The language of Another Roadside Attraction is lush and flowery while the plot is trippy and hallucinogenic.

The fact is, what I hated in the Church was what I hated in society. Namely, authoritarians. Power freaks. Rigid dogmatists. Those greedy, underloved, undersexed twits who want to run everything. While the rest of us are busy living – busy tasting and testing and hugging and kissing and goofing and growing – they are busy taking over.

Christianity has some hideous secrets and it has some ludicrous secrets and the ultimate secret of Christianity is hideously ludicrous.

Major thnax to Ben Lemke for lending this book my way. He knew it was my kind of scene. The peace and love sides, the silly and absurd sides, they compliment each other so well, and when it gets heavily into theological discussion it's only boring when the characters are reciting theories they read point blank for a paragraph. "'There is a chance that we will be able to store hearts in baboons for several days,' he explained."

I enjoyed parts of this book and it did refrain from long tangents unlike many Tom Robbins books, but there was just too much silliness. Because of the content, I was hoping for a ridiculously cool ending and, because I am an atheist, I felt sort of let down.

It took me two tries to read this book. I just wasn't in it the first time but the second time I devoured it. The book carries you through with the odd characters and trying to figure out what the secret thing is. Fortunately the book doesn't get dull when you do find out what it is. It's good until the end and one of those books you'd like to keep going

There is something about Tom Robbins that severely irks me. He has this flippant way of trying to be a philosopher in which he makes everything into a largwe-scale joke imbued with his own sense of life-purpose; however, his sense of meaning is full of bullshit as far as I am concerned. But then, due to the insipid tone of his novels, it is difficult for me to say whether the beliefs and strangely racist phrasings his ridiculous characters say are his own or not.
Case in point, when the narrator here goes on an extended speech about how, "There is a time in the life of every little girl when she wants to grow up to be a nurse...She will daydream of caring for real little babies and of giving aid and comfort to whole hospitals of nice men like her daddy." Then he goes on to babble about the Earth-mother for some time and later to propose that religion has become so difficult because we have been governed by a penis-based religion. All this to explain why the female lead of the book is free-love in the most assinine way possible- she "makes love" with several of the other characters to relieve their stress. Amanda's character is a bit of a paradox as a whole, vacillating between astute socio-political observations and idiotic simple-mindedness. She also toes the line between the "liberated woman" and the house wife in a way that suggests that Robbins is fine with female liberation, as long as they'll still cook him dinner and screw him afterwards, as opposed to a true liberation.
My annoyance aside, the plot of the novel, after one of the main characters is found to have joined a band of secret monks, becomes sort of interesting. This is the sole realm from which the second star of my review comes from, especially as, even in the most interesting sections, we have characters debating the necessity of religion endlessly when moving on to something more interesting and less dialectic would be preferable.

Man, I loved me this book. Perfect? No, but neither is Nature, dude.

This bit of psychedic beauty published in 1971 like really encapsulates a movement. You know. The spiritualism, mystism, and various other isms that were part of the questing thriving mass that was the briefly lit hippy movement of the late sixties. Free sex, free dope, free god. Free god, dude, from his prisons in the prisons of the world and embrace the Oneness that is all the minute specks of everything that is the Universe.

funny, irreverent, challenging, sometimes pointless and self-absorbed, this was an enjoyable and occasionally beautifully written novel.

This was Tom Robbins' first novel and for the first 50 pages or so it really shows.

But just like with Faulkner's first novel, Soldier's Pay, once you get past the bad start (the first 50 pages or so), Robbins does start to find his 'groove' and the novel gets better and better from thereon.

Tom Robbins' novels are known to be quirky, full of unforgettable characters, some of which you have met their like in real life, in a comic book somewhere, or in a dream or fantasy. Robbins is very seldom dull and here, in his very first book, he shines through as a novelist of great talent and promise. His humour is very sharp, witty and often peculiar/weird but that's what makes him interesting. At times his relentless efforts to be funny fall flat but for the most part, he will make you laugh (or at the very least bring a smile to your face), horny or leave you scratching your head and revisiting those especially quirky sentences and turns of phrase of his.
Pivano once called him 'the most dangerous writer alive' or something and in his heyday, I imagine that he probably was.

In this story, one of the protagonists stumbles upon Jesus' mummified corpse under the Vatican and brings it back home, supposedly as 'leverage' against the Catholic Church and the stealth group of monk-assassins that then try to track them down. This is one part of the story. The other part of the story is about the roadside attraction set up by John Paul Ziller and his nymphomaniac wife, Amanda. I was thinking about the female characters in Robbins' books and I guess the same charge that was once levelled at Ken Kesey about how the female characters in his books are unrealistic could be levelled at some of the female characters in Robbins' books. I wouldn't go so far as to say that the female characters in his books are unrealistic because most of the characters in the book are unrealistic and on purpose. Robbins is not interested in the bland and the mundane - he is interested in the crazy and the zany. Still, the women characters do come across as females written through an obviously male writer filter.

Back to the story - I did find the ending of the story a little bit of a 'let down' and a bit sudden but I did like how the writer inserted himself into the plot at certain parts in a quirky way, which reminded me of something Richard Brautigan himself may have done.

Overall, Tom Robbins's novels are about ENTERTAINMENT and are not to be taken too seriously (goes without saying) but there are tidbits of philosophy and wisdom here and there interspersed with some genuine hippy nonsense which adds to the overall comic effect of the novel.

All in all, I thoroughly enjoyed Another Roadside Attraction once I got past the first 50 pages or so but it's not quite as good as some of the classics he would later go on to pen such as Jitterbug Perfume (absolute work of genius) and Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climes (probably his funniest novel). But if you are new to Robbins' work, this is as good a place to start as any. Enjoy.

The story of how a gypsy princess, a free-spirited giant with a bone through his nose, a drug dealer, and a baboon come to possess the mummified body of Jesus Christ at their small roadside hot dog stand and zoo is nothing short of brilliant. Like other Robbins novels, the storyline often derails into monologues, flashbacks, and especially fables or twisted fairy tales. It's always astonishing how close he can come to skirting dated 60's rhetoric without losing his edginess.
Despite all of its philosophical meanderings, Another Roadside Attraction is a surprisingly light read. Warmth and humor abound, and it's a great pleasure simply to watch how Robbins performs miracles with words.

I still haven't finished this, mainly because I keep vacillating between thinking it's good and thinking it's really annoying.

Reading this just after it came out confirmed that there really were other ways to live.

this book was given to me by a room-mate in the early 90's...very few books can be credited with changing my life, but this one most certainly did...this extraordinary novel made me understand what stories are capable of, how deeply they can move inside you and change around the furniture...i was never quite the same afterwards...
robbins can be a bit filthy at times, but he turns a phrase like no one else writing in modern times...i'm about due to give this a re-reading...

i say roommate, but that really doesn't cover it...
i just heard she died last month...
she was 40

THREE WORDS: MUMMY JESUS