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Tom Robbins, whose novels read like a hit of literary LSD, filled with fantastical characters, manic metaphors and counterculture whimsy, has died aged 92.
The author of works including Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, Another Roadside Attraction and Still Life With Woodpecker, died on Sunday, his wife, Alexa Robbins, wrote on Facebook. The post did not cite a cause.
“He was surrounded by his family and loyal pets. Throughout these difficult last chapters, he was brave, funny and sweet,” Alexa Robbins wrote. “He asked that people remember him by reading his books.”
Robbins indulged the hippy sensibilities of young people starting in the early 1970s with books that had an overarching philosophy of what he called “serious playfulness” and a mandate that it should be pursued in the most outlandish ways possible. As he wrote in Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas: “Minds were made for blowing.”
Robbins’ characters were over the top, off the wall and around the bend. Among them were Sissy Hankshaw, the hitchhiker with the nine-inch thumbs in Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, and Switters, the pacifist CIA operative in love with a nun in Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates. Skinny Legs and All featured a talking can of pork and beans, a dirty sock and Turn Around Norman, a performance artist whose act consisted of moving imperceptibly.
“What I try to do, among other things, is to mix fantasy and spirituality, sexuality, humor and poetry in combinations that have never quite been seen before in literature,” Robbins said in a 2000 interview. “And I guess when a reader finishes one of my books … I would like for him or her to be in the state that they would be in after a Fellini film or a Grateful Dead concert.”
Born in Blowing Rock, North Carolina, Robbins grew up there and in Richmond, Virginia, in a family that he once described as “kind of a Southern Baptist version of The Simpsons”. He said he was dictating stories to his mother at age five and developed his writing skills further at Washington and Lee University in Virginia, working on the school newspaper with Tom Wolfe, who would go on to write The Right Stuff and The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test.
Robbins worked as an editor, reporter and critic for newspapers in Richmond and Seattle, where he moved in the 1960s in search of a more progressive atmosphere than the South offered. He had a writing epiphany while reviewing a 1967 concert by the Doors.
“It had jimmied the lock on my language box and smashed the last of my literary inhibitions,” he wrote in the 2014 memoir titled Tibetan Peach Pie. “When I read over the paragraphs I’d written that midnight, I detected an ease, a freedom of expression, a syntax simultaneously wild and precise.”
What came next was 1971’s Another Roadside Attraction, the roundabout tale of how the mummified, unresurrected body of Jesus was stolen from the Vatican and ended up at a hotdog stand in the US north-west. Five years later, his second book, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, in which Sissy hitchhiked her way through a world of sex, drugs and mysticism, made him a cult favorite.
His novels often had strong female protagonists, which made him especially popular with female readers. And while he appealed to the youth culture, the literary establishment never warmed to Robbins. Critics said his plots were formulaic and his style overwrought.
Robbins wrote his books in longhand on legal pads, producing only a couple of pages a day and with nothing plotted in advance. An attempt at using an electric typewriter ended with the author bashing it with a piece of lumber.
He laboured over word selection and said he liked to “remind reader and writer alike that language is not the frosting, it’s the cake”. As a result, his works were overflowing with wild-eyed metaphors.
“Word spread like a skin disease in a nudist colony,” he wrote in Skinny Legs and All. In Jitterbug Perfume he described a falling man as going down “like a sack of meteorites addressed special delivery to gravity.”
Robbins had three children with his wife, Alexa.
