Another Roadside Attraction by Tom Robbins (Bantam Books 1971) (Fiction). Man, I really wanted to like this book. Me: "Jesus at a roadside zoo? This is going to be great!" Wikipedia calls this "...a cultural icon for children of the sixties." That's my tribe, but I call this...unreadable. I tried...and I tried...and I tried (three times), but I could never capture the rhythm, the flow, the humor, or the story line. I hope this isn't going to cost me my happy hippie card. My rating: 2/10, finished 5/21/13.

Stylistically this is by far one of the strangest books I've ever read. It seems as though writing Another Roadside Attraction was some sick excercise in metaphorical expression by the author, Tom Robbins.

I picked up the book used based on a recommendation from a booklist I found online, The Essential Man's Library. I had previously read a Robbins piece, Still Life with Woodpecker, at the recommendation or a friend, Ari, but rembered nothing of the book. Thus I figured I'd adventure down a new ally of fiction for the time being.

While I didn't despise the book I can't aver that I loved it either. A wild tale of religious enlightenment I found the story to be more a description of its characters than the events that they are engaged in. Perhaps this was the point. Either way, I felt like a lot of the book was spent waiting for something to happen.

What I gained from this book is almost entirely unrelated to what I read in it. Tom Robbins absurdly turgid language offered me a great chance to pick up a couple dozen newbies to throw into my vocabulary. Sure, the majority of them I'll likely never use but at least now I know they exist!

Thanks for the vocab lesson!

Loved it. I would put this as my third favorite TR books, the first being Jitterbug and the second Fierce Invalids. I just loved the Amanda character. Sometimes I have trouble getting into the heads of his female protagonists, and even though she was so "out there," I feel I really got to know and respect Amanda through her conversations and random musings. I didn't fully understand Ziller, but that was less important to me and I think that was part of the point - that his character remains esoteric.
And though I felt the ending was bittersweet, it all came full circle and made sense.
If Goodreads allowed half stars I would rate this 4 1/2.

Two hippies fall in love at first sight, buy a hot dog stand in northern Washington State, and live on mushrooms while welcoming friends, human and animal, to come and go as they will.

Very much a book of the 60s, even if it was published in 1971. I used to like Tom Robbins when I was younger, but whether it's me or this particular book or the additional time that has passed, this seemed to take forever to finish. There are some great lines but a lot of it is like listening to a monologue by someone on drugs who's grabbed your arm and thinks he's imparting the secret of the universe in every sentence. There are plenty of times when he seems to run himself into a corner but he always comes up with something - a dead body in the woods, a trip to the Vatican, an even deader body ... it's a marvel of the imagination, and memorable, but overall it left me cold.

I am glad to have discovered another great American writer. This is Tom Robbins' first book and, in the best tradition of the 60s, it is an indictment of authority of any kind, both secular and especially religious. I am sure the book was a lot more startling at the time when it was first published. Our jaded times have seen much more vicious attacks on religion and state power.

Still, what makes this book especially great is that Robbins does not simply attack authority. He also demonstrates vividly the reverse of the medal -- the freedom of spirit that comes with rejecting authority and societal taboos, the peace and almost magical harmony that is the direct result of such inner freedom.

And, quite apart from everything else, the book is written with a brilliant sense of humor.

Here are two excerpts:

"And what do you believe in?" the parish priest asked Amanda sternly.
Amanda looked up from the beetle shell upon which she was painting a miniature scene in watercolors. "I believe in birth, copulation, and death," she answered. "Although copulation embodies the other two, and death is only a form of borning. At any rate, I was born nineteen years ago. Some day I shall die. Today, I think I'll copulate."
And indeed she did. (p.8)

"Never prolific as a sculptor, it has been several years now since Ziller has exhibited at all. Yet few articles of avant-garde art are published that do not refer to his contribution. That the authors seldom are in agreement as to the nature of his contribution only supports the general notion of its significance.
The Non-Vibrating Astrological Dodo Dome Spectacular was his masterpiece, about that there is no quarrel. When it was unveiled at the Whitney Museum of American Art it brought to its obscure young creator the art-world equivalent of the kind of instant notoriety a starlet achieves when she successfully pulls a film out from under the weight of a veteran and venerated actress. It was saluted as a tour de force and cursed as a scandal. Some critics were afraid to acknowledge it, others were afraid not to. When a representative of the New York Times called at Ziller's studio for an interview, she was received by a near-naked, savage looking man who stopped playing his clay flute only long enough to insist that the complex electrochemical sculpture in question actually had been executed by his pet baboon. (p. 18)

An early Robbins work that chronicles the adventures of the owners of a roadside museum and how they came across what might well be the mummified body of Christ. Might be my favorite Robbins book.

Evangelical Hippie Dippie-dom

I can remember this stuff; so by definition I suppose I wasn't there. But I must have been near enough to notice. Robbins’s modern (well, 1971) re-telling of the Gospel in the genre of the Age of Aquarius brings back memories of a softer, kinder time when all the world had to worry about was a crook named Nixon rather than a psychopath like Trump.

Not just the characters and their illicit herbal remedies, but Robbins’s baroque New Age language as well captures the mood of the day:

“Amanda and John Paul were seated on a painted log and garlanded with chrysanthemums that had been recently liberated from a suburban lawn. The lovers refused stew and wine but accepted bowls of tea. After toasts, Amanda's son—dressed in a tunic of rabbit fur and yellow brocade—was fetched from the nursery van to meet his new father and to kiss his mother good night.”

This was indeed an era of purported sensitivity and ‘mindfulness.’ Economics, for a brief period, seemed to lose its hold on the world. What mattered was that mysterious inner core touched by cheap drugs, garish clothes, and communal living. Life had become a search for “this arithmetic of consciousness that more simple men call the ‘supernatural’... Language grows a bit sticky in areas such as these... the realm of High Mystery”

Well, really it was about style: “it is style that makes us care,” says an intellectual hippie. Style, conformity to non-conformance, makes one cool. It is of course merely unlimited affectation on a budget. So religion gets a makeover. Still the same elements as the old one though: reality is somewhere else and it’s possible to think yourself there. Faith for the faithless.

The weirdest part of course is that back in the day it was the crazy hippies who were all about freedom from governmental authority and religious expression. By any definition they were evangelical, announcing the new Good News to the establishment. The red necks and other Deplorables were mainly into secular patriotism and the ‘projection’ of American power. Today, the evangelicals are the ones holding the guns and using them as well as the old time gospel to attack the establishment.

It strikes me as more than likely that the (by now) primeval call of hippiedom has transformed itself into the shouts at Trump rallies. How strange is the style of democratic politics - so variable, yet so constant in its evangelical political fervour.

The plot of Another Roadside Attraction involves a renegade colony of hippy artists, a sinister two-thousand-year-old Vatican conspiracy, and the mummified corpse of none other than Jesus Christ. But as with all of Tom Robbins's novels, the plot is almost beside the point, being mostly just an excuse to preach a Sixties psychedelic philosophy in his quirky and ebullient prose. I was still young and naive (uncorrupted?) enough to get an intoxicating rush from this novel in the summer of 1995, when I read it while hitchhiking through the rugged mountains and lush temperate rain forests of western Washington's Olympic Peninsula. It was the most perfect conceivable setting to appreciate Another Roadside Attraction.

"There are three mental states that interest me. These are: one, amnesia; two, euphoria; three, ecstasy. Amnesia is not knowing who one is and wanting desperately to find out. Euphoria is not knowing who one is and not caring. Ecstasy is knowing exactly who one is - and still not caring."

This is the book that started my obsession

It is obvious that this is Robbins' first book if you have already read his later efforts. However, I still loved it, perhaps more so in some ways for it's compositional naivete. In his later books the prose turns tight corners with the polished efficiency of an indy driver and the whimsy of a circus clown, but this book has outrage in its mind and whisky on its breath. You can feel Robbins' getting out every jab and gripe he had percolating in his brain after years within the machine, and it's fun. He is already showing the traces of inventive metaphor and simile that he leaves like little calling cards at the butt end of innocuous phrases: "The morning was dreary and rumpled. It looked like Edgar Allen Poe's pajamas outside." Sometimes the characters don't talk like the characters would, which he does explain away within the context of the novel, but until I reread the novel I'm assuming he took the easy and efficient way out of concentrating more on internal style than the substance he wanted to convey.

All in all, it's a lot of fun. I don't know if I would suggest it to someone as their first Robbins' book, but I wouldn't warn them against it.

4.5/5

I gave this book an extra star because Tom Robbins is clearly a good writer.

The lack of additional stars is because he's filled most of this book with character who "mansplain" (condescend) constantly - yes, both the men and the women- and Family Guy-esque similes that neither proceed from nor go anywhere (I.e. the sky was like Edgar Allen Poe's pajamas) and he seems to have forgotten a plot or even interesting insight into the human condition. At its nebulous center is a woman who seems to exist only to screw and be desired (which maybe is more about its vintage, but ugh) by the men who surround her and who are all just extraordinary and marvelous - to each other, at least - like Buckaroo Banzai without the dry humor.

Please me all Tom Robbins books are like this so I am never tempted to read another.