The big question for me when I finished the novel was 'Why did I not connect on an emotional level with the characters?' The novel is wonderfully humorous, the author's aim is admirable, and he treats his characters with a decided tenderness yet despite this I was left feeling a little aloof. Robins is perhaps too overtly the master puppeteer with his many strings dangling from quick moving fingers. At those points they seemed like characters from a Beckett or Pirandello play wandering about in search of direction. And I guess that's it - I was so aware of the writer and his tongue in cheek (or tongue in ass?) wit that the characters remained at a distance from me, as if they were on a stage, and when the novel stalled (which was not often) I was painfully aware of this distance. Robins' own) and I felt they could have been interchanged with one another into different roles and it wouldn't have made a difference.
The characters all have roughly the same sense of humor (which I suspect is very much like Mr. I guess my biggest complaint was the fact that the novel's pull depended so much upon the author's cleverness. That being said, here come the complaints. I can therefore conclude that Tom Robins is simply writing who he is, and that's pretty much all one can ask of any author. I also have a lot of appreciation for his message, and that message is consistent with the manner in which he writes. Through the first 50 or so pages I was very skeptical, but then he got me, and the reading went much quicker. He's incomparably clever at turning a phrase. And to an extent that's quite refreshing. He ignores pretty much every rule that fiction writers generally, in good taste, abide by. Whatever one says about this writer, the first is that he is a complete iconoclast of Rabelasian proportion. There are some things i really appreciated about the book and his style, and there are some things I really didn't care for. this is totally a guy you either love or hate, and yet I find myself strangely ambivalent.
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