Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins

Jitterbug Perfume

Jitterbug Perfume

1. Nope. I can see why it sold at the time. Can't see it becoming a classic, the writing's too lousy. Such a lot of the book is very 80s, uncontrolled, unedited, self indulgent verbal vomit.

2.
The writing is really bad. Apparantly Robbins fancies himself as America's Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw and P.G. Wodehouse rolled into one. He has neither the wit, brains, nor funny bone to do it. Nor does he have their writing ability. He's very clumbsy with words and his imagery is so heavy handed it stamps at you.

He also seems to fancy himself as a modern Shakespeare with that wondrous facility to use words. Hah! He's ghastly! All those overdone and overblown metaphors and similes that are often so obscure the reader is pulled up to go: 'Huh?' and try to work them out. He doesn't have the quick wit and depth of knowledge to write clever and witty asides.

3. Robbins touches on potentially controversial subjects like sex, death, religion, and individualism.
And Uncle Tom Cobbly and all! What doesn't he sprinkle the book with just for shock effect? He is spawn of the 80s, the worst of New Age. So this book insists that inhibitions are wrong, sex is all, plus a passing conscious mention of ecology with that forced symbolism. Tom Robbins is obviously like some of my trendy professors in the 80s who used to lean on the pretty young students with the same line about inhibitions being bad for you and sex, with them of course, when they wanted it, was so healthy!!!

He's like a little boy writing rude words on street walls and yelling 'pe*nis'. He's so busy trying to shock the reader and prove what a great uninhibited writer he is that the story goes to pot. ( Yes, that is an intentional double entendre!)

Why didn't his editor tell him to cut out the sideshows and tell the story?

4. What characters? Cardboard 2Ds to bear the weight of his heavy handed posturing and preaching.

5. Humour?
Maybe this is a culture thing and Americans find TR funny but I'm not American and his heavy handed efforts are not funny at all. It's all so obvious, 'custard pie in the face', unsubtle, puerile stuff. Maybe it's a jock thing and his humour will go down a treat in the locker room. (I think that's the American term for our changing room.)

6. Does the author's biography matter to you as a reader?
Nope, the writing tells me about the writer. If I enjoy a writer's work then I may look up the basics. It's the writing that counts.

In the beginning, Robbins had my attention switching from Alobar to Seattle, New Orleans, and Paris. I wanted to see where he was going, but got lost along the way. The switches and story are monotonous, yet Robbins keeps hitting levels of absurdity.

In the 80’s, sex and individualism were sought after like previous generations. I can see why this may capture a certain audience at the time. He plays on eccentricity attracting young readers to think this is new asking them to join the ranks of the unique.

His writing style is bizarre and I found it difficult to visualize characters and settings based on descriptions and analogies. Some of the analogies were good like, “Louisiana in September was like an obscene phone call from nature. The air-moist, sultry, secretive, and far from fresh…”, but he threw in too many others that washed out the good. Here is an example, “She lowered her eyelids, lids that resembled purses sewn from the skins of thick, dark grapes.” Huh? He details throughout with repetition making approximately the last 50 pages hodgepodge. There are only so many ways to describe bodily secretions, smells and sex.

The characters’ stories were only an outline for Robbins’s fill of hallucinations. I can’t even explain what he meant to do with the story. What was the significance of the bees with Pajama Bingo and then Huxley Anne? Why at the end is Priscilla’s ex in love with her, and why bother bringing Ricki? I actually thought Wiggs Dannyboy was Alobar reincarnated. That's what I think the story is about, reincarnation, not everlasting life.

His humor interrupted the flow. He put it in as if telling the reader a little secret, but majority of the time it wasn’t funny and meaningless. If he cut out the humor, the book probably would have ended 40 pages earlier.

I didn’t need to know about him the writing explained it all. I may have misinterpreted the entire book, but it doesn’t matter since I would never recommend it or the author.

I couldn't finish this book. I was afraid if I were struck blind it would be the last book I'd read - I would have committed suicide.

If you want to know how I really felt, reread pdr's post. That sums it up for me.

The characters were shallow, the sex gratuitous, plot was whipstitched rather than knitted together; humour? Was there something funny in there? Not.

I did not like it Sam I Am
It felt like reading lots of Spam. pbbbbtttt....

I find all of Tom Robbins' fiction to be cloyingly self-absorbed, the main thing he seems to be trying to say is: "Look at me! Look at me! See how good a writer I am!" I'd read Cowgirls and Roadside Attraction some years ago, and gave Jitterbug a go when it came out in paperback. That lasted about ten pages, before I went on to something else. Life is too short.

caw.

I got sick of Alobar. We spent waaaay too much time on the guy. I found the modern day action more interesting.

The sexual obsession got to be a bit much too.

And I agree with the descriptions. Enough already. I like a little less talk and a lot more action.

Those of you who are saying the characters are shallow, how do you mean? What would you have liked to see more of where they were concerned?

The characters I remember were the King (Alobar), his SO, the two women in New Orleans, the two brothers in France, Pan, and the chick in the Pacific Northwest.

But what do I remember about them? Not much.

The King didn't want to die.
The King's consort made rope but preferred making perfume.
Pan was fading away.
The chick was pathetic.
One of the French brothers wore a whale mask. (for whatever reason)
And the two in New Orleans...the old one was a stepmother of sorts to the one in the NW.

After ~159 pages I should have known more about these characters. Maybe the author told us more about them but it was hard to pick out any details because the story was incoherent - maybe incohesive is a better word (if it IS a word)

The only part I enjoyed, the only part that hung together and made sense was when the King and the former ropemaking woman got chased out of their home because people noticed they were living too long and not aging. That scene was cohesive and it made sense.

Otherwise to me, it read like this .......>thunk<..............>thunk<.........>thunk< I kept falling out of the story.

There was no main character. We jumped from character to character so that I never really bonded with any of them. And no one was particularly sympathetic. I just never had a reason to care for any of them. The story was about:

Kudra and Alobar and Pan and Priscilla and Rikki and The ladies in New Orleans and the two french guys and that DannyBoy and Huxley Anne and the Pajama character and I don't even remember who all.

It was like the kitchen sink.

Oh dear. I loved it. I read it about four years ago and realized that what I thought was my copy was actually my best friend's copy and was, subsequently, cozied up on her bookshelf 500 miles away. I was going to read it again before this discussions, but found my mistake too late. The particulars are going to escape me now.

To me, the writing is definitely odd, but what I remember at the end was feeling like I'd woken from a delightfully wacky dream - refreshed and smirking. Some of it was over the top, but as someone usually sensitive to "trying to hard", it wasn't offputting.

His gusto for writing about sex didn't bother me. It seemed to suit the characters and the story.

I enjoyed this up until he started into the theories about aging and evolution and flower brains. At that point I tuned him out, because at this point I felt I was listening to the author (possibly one with a long history of hallucinogenic use?) and not a character.
Yes I felt he overused metaphors and similies, but to me they were so off the wall that they were amusing. I 'got' many of the connections and it made me laugh that he chose them, surely knowing most readers would be lost. The quirkiness kept me reading, and laughing. I did often wonder though how he became a successful writer if all of his books have this same style.
I was disappointed in the character development. He snagged me right away with most of the major characters, and then left them hanging, and me wondering about them. And their connections to each other were so cold. The way he just left them without a goodbye or much explanation was frustrating. Especially Pan. He was such a vital part of the story, and could have been written much better.
Overall, even though I know this doesn't deserve much literary acclaim, I'm glad I read it, and will hang on to my copy, in case I get a wild whim to revisit it some day. I guess the main appeal was the concept behind the story. It stimulated my thinking in some fun ways. Even though he failed miserably to create a tightly crafted piece, I will never forget the book, nor a few of the characters.

Lol! If you're giving it away, I'd love it. Seriously, I thought it was terrific. Perhaps I am in a perpetually weird mood.

Keeping in mind that I haven't read the book, based on some of your guy's descriptions, it almost sounds as if the characters were allegorical or symbolic?

I think so. It was far less narrative than a vehicle for an idea, a double dare to play along. Very dreamlike. Like dozing off after one glass too many and having a dream that you can almost explain when you wake up.

If I had been as stoned when I read it as he was when he wrote it I would have enjoyed it too -

I think they were a bit allagoric, yes. Allomar represented an evolved way of thinking about the longevity of life and resisting cutural traditions of death. And Pan represented, or rather was, a god, whose need in society was dying and thus, so was he.

Characters.

Yes, the book was obviously meant to be a deeply meaningful, highly symbolic look at society in the 80s. I guess that's how he sold it to the publisher.

But Robbins is too self indulgent. It's his navel contemplating view of society, without any real understanding of the world and where it was at in the 1980s.
He simply doesn't have the intellect to do this type of writing.

His characters were cardboard because they were all vehicles for his heavy handed writing about HIS self indulgent, cliched ideas.

Pan was an overloaded effort at ecology and the need for conservation, but also had to carry the 'throw away your inhibitions' line as well. Too much to load on a 2D character..

The other characters were nasty and supremely forgettable. Life is to be lived to the full, in Tom Robbins' way, seems to be the sum of the book, and that's an old cliche anyway.

If you're going to make clever asides and puns then you have to have the wit to make them. Robbins doesn't.

Every image in the book is a barrow load of concrete, shovelled on with a spade. Witty social comment needs the delicacy of a pointing trowel, a nudge to the reader, not a boringly repeated clout over the head.

P.S. Perks, a dream needs to be handled delicately. This book is more an editor's nightmare!

Ah. I guess I was wrong. Silly me.

Really?

Is that a genuine comment or a miaou?

I didn't think you'd relinquish your favourable opinion so easily.

I would have enjoyed it more with fewer characters to juggle. They were all just symbols and so I never connected. I need to like the characters and care about what happens to them. Allegory is fine in small doses, but this was way too much for my tastes.

I could have handled a few allegorical characters, but he lost me with Alobar and Kudra. They annoyed the snot out of me. And Priscilla was so pathetic that I didn't much care what happened to her.

I confess that I didn't understand quite a bit of it. Whale mask? Huh? Can someone explain to me what that was about?

pdr said:

I didn't think you'd relinquish your favourable opinion so easily.

Click to expand...

It didn't appear we were dealing in opinions.

It's funny how differently people can react to things. When I discussed this book the first time around, the majority of our group loved it. I wish I had been able to read it again and have it fresh in my mind for more point rebuttals, but I can't. All I remember is having a good time with it.

Ah, but...

just because I was very disappointed in this book and found it a load of verbal vomit doesn't mean that others will or that they cannot express their positive opinions.

If you had been brought up as I was in the educational tradition of forming opinions and debating them strongly then you would be putting forward reasons for your liking the book and being able to say 'Yes, but...' to my opinions. This way we could actually have debate about Tom Robbins and his book and not start sliding into attacking the person and not the point.

A snide 'Ah. I guess I was wrong. Silly me.' doesn't help people reading this thread to form their own opinions. A spirited 'Sorry, I disagree. I think xyz' would actually help others join in.