I've never picked up a Tom Robbin's book I did not like...and doubt I ever will. ( )

True-to-form Robbins: funny, amazing metaphors, and always earthy as all get out! ( )

Robbins, Tom, Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas, New York, Bantam Books, 1994.
A story told many times since the sixties about the economic and Christian corruption and general pollution which will soon lead to the coming breakup of the system as we know it. Gwen, the stockbroker, meets Larry Diamond, fresh from the East, and from Timbuktu in Africa, where he has learned the secret of life though not the cure for cancer, which he has. He is still respected by the Seattle stock community for some reason though he has stolen it blind, dresses like an up-to-date hippie, and drives a beat-up, purple Vespa. As the financial world collapses he saves Gwen from her religious, capitalistic boyfriend and they head off into the blue - for T--b--tu, of course. Predictable, and, of course, all true, and all has happened in real life before.
Tom’s stuff show’s no growth over the years, with lines like, “The Father’s a frog, the Son’s a tadpole, the Holy Ghost is swamp gas.” Could it really be, that those who choose to read Tom Robbins are still concerned about such topics? His ability to string words together musically and originally is still amazing as when he discusses our difficulties in dealing with reality “that often seems to be unfolding in a foreign tongue...We’re attempting to comprehend the spiraling intricacies of a magnificently complex tragicomedy with librettos that describe barroom melodramas or kindergarten skits.” or Diamond’s kiss-off as he tipped the bartender with a fifty from “a tumbleweed of cash” while all around him drunken brokers were asking him for advice on the market after the day’s disastrous crash, “Poorer of some hopes but freer of some illusions.” Since he verbalized it(rather than written), it could as well have been a peon to the bartender as, “Pourer of hopes, freer of illusions” with the bartender and the booze as the nouns, ‘pourer ‘ and ‘freer.’
This book does have a place in the scheme of Ishmael, however in that it describes the breakdown of the “Taker Thunderbolt.” As our system continues its losing struggle against “The Law of Life,” just as surely as a glass bottle dropped from an airplane would lose against the “Law of Gravity.” ( )

Like many of Tom Robbins books, this one is full of mystical insights, but once again he presented an ending that I felt was rather unsatisfying. ( )

Having read "Another Roadside Attraction" years ago, I thought I'd give Robbins another try. Wish I would have spent the time reading something else. ( )