Jitterbug Perfume's plot. There isn't one, really. As for characters, there is a French perfume merchant, a "genius" waitress, a Bohemiam king, New Orleans revelers, and an assortment of others who are cosmically connected in a universe that does not add up perfectly. Irony abounds. So does a deep, fundamental faith in life itself, and in things that are alive.

Robbins is one of the principal voices of the American enlightenment that Jean-Francois Revel predicted in Without Marx or Jesus. "Maybe it was sentimental, if not actually stupid," he has one of his characters think, "to romanticize the Sixties as an embryonic golden age ... Even though, in social terms, the Sixties had failed, in evolutionary terms they were a landmark, a milestone ..." This is true. The kid culture of drugs, sex, socialism, and rock 'n' roll has begun to yield to a more mature civilization in which people realize that drug abuse and sexual promiscuity can be hazardous to their health, socialism can be harmful to their pocketbooks, and Scarlatti sounds better played on the harpsichord sounds better played on the harpsichord than on some terrifyingly loud electric guitar.

Robbins's term for this is "floral consciousness." He writes, "As floral consciousness matures, telepathy will no doubt become a common medium of communication.

"With reptile consciousness, we had hostile confrontation.

"With mammal consciousness, we had civilized debate.

"With floral consciousness, we'll have empathetic telepathy."

Eventually, perhaps. But Robbins is certainly right about one thing: "Never underestimate how much assistance, how much satisfaction, how much soul and transcendence there might be in a well-made taco and a cold bottle of beer."

And so the beet goes on.

COPYRIGHT 1985 National Review, Inc.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning