As in the best of his earlier novels -- Another Roadside Attraction, Skinny Legs and All, Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas, and Jitterbug Perfume -- here again Robbins does a remarkable job of pulling in esoteric historical, religious, and anthropological information, to add an aura of magic to present-day events, without being tedious or heavy-handed or preachy. You might well laugh out loud at how he mocks and at the same time throws new light on our favorite beliefs and icons.
This time the zaniness is more controlled, the main characters are all human (unlike in Skinny Legs in which inanimate objects like a bean can and a dessert spoon walked and talked and provided insight into the thousands of years of human history that they had witnessed), and the action all takes place in the present day (with none of the jumping back and forth from ancient times to now, as in Jitterbug Perfume). The result is probably his best novel to date.
Typically, the main characters of Robbins novels are totally off the wall, and only by a tour de force does he get us to believe them and sympathize with them and suspend our disbelief probably further than we have for any other author. Switters, the hero of Fierce Invalids, is far more human and believable. He feels quirky in an Allie McBeal sort of way, where his bizarre reactions and motivations seem to fit together and make him endearingly human, and his illogic is just logical enough to intrigue.
Yes, Switters, the hero, a CIA operative, goes on a personal detour in Peru to return his grandmother's elderly parrot to the wilds of the Amazon. Yes, he chances upon a shaman whose head has the same shape as the parrot's unique cage -- like an Egyptian pyramid -- and whose innovative philosophy of life happens to closely resemble the parrot's one line "People of zee wurl, relax." Yes, Switters takes to a wheel chair for fear that due to the shaman's curse he will die if his feet ever touch the ground again. But the author goes out of his way to explain such outlandish circumstances, and presents everything in such a light-hearted humorous way, and strings so many impossible pieces of plot together with even more impossible coincidences, that you just enjoy the tale -- as you would Tom Jones or Cat's Cradle -- and find yourself amazed at how he then makes a religion out of humor of this kind, and actually throws light on human nature and destiny and the nature of religion.
Along the way, we get the gospel according to Robbins: laughter is holy, and opposites (yin and yang, male and female, dark and light, good and evil, God and the Devil) are in some sense interdependent and both necessary like the ones and zeroes of binary math.
Coincidence normally is a sign of novelistic artifice. Realistic authors either avoid coincidences, or build a story around one major coincidence. Humorous and ironic authors -- like Fielding and Dickens -- multiply coincidences and call attention to them, reminding us as we are reading that this is in fact fiction.
In Tom Robbins, as in some of the best of Vonnegut and Pynchon, in Stoppard's Rosenkrantz and Guilderstern are Dead, and even in that magnificent scientific/mathematical meditation Godel, Escher, Bach by Hofstadter, coincidence is presented as evidence of artifice, but not human artifice -- rather the doing of some incomprehensible divine or natural plan or destiny. Yes, on the one hand, randomness reigns. The world is a meaningless and absurd place, and as in Lem's strange stories, man keeps coming up with the darndest ways of trying to manufacture meaning out of nothing. But on the other hand, it's not randomness and meaninglessness that's scary, but rather order -- an order that is immense and intricate and seems to come out of nowhere, and is beyond human control or understanding. Rosenkrantz and Guilderstern are shocked that in defiance of the laws of statistics every time they flip a coin it comes out the same. And here the minor coincidences (Switters, our would-be invalid CIA operative winds up in a nunnery in Syria, where the abbess is the same woman who years before posed for a nude painting by Matisse that now hangs in the home of Switter's grandmother in Seattle) and the major ones (linking the third prophecy of Fatima to a shaman in the Amazon) come together with such remarkable facility that we begin to see them not as the author's artifice, but rather as some bizarre kind of evidence that this wacky, random world we live in is governed by rules as yet unknown and perhaps unknowable, and that this seemingly arbitrary story grew in the author's inspired imagination with the necessity and precision of a crystal growing; that in some sense this novel reflects hidden or neglected aspects of reality. That such a contrived and impossible tale should feel so natural and fit together so well is indeed a minor miracle, as if with all his fun and foolishness Robbins has managed to tap into the energy and wisdom that somehow resides in language itself.
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