Another Roadside Attraction
By Tom Robbins
In Moby Dick, Herman Melville puts you through hundreds of pages of pretending to know everything about whales while being no more informed than I would be with wikipedia open in front of me. You read about sperm, opium, and some really colorful relationships before he delivers one of the funniest jokes in the English canon. Another Roadside Attraction is a lot like that, only Tom Robbins does so in a shorter length, including more sex and drugs, without delivering quite the same ending. For his first book, you already see a lot of the writing style to appreciate in Robbins’ later work. Kooky and slightly off the mark of hippy, Robbins describes the world within his story alongside journal entries that ramble for pages at a time. I didn’t hate the read, but I would have finished it in half the time had he tightened up his meandering to fill in what he does well.
Within the first chapters of Another Roadside Attraction, you’ve met everyone you need to know, though it’s unclear what anyone’s importance is. While there is a framing device, you don’t really get a sense of what’s going on until halfway through the book. It could be about Amanda and her butterflies, the mushrooms she consumes, the mysticism she lives within. Then there’s a circus and the reader is introduced to the magician that’s been mentioned by the nameless narrator. A lumberjack with a penchant for pussy, Plucky Purcell, has periphery scenes before disappearing into an evil monastery that could also be what everything’s leading up to. All the while, there’s entire sections devoted to maintenance of the roadside zoo, updating the framing device, and other random bullshit that could be a red herring if it weren’t so obviously pointless. As for the narrator propping up context, the reveal of his identity could be done with a disappointed slide whistle, ultimately resulting in some more leering at a distraught Amanda and pontification to the point of Melvillian boredom. And here I thought it was going to be a trained ape the entire time.
It’s not that this is a bad book. It just could have been better. I’m disappointed because I know Robbins will go on to do better, so why not now with his first attempt? Why must it be a crusade against organized religion while propping up the idolization religious imagery holds in society? Probably because, as stated in his author’s note, he was “a student of art and religion, later worked as a copy editor and an art critic before ‘dropping out’ to write fiction.” That’s a pretty succinct way of describing both the beauty and pitfalls of Robbins’ writing in this first entry. I love the way he describes getting caught up in a romantic idea, but the lows of his own characters being in love with their (his) own words deflates the page. There are some harder bits to swallow, products of 1971; at worst they are both a feature and a bug, at best you get consensual boning. If you plow through the drier sections, you are gifted the seed of writing that Robbins will go on to grow into his eventual authorial voice. Make it all the way to the end and you get a handful of words that make up for all the nonsense behind them; the white whale of metaphor this book’s been chasing across every page. It comes off almost like poetry. If you’re lucky, you’ll come away with Tom Robbins’ intent leaving a warm sense of universal balance in your heart.