First, a few home truths. Nobody writes like Tom Robbins. There’s never been a character like Amanda in the whole of literature, and that could be a good or a bad thing. And I really hope today’s column ends up as a recommendation for Another Roadside Attraction as I mean it to be, and not a Cease-and-Desist.
You see, Tom Robbins is a ‘phase’ writer. As regular readers, many of us have gone through phases where we would binge-read one writer; I have had a Hilary Mantel phase, a Louise Penny phase, a Tarashankar Bandyopadhyay phase, but the one I would love to go back to was my Tom Robbins phase. It’s a spell though; once it’s broken, it’s difficult to go back.
Story? Plot? Narrative arc? Oh you poor dear. Robbins will sprawl and meander and give you a wall graffiti, a Jackson Pollock painting, and you ask for an arc? He will exasperate you. He will be cracking the most inane of glorious-word-play trivialities in the middle of what you think is the heart of the story’s main conflict. He will go on a five-page detour (and often an exquisite one) about a minor character, never to visit that character again.
But he is a magician. He writes the most hilarious, finely-crafted cod-philosophy, and creates the most uproariously unbelievably lovely protagonists and the most uniquely quotable one-liners and party-pieces (sample this, my favourite line in all literature: ‘It’s never too late to have a happy childhood’) — and whenever that silly question ‘which literary character would you like to have a coffee with’ is popped, my answer is always Amanda from Another Roadside Attraction.
What to say about Amanda? She is unique — a free spirit if there ever was one. A connoisseur of mushrooms, butterflies and quack medicine, the book blurb defines her perfectly — ‘lovable prophetess and promiscuous earth-mother’. She meets John Paul Ziller — a legendary magician/ musician/ filmmaker, and the master/ disciple of Mon Cul, the baboon who knows of the only word in the dictionary that rhymes with ‘orange’.
Amanda meets Ziller, they have a marriage-at-first-sight, and they set up “Captain Kendrick’s Memorial Hot Dog Wildlife Preserve” in Skagit County, Washington — a roadside hot dog stall turned zoo that of course does not keep lions and tigers and elephants, because come on, everyone knows it’s cruel to cage animals — but indeed has a flea circus. Yes, fleas. Yes, circus.
Then their friend Plucky Purcell, a former college football star, turns up. He had infiltrated the Felicitators, a sect of Catholic monks who act as the Vatican’s assassins. He had been to the Vatican. There had been an earthquake at the Vatican while he was there. And what he had found there, and what he had stolen and brought along with him now, will change the face of organised religion forever. Or it might not. But heck, the ride would be worth it. Go on, then. Hop on to the ride with Amanda. And tell her that I said hi, and tell her that I still love her.