”The Magician’s underwear has been found floating in a stagnant pond on the outskirts of Miami.”

With that bizarre opening sentence, the first warning shot is fired across the readers bow that they are about to embark on a truly weird journey.

And how! Another Roadside Attraction is an undisciplined romp through
Birth, Copulation, and Death
Sex, Drugs, and Rock’n’Roll
Butterflies, Mushrooms, and Magic
It is
Bawdy and Blasphemous, and Taboo, oh my!
It’s stuffed full of profound nonsense, satirical whimsy, mystical silliness, magical chicanery, and supersaturated eccentricity, arranged in Kaleidoscopic cartoons of words. There is enough hippy-dippy shit here to fertilize rainbow gardens on the moon, yet presented with a light touch of tongue-in-cheek satire to make it palatable.

The characters within Another Roadside Attraction — particularly the leads, Amanda, John Paul Ziller, Plucky Purcell, and Marx Marvelous — make not the slightest effort at verisimilitude to reality as we know it. Instead they are invocations of archetypes — sacred avatars of a blissed-out Looney Tunes Platonic Ideal. It’s really much more fun that way.

As for the plot — well no, what exists here is rather thin to call a plot, let’s say instead the story — it contains elements to mortally offend almost everyone. Copious drug use, unashamed polyamorous sex, conversations questioning the validity of capitalism and Christianity, the mummified corpse of Our Lord Jesus Christ, moved after two millennium from a vault beneath the Vatican to a roadside hotdog stand in the Pacific Northwest, and casual sex with underage teens presented matter-of-factly without condemnation; yea, there is something here to explode the heads of all dogmatic prunes, whether of the Left or Right.

This was Tom Robbins first novel, and it is far from perfect. Though it’s uneven telling was clearly intentional, it’s still occasionally annoying. Several of the dialogues between Amanda and Marx Marvelous, as well as some of the curiously quaint descriptive passages drag on far too long, and I found myself skimming. For these offenses, I subtracted a star. But then I added that star right back for Robbins’ primal audacity in daring to spin a yarn of such satirical blasphemous creativity in the first place.

”At a cruel souvenir stand beside a dry water hole, we checked our maps against the extended umbilicus of a shaman. He reveals to us the hidden meanings of our moles and the deeper significance of our snoring.”

”Life is a fortune cookie in which someone forgot to put the fortune.”

I think there are probably a lot of men who will love this still.

I really enjoyed parts of this book, and then there were the parts where my eyes just glazed over.

In some ways, it could have been about the current political and social climate, which is a pretty good trick for a book copyrighted in 1971. Or really bad for us that we haven't made much progress or learned to deal with things?

There are times when Robbins is just having fun playing with words and he goes off on tangents with them. While it's fun, I also wanted to get on with the story. It was like sitting with my older cousins and siblings while they recalled the 1960s. If I look at the book from that viewpoint, it was cool. Despite the premise on the back cover - it took FOREVER to get to the point where they had the Corpse. It's really more about the fleas.

Read this one as an idea of how the Sixties could have been, maybe were for some people, how they chose to live, their viewpoints on life and its meaning. Yes, I stuck it on my philosophy and religion shelves because their riffs on those things were interesting, and definite food for thought, 50 years on.

This book fulfills the 2018 Popsugar reading challenge of a book mentioned in another book.

The legend begins with the first epic strike of one of the most underrated and ingenious, both comedy and cutting criticism using, authors.

Do you know how he writes these unique pieces? Robbins is so obsessed and perfectionistic that he rewrites it, again and again, word for word, sentence for sentence, until it fits his standards and just continues after that. I´ve 2 to 3 other authors with similar, pedantic work schedules and techniques in mind, but can´t remember them, just that one called it a bit of self-torture and I don´t know if Robbins enjoys it or just exaggerates the hard fun element of the creative process.

This pumping of tears, sweat, and, hopefully just metaphorically, blood into the novels can be felt at each moment, it´s a very rare perfection of each dialogue, description, and, as a bonus, everything is interconnected and always leads to a satisfying end that shows how much detail has been invested in making it a multi layered reading experience. Wise dialogues and monologues change with long diatribes or introspectives of the characters and one often stops reading to think about the implications.

A bit of a warning here, Robbins is no Pratchett, a bit closer to Ruff and Robbins, but by far the most hardcore one, although there is Sharpe too, all together philosophical, funny, critical, and very explicit stuff. Especially the last element, both regarding sexual content and the indirect Chuck Norrisness of the action, are reasons for why people should first try a bit of his amazing, and in my case very tasty and nourishing, alphabet soup, because tastes are different.

It´s a bit of a plague or cholera situation, if Robbins would have written with less intensity, he could have multiplicated his sales, but then it would have lost its uniqueness, so it´s good that the didn´t self censor to conform the market forces.

Oh, I should possibly mention something about the novel too and not just drivel about the greatness of the author, so let´s roll with that. The strong female lead protagonist lives in a world of rebellion, revolution, and recommencement, lives free love, and owns, together with the other protagonists, quite any aspect of religion and politics that are messes. That´s the second reason why this one is not for everyone, because Robbins knows no subtle use of velvet gloves, but goes on full aggressive provocation and confrontation which can be interpreted as timeless social critic or blasphemy and dangerous demagogy, depending on the standpoint. I am of course jaying at it even stupider than usual, because it´s extraordinary vivisection of the flaws of our society I love to flame and troll against.

Robbins gets more entertaining, character based, and less deeply sarcastic in his following novels I would also call milestones and masterworks, especially in contrast to this often overrated, indie, beatnik authors who are just provoking to get the predictable bite reflexes of their opponents starting without being able to tell a great story or criticize the system in more complex ways than getting wasted, violent, or as perverted as possible. I deem many cult authors between completely overrated and trash, they were simply the first ones to write predecessors of average fringe pseudo philosophical extreme horror with some naughty words, a final reason why Robbins could be mistaken for such literature, as he has a similar cult reputation.

Tropes show how literature is conceptualized and created and which mixture of elements makes works and genres unique:
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