Biblioracle: Tom Robbins has died at 92. He was one of the writers who shaped me.
It feels like just about every month I'm coming here to remember a recently deceased writer who had some profound effect on my life as a reader.
This month it's Tom Robbins, author of numerous classic novels, including 'Another Roadside Attraction,' 'Even Cowgirls Get the Blues,' 'Still Life with Woodpecker' and 'Skinny Legs and All,' among others. Robbins died in his home of La Conner, Washington, on Feb. 9, at the age of 92.
I suppose confronting these occasions is the inevitable byproduct of aging. I will turn 55 in less than two months, and the established writers who were full-fledged adults when I was still a fledging are now quite elderly.
But also, this is triggered by an increasing wonder about how I've become the person I am. In a lot of ways, my reading has made me, and Tom Robbins is one of the writers you can find in the DNA of my sensibilities.
The specific Robbins book that shook me up was 'Still Life with Woodpecker,' published in 1980 with a distinctive cover modeled after a pack of Camel cigarettes, a woodpecker clutching a match in its beak standing in for Joe Camel.
Like all of Robbins' novels, 'Still Life with Woodpecker' defies easy description. It involves an exiled princess, Leigh-Cheri, living near Seattle with her royal parents, who wants to save the planet but runs afoul of fellow progressives who fight for influence. Then some aliens show up who think Leigh-Cheri is descended from a different race of aliens that are their enemies.
This is in maybe the first 30 pages of the book. To summarize the rest would take a couple more columns-worth of length.
Robbins reportedly wrote sentence by sentence, which may seem to describe how everything is written, but he did it literally, refining a single sentence over many hours before moving on to the next. The shambolic nature of his plots has a Scheherazade flavor, a storyteller unfurling a tale bit by bit with no aim other than keeping the reader invested moment-to-moment, failure being the penalty of death.
I would've been maybe 15 years old when I read 'Still Life with Woodpecker,' old enough to be curious about everything adult, too young to understand much of it, but the right age to find it all quite seductive. Robbins' work was rooted in the hippie counter-culture ethos of the '60s that I was too young to experience, and which the Reagan revolution was in the business of actively erasing by the time I was reading him.
The books were silly, designed to entertain, but also filled with aphorisms that forced you to pause for a moment or two. For example: 'There are two kinds of people in this world: Those who believe there are two kinds of people in the world and those who are smart enough to know better.'
Or this one: 'We are our own dragons as well as our own heroes, and we have to rescue ourselves from ourselves.'
Or this: 'It's never too late to have a happy childhood.'
At the time, I took these lines as examples of adult wisdom being handed down to a new initiate.
The untethered, anarchic, comic brio of Robbins' novels feels incompatible with today's world, as though the intervening years have been explicitly designed to stamp out this spirit and replace it with something that can be bought and sold, something governable.
Sissy Hankshaw, the protagonist of 'Even Cowgirls Get the Blues' is born with oversized thumbs, which make her the world's best hitchhiker.
This is Robbins in a nutshell, a reminder that what makes us unique is our greatest power.
John Warner is the author of 'Why They Can't Write: Killing the Five-Paragraph Essay and Other Necessities.'
Twitter @biblioracle
Book recommendations from the Biblioracle
John Warner tells you what to read based on the last five books you've read.
1. 'Without Precedent: Chief Justice John Marshall and His Times' by Joel Richard Paul
2. 'Dracula' by Bram Stoker
3. 'Beat to Quarters (Hornblower Saga)' by C.S. Forester
4. 'A Calamity of Souls' by David Baldacci
5. 'The Pelican Brief' by John Grisham
— Derek S., Eugene, Oregon
I'm going with something of a suspense thriller, though in a different milieu than what Derek has here. My hope is that going a bit off the previous path opens up an exciting new experience, 'Last Resort' by Andrew Lipstein.
1. 'The Noble Rot Book: Wine from another Galaxy' by Dan Keeling and Mark Andrew
2. 'Three Years with Grant' by Sylvanus Cadwallader
3. 'Defusing Armageddon: Inside NEST, America's Secret Nuclear Bomb Squad' by Jeffrey T. Richelson
4. 'Vanishing Treasures: A Bestiary of Extraordinary Endangered Creatures' by Katherine Rundell
5. 'Mr. Churchill in The White House: The Untold Story of a Prime Minister and Two Presidents' By Robert Schmuhl
— Andy A., Crystal Lake
This book is better than 10 years old, but my guess is that things have not gotten demonstrably better: 'Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety' by Eric Schlosser.
1. 'Lincoln in the Bardo' by George Saunders
2. 'The Midnight Library' by Matt Haig
3. 'The Island Child' by Molly Aitken
4. 'Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss' by Margaret Renkl
5. 'The Wedding People' by Alison Espach
— Sheryl L., Northbrook
This calls for some Lydia Millet. The choice is 'Dinosaurs.'
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