Tom Robbins: the WWF for Readers

Book Review:
Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates by Tom Robbins

Tom Robbins has finally put out a new book! Let’s get out the whiskey & party like it’s last year, baby! OK…I understand that this may not excite everybody, but it sure as hell excited me. I stumbled across it as I was giving a different fierce invalid a tour of a library (with some pretty hot climates, might I add), and it was the biggest thrill I’ve had standing up in a long time. (Don’t get me started on how many times I’ve started stripping because I had to go into the East Asia Collection. Woo wee, it is hot!)

So, now that I’ve let my significant bias out of the bag, you can read my review knowing full well that I may have a tendency to exaggerate his genius or I may be a fan of his older work who will only say that “he’s not as good as he used to be.” I’ll guess I’ll be a mixture of the two.

Fierce Invalids starts with a whimper -- or a befuddled grunt. Some disconnected scenes from various parts of the story are thrown at you to see if you can take it. If you’re worthy of being a Tom Robbins reader. Hopefully you are, because it only gets better from here. We have one fierce invalid, Switters, who is such a wild combination of opposites that it blows my dichotomy-obsessed mind. He’s a drug-using CIA operative who dislikes authority, sanity, and dogma; a lusty-eyed lover of youth (especially in the form of his teenaged stepsister) who goes gaga for a middle-aged nun; a vegetarian who can’t pass up good ol’ red eye gravy. The fun never ends when you’re in this man’s head!

I should step back for a moment. Switters isn’t really an invalid. He’s the victim of a Kandakandero curse placed on him as payment for a drug-induced enlightening experience at the hands of a man whose head is precisely the shape of a pyramid. If he there isn’t air between his feet and the ground, he will die. His methods for getting around this particular mobility impairment, not to mention his explanation to his boss at the CIA, are reason enough to read the book. His travels (mostly from two inches above the ground) take him to Peru with his elitist computer-hacker grandmother’s parrot (quite tasty!), to California to try to get into a young girl’s pants while studying the Fatima prophecies, to Syria first for covert business activities from his wheelchair across desert sands and then for explorations of convent life with some renegade nuns who throw off their habits into a fire beneath his window, and finally to the Vatican while dressed in full nun’s regalia. Who could resist the insanity that Tom Robbins makes into truth? (Hmm… now I understand Grandpa’s philosophical pro-wrestling analysis. I like it. I like it very very much.)

Fierce Invalids is certainly not the best book in the Tom Robbins’ collection, but it IS excellent nonetheless. With his forceful flaunting of opposites, Switters is a character worthy of this book’s 432 pages. If you share my taste for the absurd, you should read Tom Robbins…everything by Tom Robbins. Especially this book. But PLEASE, for the love of God and dark chocolate, don’t read one of his four newer books before you’re read at least one of the first three (Another Roadside Attraction, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, Still Life with Woodpecker) and preferably all of them. You need to understand the absurdity and spirituality that IS Tom Robbins before you can accept the “throw ‘em in the water and make ‘em swim” approach that he’s adopted since the 80’s. Heed my warning. I cannot be held responsible for your grim fate if you dare to step directly on the ground.