Brushing a cigar ash from the attorney's somber necktie, Amanda corrected him. "There is no such thing as a weird human being. It's just that some people require more understanding than others."
So we, lucky readers, are introduced in the first few pages of Another Roadside Attraction, to the majestic character of Amanda, so vibrant in voice and aesthetic as to break the somnabulistic spell cast upon fiction readers the world over by dark and brooding tales of contraction. Step inside the mind of Tom Robbins' greatest character in his first and greatest work circa 1971, dancing a philosophical jig with an uncontrived and natural rhythm:
When she was a small girl Amanda hid a ticking clock in an old rotten tree trunk. It drove woodpeckers crazy. Ignoring tasty bugs all around them, they just about beat their brains out trying to get at the clock. Years later, Amanda used the woodpecker experiment as a model for understanding capitalism, communism, Christianity and all other systems that traffic in future rewards rather than in present realities.
The text is pulsating, optimistic and stylized without irritation (according to Rolling Stone "garbed colorfully in the language of Joyce" while the Los Angeles Times compares it to "the style and humor of Mark Twain" in audacious but fitting literary parallels), as plucky Plucky Purcell, the intense Tarzanesque John Paul Ziller, Nearly Normal Jimmy, and the self-titled narrative-weaving Marx Marvelous, whom like the four largest moons of Jupiter, rotate faster around the planet Amanda than she does on her axis. In the words of Marx Marvelous:
Nearly Normal Jimmy once described Amanda as a "religion-unto-herself" and I readily admit that there is something beatific about her gentleness, her poise, her radiant face, the way she seems to float several inches above the ground. However if she is a saint it was the pope of gypsies who canonized her. My God! What colors she wears, bangles and bracelets and beads. Rings on each finger, on every toe. Her dark hair appears singed by campfires and she moves always as if to music; her manner mixes action and dream.
Don't miss your chance to float away on her celestial femininity, leaping from the pages of the text. This is a carefree but poignant tale, providing insight in the undisturbed fashion of a reconciliatory neighbor. A recent review on Amazon bemoaned the fact that Amanda is such a fantastic character that it made the reader so sad that she wasn't real. Perhaps though she is real, needing only to be sparked and lit in our imagination, the way the flames of a campfire seem to always crackle and lean towards passing rivers, bubbling with the watery metaphysical companion to the fiery embers. After all, according to Amanda: " ... it had long been her theory that human beings were invented by water as a device for transporting itself from one place to another."
Labels: literature
