THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Wednesday, November 9, 1994 TAG: 9411090027
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E8 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: BOOK REVIEW\
SOURCE: BY DAVE EDELMAN
LENGTH: Medium: 91 lines
ALTHOUGH TOM ROBBINS has a reputation for writing humorous novels that giddily defy any attempts at summarization, his technique is starting to become disappointingly clear.
The inside sleeve of ``Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas'' (Bantam Books, $23.95), Robbins' new novel, promises all manner of goofiness by describing a plot that involves the collapse of Wall Street, a 300-pound psychic, a born-again monkey and Sirius the Dog Star. Once you've made it halfway through the book, however, you realize that this is really the same book Robbins has been writing for years:
Take a confused and slightly square female protagonist; throw her together with a hip middle-aged guy who (a) regularly insults Western Judeo-Christian culture, (b) is on some sort of urgent quest to put a whoopee cushion on the chair of respectability and (c) turns her on to kinky sex; add an exotic leitmotif like frogs, beets or explosives to stitch all the meandering subplots tightly together; and end with a prolonged sermon about flying saucers, the hypocrisy of conventional religion, Atlantis or the virtues of recreational drug use.
Robbins, who lives in Seattle, has managed to knock off six fairly entertaining books with this formula, among them the 1970s cult classic and recent movie flop ``Even Cowgirls Get the Blues'' and the puckish '90s best seller ``Skinny Legs and All.'' But considering how long it takes for him to churn these things out - about five years per book - ``Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas'' could just as easily describe Robbins' modus operandi as his subject matter.
The book opens with the hero, an uptight Filipino broker named Gwendolyn Mati, bemoaning a ruinous crash of the stock market on Easter weekend. Her friends offer her little consolation: One of them, 300-pound medium and tarot deck enthusiast Q-Jo Huffington, has suddenly vanished; the other, Gwen's lover and devout Lutheran Belford Dunn, is preoccupied with searching for his lost pet monkey, Andre.
Scrambling for some way to rebound from the weekend disaster, Gwen meets up with erstwhile financial hot shot Larry Diamond. But Diamond has little concern for brokering these days; instead, he's out to convince Gwen that it's high time to ditch her materialistic career and join him in his mind-expanding crusade for humanity.
Diamond wants to know why the world's frog population is mysteriously disappearing; why an African tribe named the Bozo detected a neighboring star to Sirius thousands of years before Western scientists did, and whether a celebrated Eastern mystic can really cure cancer with enemas.
The reader is likely to be plagued with burning questions of his or her own. Such as, does Robbins take any of this astral gobbledygook seriously? And why should tens of thousands of people fork over 24 bucks to read it?
Robbins' previous novels, such as ``Jitterbug Perfume,'' which outlined a four-step recipe for immortality, and ``Still Life With Woodpecker,'' which instructed the reader on the ABC's of making homemade bombs, were similarly ludicrous, but they were redeemed by their deliriously wacky prose. The author is a master of the creative metaphor and non sequitur. Who else but Tom Robbins could write of ``beets as intense as serial killers, celery as stringy as soundtrack orchestras, sesame seeds as blank as the eyes of termite queens?''
And yet, ``Pajamas'' is linguistically lazier than most of Robbins' earlier works, and his indictments of conventional society are only half as biting. His decision to write the book in the second person is more irritating than effective.
``Pajamas'' adds to Robbins' ideological canon a few ideas with more than a whiff of fascism: a disdain for the homeless (``Everybody has a hard-luck story,'' claims Diamond); a disregard for politics of any shape or form; and a dislike of any ideology (especially Christianity) that champions the meek.
Probably the most important contribution that ``Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas'' makes to American culture is a new word to describe the sound that a slide projector makes when it rotates to the next specimen: snickersnee. Like the book itself, it's an interesting piece of linguistic legerdemain, but nothing to croak over. MEMO: Dave Edelman is a book reviewer who lives in Gaithersburg, Md. ILLUSTRATION: Photo by CARL STUDNA
Tim Robbins' new book echoes his previous works.
by CNB