After reading this book I'm not surprised to find out that Tom Robbins was friends with the likes of Terrence McKenna and Timothy Leary. Very creative and fun story. Looking forward to the next Tom Robbins book I dive into.

If you haven't read anything by Tom Robbins, you may need to prepare yourself. This is not a prosaic novelist, although technically what he writes in (usually) is prose; he assembles his words into phrases that startle and delight and irritate and make you want to go back and read them again just to savor the bounce and verve that he injects into almost every sentence. Even so, more than the energetic jolting of his figurative language, Robbins produces stories that are captivating primarily because his characters are so engaging and offbeat and weird and wonderful.
Another Roadside Attraction, Robbins' first novel, takes on a decidedly dangerous plot point (no, I am not spoiling the story, in spite of the fact that most back-cover blurbs do it for me) that, in spite of its potential for world-changing and paradigm-shifting, takes a back seat to the philosophical investigations of the narrator, whom we eventually learn to be one of the characters, an escapee from an East Coast think tank who has adopted the deliberately provocative pseudonym of Marx Marvelous. It's Marx's conversations with Amanda--the Mother Goddess post-hippie pantheist--and Plucky Purcell--former Duke University football star who has lucked and stumbled into the heist of the Millennium--and John Paul Ziller, drummer and flute-playing artist from Africa (or is it India?)--that drive the book along and engage the reader in some very profound questions and speculations that are not, in spite of their profundity, abstruse or intimidating or anything but fun to get involved with.
Here are a few of the places where I dogeared a page for future reference:
[Puget Sound, Washington] "...is a landscape in a minor key. A sketchy panorama where objects, both organic and inorganic, lack well-defined edges and tend to melt together in a silver-green blur. Great islands of craggy rock arch abruptly up out of the flats, and at sunrise and moonrise these outcroppings are frequently tangled in mist. Eagles nest on the island crowns and blue herons flap through the veils from slough to slough. It is a poetic setting, one which suggests inner meanings and invisible connections. The effect is distinctly Chinese. A visitor experiences the feeling that he has been pulled into a Sung dynasty painting, perhaps before the intense wisps of mineral pigment have dried upon the silk." That's one of Robbins' more straightforward descriptions, but it demonstrates the gift he has for translating sensation into his reader's experience.
When Amanda describes her understanding of religious education, she uses a particular vivid analogy:
"'There is an insect called the hunting wasp. The female hunts for spiders and other insects and preys on them in an unusual way. She stings them in the large nerve ganglion on the underside of the thorax so that they are not killed but only paralyzed. She then lays an egg on the paralyzed victim (or within its body) and seals the prey up in a nest. When the egg hatches, the wasp larva commences to eat the prey, slowly, gradually, in a highly systemized way. The nonvital tissues and organs are eaten first, so that the paralyzed creature remains alive for a good many days. Eventually, of course, its guest eats away so much of it that it dies. During the whole long process of consumption, the prey cannot move, cry out or resist in any way.
Now, suppose we view the Church as the hunting wasp, its stinger being represented by the nuns and priests who teach in its schools. And let us view the pupils as the paralyzed prey. The egg that is injected into them is the dogma, which in time must hatch into a larva--personal philosophy or religious attitude. This larva, as that of the wasp, eats away from within, slowly and in a specialized manner, until the victim is destroyed. That is my impression of parochial education.'
In a typical Amandan spasm of fair play, she called to John Paul as she went upstairs to bathe the baby. 'Public secular education is only a little less thorough in its methods and only a little less deadly in its results.'" It is precisely the gruesome quality of the analogy that makes the idea behind it so startling and thought-provoking. The fact that many people would recoil from making this connection is one of the reasons that Robbins is so fascinating: he doesn't ever hold back from making connections.
When Marx explains why he has ended up exploring the far reaches of America's subculture, he describes the project that his think tank was engaged in:
"...the government elected to spend several hundred thousand dollars of tax money to diagnose itself. It asked East River Institute to find out what's wrong with America. Why have traditional values been deflated? Why are we as a people guilt-ridden, anxious and prone to violence? Why is there suspicion that a nation of unprecedented wealth and power is tattering at its edges, coming apart at its seams? Where has flown the Great Speckled Bird of Christianity under whose wings we were once so secure? Why, with all our bombs and churches, are we afraid? What is to blame for the unmistakable evidence of social decay?" Remember, Robbins wrote those words in the late 1960s. It is again startling to notice how precisely this describes America today.
This is Plucky Purcell, letting himself run on a bit about his values:
"One cannot hate society, because within society there are loving and lovable individuals. Similarly, it wasn't the Church I hated, because the Church contained the bravery and enlightenment of many individual priests and nuns and saints.
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. Soon their sour tentacles are around everything: our governments, our economies, our schools, our publications, our arts and our religious institutions. Men who lust for power, who are addicted to laws and other unhealthy abstractions, who long to govern and lead and censor and order and reward and punish; those men are the turds of Moloch, men who don't know how to love, men who are sickly afraid of death and therefore are afraid of life: they fear all that is chaotic and unruly and free-moving and changing--thus, as Amanda has said, they fear nature and fear life itself, they deny life and in so doing deny God."
Here is Amanda challenging a government agent's (and therefore our own) received wisdom:
"You risked your life, but what else have you ever risked? Have you ever risked disapproval? Have you ever risked economic security? Have you ever risked a belief? I see nothing particularly courageous in risking one's life. So you lose it, you go to your hero's heaven and everything is milk and honey 'til the end of time. Right? You get your reward and suffer no earthly consequences. That's not courage. Real courage is risking something you have to keep on living with, real courage is risking something that might force you to rethink your thoughts and suffer change and stretch consciousness. Real courage is risking one's clichés."
And Plucky again:
"To an artist a metaphor is as real as a dollar." That one should make you think and think some more. How real is a dollar? Isn't it just a symbol for something else, like value assumed and exchanged in a regulated market? Hmm? That's the sort of sideways traffic that Robbins throws into the trains of thought that rumble through his very non-linear, very non-prosaic novel.
Just now, re-reading the excerpts I have jotted down, I am aware that this sounds like a didactic barrage, possibly a manifesto of sorts. It's not. It really isn't. But it is certainly a challenge to the audience: if you're listening, are you willing to think and feel differently? That's coming. That's certainly coming.

What a book! I honestly can’t believe it myself, but this will be my third five-star rated book in a row. A cousin of mine sent me Robbins’ Jitterbug Perfume for Christmas, and then a co-worker advised me to read Another Roadside Attraction, describing Robbins as “C.S. Lewis on mushrooms.” That seemed interesting, so I picked up the book and started reading it. Immediately, it seemed reminiscent of the works of Robert Anton Wilson and Robert Shea (most notably, The Illuminatus Trilogy). And it took about 100 pages to get into the book, but then it sucks you in and takes you on a wild ride.

It’s a hard one to summarize, but I’ll give it the old college try. A newly-married couple, John Paul Ziller and Amanda, decide to open up a hot dog and juice stand on the side of a road. The stand is just another roadside attraction, complete with a flea circus and a collection of snakes. They have with them a baboon by the name of Mon Cul and a child, Baby Thor. Ziller is a legendary magician/musician, while Amanda really digs the old religions of Tibet and China. She experiments with trances and yoga a lot. A friend of theirs, Plucky Purcell, corresponds with them via air mailed letters for a good portion of the story, and his own tale is too crazy to describe in this little blog post. And finally, Marx Marvelous, a sensitive scientist who has a hunch that the Zillers will help him on his anti-religious quest, shows up unexpectedly for a job interview at the hot dog and juice stand. When these characters meet up together, a lot of crazy stuff happens.

This one is really good - be patient when you begin the story and let is carry you through to the end.

5 Stars. 337 pages. Published in 1971.

That this was TR's voyage out, a maiden novel, comedic-philosophical Chautauqua, guised up story as told by one of its main odd-ball eccentrics Marx Marvelous, whose 'history' as laid down along with Amanda (nature goddess, trance specialist and amorous focal for our 3 male protagonists, (her son baby Thor a 4th) John Paul Ziller & L. Westminster "Plucky" Purcell besides a semi-anthropomorphic baboon goes by Mon Cul who is part an parcel of male overbalance Pan lore that needs balancing) near the end riff on how everything worked out and that 'meaning in meaning' doesn't mean much anyhow but contains value nonetheless. "Mystery is part of nature's style, that's all' says Amanda in a rare teaching moment.

To get there though we wound a spiral escalation of plot maneuvers, character development and up close examination of flora/fauna of the NW Skagit County, WA, with mushrooms, butterflies/moths as motif, garter snakes, flea circus and crystal encased Tsetse fly, for the jumpy flutter of silliness that's laced throughout. Oh and he of the second coming (and second going/ascension), a bedraggled corpse of same Christianity is carted about and propped like a Weekend at Bernie's ragdoll to trip the dilemmas up and flesh-out the final philosophical conundrum that have been vexing our roadside attraction crew and send them on through fate's door. There was a lot of fun to be had with this book, it was the first of further rollick in subsequent novels where I think he improves his craft by keeping it fun but tighten the reins just a bit - really though it is his style and more to follow. Good quick read.

Жаль что я не могу поставить этой книге меньше. История про цыган-хиппи, спиздивших тело Иисуса. Через силу читал эту парашу, и в конце книги, моя задница сгорела, как и Иисус вместе с главным цыганом.

Usually when I read something really, really, really great I know before I'm even finished that I'll be incapable of conveying how great it is to anyone, or giving it a review that in any way expresses how fantastic it is. I don't usually like to review books that I give 5 stars to because most of the time I just don't know where to begin, and I know my review won't do my feelings, or the book, justice. Those reviews are always more of a mess than usual. I just don't know how to organize my thoughts, nor do I ever possess the energy or the skill required to give it a review it deserves. This is one of those occasions, as you can already tell by the rambling incoherent mess it's turning out to be, but I'm going to take a moment anyway to try to say a few things about Another Roadside Attraction.

I bought it on a whim, having never heard of Tom Robbins (although later realizing he was the guy who wrote Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, which I've neither read nor seen the movie adaptation of, although I knew of it). I saw it in the bookstore, thought it seemed amusing, and the blurbs on the cover comparing the writing to Mark Twain and Borges and Nabokav and Joyce made it sound like something to give a shot, so I got it. A few months later I read it. I should not have waited months. It surpassed all expectations I had, which were already kind of high.

I can understand someone not liking the book, but even more I can fully understand those who say it's one of their favorite books ever written. There's nothing quite like it. Maybe Robbins' other stuff is similar, I don't know. But this is an amazing book simply for its writing alone. Each page is packed with sentence after sentence that is itself its own microcosm of masterpiece and mystery and magic, part of something bigger and more important, but never diminished. Not since Gogol and Melville have I read prose that could be called four dimensional. Robbins does it. He nails it. Sometimes he really nails everything all at once like some kind of god-lord of the written word, and unleashes powerful passages that are hilarious and complex and insightful and revealing and pissing that throbbing creativity every which way all at once. And its characters, its plot, its structure, its mental entanglement, its actual story and side stories and unconventional development are nothing to ignore, either, for although by this point they could be random and the book would be a solid feat, they are each an important trait that amass into a weighty bulk of psychedelic mind expanding power. Robbins has a true work of greatness on his hands here, and it was only his first novel. The thing explodes with talent and creative genius.

It's the kind of book one reads slowly. Or I did, anyway. There seems to be so much thought and vision and style packed into each page, each paragraph, each sentence, that a slow, highly attentive, sometimes repeated (up to four or five times for maximum effect) reading is necessary to fully take it all in. Very often I found myself amazed at a passage, so I re-read it a few times before moving forward. Other times I even went back a few pages just to revisit excellent parts, to relive Robbins' unmatched protean metaphors and his godlike handling of the English language, layered over some exquisite scene of absolute hilarity and beauty. If you read this book at the same pace you read most books, it's unlikely you'll take in everything. You'll miss half of it, especially the most important pieces. I think this is the simplest explanation for why some so strongly dislike it.

While reading Another Roadside Attraction I found myself doing what I always do when I've discovered an author who impresses me: reading everything I can about him. He frequently gets lumped in with the postmodernists and even the beat writers. But without question Tom Robbins is superior to those who are considered his "peers", and this includes Kurt Vonnegut, Thomas Pynchon, William S. Burroughs, and anyone else whose work might warrant some kind of a comparison. If you took those very rare moments where Thomas Pynchon’s writing is actually very good, or the sparse parts of Burroughs’ writing that were novel and fun, and you put them into a writer who maintained that quality for the duration of his book, who could actually write at a high level of skill for more than a page or a paragraph, and even exceeded that quality quite often, you would have some semblance of Robbins. The fact that we have Robbins means we don’t need Pynchon, because Pynchon’s only value was occasionally sprinkling his field of shit with golden nuggets that one had to wade through neck deep waste to reach. Robbins’ entire field is gold nuggets, as far as the eye can see.

Although I understand comparisons with each of those writers, Robbins has been the only writer of this ilk, and that includes all other beatnik and postmodern writers I've read, to not only not lose me with utter stupidity or vapid, tired, gimmicky, talentless, hackneyed crap, or not-quite-capable storytelling, or awkward prose, or thoughtless vision, or failed experimental form, but who has successfully transcended the very things these other writers were trying so hard to transcend by succeeded at everything, and has accomplished truly magnificent art with his words, nailing every factor that mattered.

His vision, hard to define though it might be, resonates and seems fully realized, important, strongly demonstrated, superbly executed time and time again, and unfalteringly present without any weakness. Despite the chaos of his creation, he controls everything and is focused and intent and ultra-intelligent. It's wonderful to finally find an author of this generation/scene/"genre"/movement that I can support, appreciate, and who is, fortunately, still alive. He's in a league all his own. I look forward to reading more...

This book is all over the place, simply put. I could probably not tell you what it was about even if I were on the strongest of hallucinogenic drugs that it probably took to write this book. Sorry Tom Robbins, but I personally prefer books in which I can actually understand what’s going on.

This book follows a reckless, sexually loose girl named Amanda and her husband, as they open a roadside stand and meet many eccentric characters along the way as they discover many of life’s lessons. Don’t be fooled, this book is not as quirky or holistic as it sounds. Along the way, they meet a friend who was sent by the government to find out what the young generation is all about. That is practically all I can deduce from this book. The diction, for one is random as hell, for lack of a better term, Robbins cannot seem to stay on one subject for more than a paragraph before he wanders on to talking about a girl’s pet talking bear, monks, and Volkswagens (yes, all in the same book). This book gives the entire 1970’s a bad name; I feel like my grandmother by thinking that all of these people were on drugs and crazy solely based upon this book was written.

Maybe if you have an intense spinal surgery and are given daily doses or morphine, heck maybe if you drink codeine like grape juice and snort Benadryl on a daily basis, then maybe, just maybe you’ll enjoy this book. But please, for the sake of making good use of your life, don’t waste your time reading this book. I truly wish I had those two weeks of my life back. Seriously, if you want a spiritual revelation, go to a temple or something, just don’t read this book.

il primo impatto non è dei più semplici: è come un pasto con troppe portate servite tutte assieme, che solo a guardarlo passa la fame. e difatti la tentazione di mollarlo dopo poche pagine è fortissima. robbins è al suo primo romanzo, e in seguito imparerà a dosare gli ingredienti, ma se si ha la forza di volontà di proseguire nella lettura ci si imbatte in momenti meravigliosi, su tutti un incredibile dialogo da gesù e tarzan che vale l'acquisto del libro.non è il primo libro da consigliare a chi vuole scoprire questo geniale eccentrico della letteratura americana, ma chi è un fan arriverà alla fine soddisfatto.

this book made me want to make all kinds of meals with mushrooms... no, not the hallucinogenic kind silly

I heart Tom Robbins super much. This book sums up my own faith, and I love that the characters are just as crazy as real lifers. xoxo.

What do you get when you take a teenage hippy, a magician, a hot dog stand, and a mysterious Corpse? ...Probably something involving the law, but in the mind of Tom Robbins this unlikely combination arrives to unleash a Catholicism-crippling truth.

Robbins' first novel is less obscure than his later ones; you won't find barely recognizable metaphors in Another Roadside Attraction, but the drawn-out speeches on religion, truth, and humanity are front and center throughout. The novel switches haphazardly halfway through from third person narrative to first person singular; delightful, certainly, but our new narrator bogs the story down with his personal conundrums. The book would be a smoother read without the narrative switch; of course, when did Tom Robbins ever opt for smooth?

It's well worth reading in order to learn a little bit about Robbins' style, which hasn't changed significantly since Another Roadside Attraction was published in the '70s, but if you're looking for sheer entertainment, take Even Cowgirls Get the Blues on out of your bookshelf, podner, because this one just ain't it.

never read anything like this before and i lived and died for every second!!! i just want to chew on it for months and reread it again and again. what a way to start the year :)