Absolute chaos. The book jacket blurb (honestly, who writes those things anyway?) reads as follows:

Jitterbug Perfume is an epic, which is to say, it begins in the forests of ancient Bohemia and doesn’t conclude until nine o’clock tonight [Paris time]. It is a saga, as well. A saga must have a hero, and the hero of this one is a janitor with a missing bottle. The bottle is blue, very, very old, and embossed with the image of a goat-horned god. If the liquid in the bottle is actually the secret essence of the universe, as some folks seem to think, it had better be discovered soon because it is leaking and there is only a drop or two left.

Besides reading like the diary of a junky from the ’30s, it reveals almost nothing about the book besides maybe the fact that Jitterbug Perfume is the sort of book that defies any expectation you might be able to glean from a blurb.

This is the second novel that I have read by Tom Robbins (the first was Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates). One thing about reading Tom Robbins that might surprise you is just how many people will come up to talk to you about him if you’re the type to read books in public. When I purchased this book (shoutout to Dog Eared on Valencia), the three men working the register took an immediate interest in sharing their nuanced and strongly held opinions of Robbins. When I left this book behind in a bar one night, the bartender working when I came back to pick it up professed that Jitterbug Perfume was his favorite book of all time. And finally, leaving this book on a desk in the office while out for a run, I came back to a note, handwritten, that someone felt compelled to write to me about it:

A fair characterization of Tom Robbins is perhaps that he evokes very polarized reactions from people. Some people obviously love his work. Some have never heard of him. And if Goodreads and Reddit are anything to go by, some people hate him.

In my opinion, many of these detractors of Robbins make very reasonable points. On r/books, a post made by a now-deleted Reddit user particularly resonated with me:

here’s a theory: Tom Robbins and Jack Kerouac and maaaybe Hunter S. Thompson (i’d argue that Thompson has done legitimately valuable work) are Party Guys.
the worlds they live in are anything but boring. the first time they show up at the party you think, “holy shit! this guy is wild! look at that energy, and this parade of outsized characters he’s bringing along! okay, granted, he’s pretty hammered, and goddamn his voice is loud, but who cares! this is real life, and these are real people. i’ve never been at a party like this!”
by the fifth party the Party Guy shows up at, it’s “oh jesus, not this asshole again. always drunk, always yelling about the same bullshit. he climbed up on that hobby horse years ago and never got off it. his friends are all sycophants or jealous megalomaniacs, and he’s probably gonna fall through another table…”

I think this take is spot on.

Firstly, Jitterbug Perfume is written with the stylistic character of someone with confidence - whimsical, slightly cringe, and with jokes delivered in the way that you’d expect from someone who thinks they are hilarious. There is a component of this confidence contributing to Robbin’s embrace of postmodernism and crassness. Moreover, though, I also can’t help but taste a tinge of insecurity in Robbin’s writing similar to that of so many of the Party Guys (TM) that I know personally. It feels like there is a need to be edgy to evoke reactions out of people. This edge becomes a trap of self-parody because he never learned any other way to be cool.

Secondly, Robbin’s books prominently feature a number of philosophical themes that come off to me as extremely privileged. Jitterbug Perfume prominently features the idea that death is something to be categorically defied, because presumably living is so great, is it not? In Fierce Invalids Grandma Maestra’s parrot’s mantra is famously “people of ze wurl, relax!” and Robbins conjures up a pyramid-headed Amazonian shaman who proselytizes that the reason behind the colonial dominance of the white man is their laughter.

In a similar vein, as many others have remarked, Tom Robbin’s portrayal of women leaves a rather sour taste in my mouth. Though he features women characters prominently - many of them I think are given significant roles and complex personalities, outside of those women who are non-sexual by design because of their age or their familial relationship to a protagonist, Robbins is particularly heavy handed in his brushstroke painting the young, desirable women in his books as sexual objects. Particularly off putting to me was his description of Switter’s (35M) frankly gross infatuation with his 14 year old stepsister.

Some people have argued that the sexuality in his writing is sexually liberating. I’ve also heard characterizations of these depictions as satirical. Unfortunately, I find both these claims to be pretty unconvincing mainly on the principle that for them to be true would require Robbins to be deliberately making some sort of larger related statement. My reading doesn’t leave me with any impression at all that Robbins is particularly interested in bigger questions of sexuality. If anything, when viewed against his broader themes of “just relax and have some fun”, the sexuality in his books looks markedly less satirical to me.

I think Robbin’s philosophy of positivity is well-meaning and good. If someone were to ask, most of them honestly resonate with me in my day to day life. However, I think it’s disingenuous to ignore the fact that in a lot of contexts they are unhelpfully naive. Ultimately, there is no way for Robbins to dodge the perception that his are the lifeview of a middle-class-or-higher, socially-successful white dude from the 50s. When viewed through the lens of sexuality, the image in my mind is that of a drunk ex-fraternity dude in his forties, telling you at a dive bar to “relax, live a little, lighten up”, all while he’s obviously trying to fuck you.

All things said, Robbin’s writing is charming, refreshing, and quippy. I love the running motif of beets in Jitterbug Perfume. I laughed when Switters inadvertently killed a man after touching his penis. His writing is endlessly quotable (as evidenced by the collection I’ve included below). At times he hits upon little philosophical crumbs that are so witty and clever that you can’t help but think about them for a few minutes, but then chooses to completely neglect expanding upon them even a little bit. I would never make an unqualified recommendation to anyone to read Tom Robbins. That said, please read some Tom Robbins. Tell me what you think.

Favorite Quotes

The beet is the most intense of vegetables. The radish, admittedly, is more feverish, but the fire of the radish is a cold fire, the fire of discontent not of passion. Tomatoes are lusty enough, yet there runs through tomatoes an undercurrent of frivolity. Beets are deadly serious.
Slavic peoples get their physical characteristics from potatoes, their smoldering inquietude from radishes, their seriousness from beets.
The beet is the melancholy vegetable, the one most willing to suffer. You can’t squeeze blood out of a turnip…
The beet is the murderer returned to the scene of the crime. The beet is what happens when the cherry finishes with the carrot. The beet is the ancient ancestor of the autumn moon, bearded, buried, all but fossilized; the dark green sails of the grounded moon-boat stitched with veins of primordial plasma; the kite string that once connected the moon to the Earth now a muddy whisker drilling desperately for rubies.
The beet was Rasputin’s favorite vegetable. You could see it in his eyes.

Never underestimate how much assistance, how much satisfaction, how much comfort, how much soul and transcendence there might be in a well-made taco and a cold bottle of beer.

The highest function of love is that it makes the loved one a unique and irreplaceable being.

When you’re unhappy, you get to pay a lot of attention to yourself. And you get to take yourself oh so very seriously. Your truly happy people, which is to say, your people who truly like themselves, they don’t think about themselves very much. Your unhappy person resents it when you try to cheer him up, because that means he has to stop dwellin’ on himself and start payin’ attention to the universe. Unhappiness is the ultimate form of self-indulgence.

There is plenty of misery in the world, all right, but there is ample pleasure, as well. If a person forswears pleasure in order to avoid misery, what has he gained?…how can you admire a human who consciously embraces the bland, the mediocre, and the safe rather than risk the suffering that disappointments can bring?…If desire causes suffering, it may be because we do not desire wisely, or that we are inexpert at obtaining what we desire…why not get better at fulfilling desire? I cannot believe that the most delicious things were placed here merely to test us, to tempt us, to make it the more difficult for us to achieve the grand prize - they safety of the void. To fashion of life such a petty game is unworthy of both men and gods.

Philosophers have argued for centuries about how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, but materialists have known all along that it depends on whether they are jitterbugging or dancing cheek to cheek.

The minute you land in New Orleans, something wet and dark leaps on you and starts humping you like a swamp dog in heat, and the only way to get that aspect of New Orleans off you is to eat it off. That means beignets and crayfish bisque and jambalaya, it means shrimp remoulade, pecan pie, and red beans with rice, it means elegant pompano au papillote, funky file z’herbes, and raw oysters by the dozen, it means grillades for breakfast, a po’ boy with chowchow at bedtime, and tubs of gumbo in between. It is not unusual for a visitor to the city to gain fifteen pounds in a week–yet the alternative is a whole lot worse. If you don’t eat day and night, if you don’t constantly funnel the indigenous flavors into your bloodstream, then the mystery beast will go right on humping you, and you will feel its sordid presence rubbing against you long after you have left town. In fact, like any sex offender, it can leave permanent psychological scars.

Madame Lily Devalier always asked “Where are you?” in a way that insinuated that there were only two places on earth one could be: New Orleans and somewhere ridiculous.

They fell asleep smiling. It is to erase the fixed smiles of sleeping couples that Satan trained roosters to crow at five in the morning.

Gods and men create one another, destroy one another, though by different means.

Logic limits love, which may be why Descartes never married.

The oyster was an animal worthy of New Orleans, as mysterious and private and beautiful as the city itself. If one could accept that oysters build their houses out of their lives, one could imagine the same of New Orleans, whose houses were similarly and resolutely shuttered against an outside world that could never be trusted to show proper sensitivity toward the oozing delicacies within.

“There are no such things as synonyms!” he practically shouted. “Deluge is not the same as flood.”

Of our nine planets, Saturn is the one that looks like fun.

An old Ukrainian proverb warns, “A tale that begins with a beet will end with the devil.” That is a risk we have to take.”

The accumulation of material things is shallow and vain, but to have a genuine relationship with such things is to have a relationship with life and, by extension, a relationship with the divine.