MemeMachineGo!

Like half of Berkeley, I was at Cody’s tonight, where Tom Robbins was flogging his latest book, Villa Incognito. When I got there at 6:30 for the 7:30 reading, the seats were nearly all taken. I left my jacket on one and went for dinner. When I returned at 7, I almost didn’t make it back upstairs, and was fortunate my seat hadn’t been given away: there were probably a couple hundred people in attendance, of all ages.

I first read Robbins early last year: Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates, what was then his most recent book. And it rocked my world. Phrases or lines or passages I wanted to call my friends to quote on about every page. New ideas every couple of pages. Great characters with wonderful voices. It’s just a wild ride of a book. Robbins had joined the ranks of my favorite authors even before I was done, and I quickly gathered used copies of the rest of his oeuvre.

The next I read, last fall, was his first, Another Roadside Attraction. It was fun, but heavy-handed in places, and the prose only rarely sparkled in the way Invalids’ did so often. His second novel, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues I read just last month, and it was very good, but still no Invalids (sense a theme?)

And just recently, I read Villa Incognito, and, of course, what I wanted was to be blown away again by pages that just crackled with brilliant language and interesting ideas.

And, by that entirely unfair standard, I was disappointed. There were wonderful turns of phrase, but only intermittently. He has favorite themes, tropes, situations, and character types, and too much of the book seemed familiar to me. Too many notes being struck in the same way again. For instance, in Invalids, our hero, Switters, has a wonderful rant about how it was all over for the American people when we accepted the phrase “genuine imitation leather” without open rebellion, and we deserved anything we got from there on in. And in Incognito there’s almost the same rant from a character who often sounds a lot like Switters, this time complaining about “vine ripe tomatoes” being applied to tomatoes that aren’t even ripe.

It’s a good book, mind you. I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it. But not as your first Robbins — I’d still point anyone towards Invalids for that (and maybe that choice will change as I read his remaining four books.)

In person, Robbins is very funny, to no surprise. He quoted William Gibson as having said that book tours made him feel like a ghost, going on to explain that book tours made him feel like Anna Nicole Smith: his brain kept getting smaller, and his breasts kept getting larger. In an interview I can’t find right now, he commented that he used to refuse appearances and interviews, and that approach resulted in college students showing up on his doorstep on a recurring basis. He became less reclusive to protect his privacy — when he began to go to the public in measured doses, they stopped coming to him. And I’m glad he did, and I’m glad for the chance to see and hear him speak.

Here’s a recent interview with him.