An Unfair Post: Tom Robbins

Here I am trying to get enough posts in to stretch unto my departure from this less than delightful halfway house, so I am now plundering the archives of January Magazine. What do I find but an interview of Tom Robbins. Those coming early do not yet know my attachment to to Tom Robbins. His heyday may be forty or more years ago, but not for me. He is humor and anarchy and a goodtime.  It is unfair because I do think so highly of this writer.

And your writing feels very natural. Very smooth. I understand you were quite young when you started writing.\

Yeah. I started writing when I was five years old. And I worked very hard on trying to make it flow smoothly. But I probably spend as much time on one sentence as John Grisham spends on five chapters. [Laughs] Which is not to cut John Grisham, because his intentions are very different from mine. The ends he's seeking -- which is to entertain people and make a lot of money -- are not my ends. And he does what he does very well.

What are your ends?

[Sighs and looks resigned.]

You walked right into that one, didn't you?

Yeah. And I'm looking for a way to walk right out of it. [Laughs.]

Cornered, I'm afraid.

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. And I guess when a reader finishes one of my books -- provided the reader does finish the book -- 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. Which is to say that they've encountered the lifeforce in a large, irrepressible and unpredictable way and as a result their sense of wonder has been awakened and all of their possibilities have been expanded.

At the same time, I don't think that a novel is supposed to be a guide book to happiness any more than it's supposed to be a journal of one's personal pain and frustration, which most novels are today, unfortunately. I think the novels that are most important are those that are more on the order of those coyotes that howl on the hills outside of town. Something mysterious and wild and hypnotic.