Tom Robbins, whose cosmically comedian novels about gargantuan-thumbed hitchhikers, stoned secret brokers and mystic stockbrokers caught maintain of tens of millions of readers within the Seventies counterculture, died on Sunday at his dwelling in La Conner, Wash. He was 92.
His son Fleetwood confirmed the loss of life however didn’t cite a trigger.
Alongside works by Carlos Castaneda, Richard Brautigan and Kurt Vonnegut, Tom Robbins paperbacks, dog-eared and torn, had been frequent sights on the bookshelves and bedside milk crates of the late hippie period, between the tail finish of the Vietnam Struggle and the rise of Ronald Reagan’s America. He turned one of many uncommon writers to realize each a cult following and mega-best-seller standing.
With their meandering plots, pop-philosophical asides and frequent jabs at social conference and arranged faith, Mr. Robbins’s books had been the proper accompaniment to acid journeys, Grateful Useless reveals and weekend yoga retreats, lengthy earlier than these issues turned middle-class and mainstream.
Although he stored writing into the twenty first century, he regularly selected titles that emanated the period’s Day-Glo whimsy, like “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues” (1976), “Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas” (1994) and “Fierce Invalids Dwelling From Sizzling Climates” (2000).
His story strains had been secondary and exhausting to elucidate; one reads a Tom Robbins novel for the verve of a well-wrought sentence, not a taut narrative. His literary foreign money was exaggeration, irony, bathos and the comedian mythopoetic, mixed for an impact that was really his personal.
Take a consultant line like this, from “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues,” his second novel: “A day squeezed out of Mickey’s mousy snout, a day carved from mashed potatoes and lye, a day scraped out of the canine’s dish of meteorology.”
Bizarre, nostalgic, vaguely unsettling — no matter one calls it, followers couldn’t get sufficient.
His first guide, “One other Roadside Attraction” (1971), obtained vital reward (Rolling Stone known as it “the quintessential novel of the Sixties”) and, after an preliminary flop in hardback, the novel took off in paperback. By the point “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues” appeared, 5 years later, “One other Roadside Attraction” had bought greater than 100,000 copies.
Mr. Robbins stored his rising military of followers at arm’s size. Extraordinarily personal, he hardly ever sat for interviews or stood for images, and he solely often left his dwelling, within the tugboat city of La Conner, north of Seattle.
He wrote slowly — pen, longhand, notepads — and agonized over every sentence, generally spending an hour on a single line. He hardly ever set his story out forward of time, preferring to let his instincts and creativeness carry him ahead over a roadbed of well-turned phrases.
“I don’t know the right way to write a novel,” he informed The Seattle Weekly in 2006. “I couldn’t let you know the right way to write a novel; it’s a brand new journey each time I start one, and I prefer it that method. I hardly ever have even the vaguest sense of plot once I start a guide.”
Mr. Robbins claimed to attract inspiration from Asian philosophy and Greek myths — not as supply materials, however as paradigms for considering by means of the right way to symbolize his tackle actuality.
“Reviewers additionally describe my work as ‘cartoonish,’ which I take as a praise, as a result of I really like cartooning, and cartooning may be very Greek,” he informed The Seattle Weekly. “The creators of the Greek myths labored like cartoonists, portray in large daring strokes with out plenty of bodily or psychological element.”
Although he was typically recognized as a Seattle author, he was born and raised within the South, and even 50 years after shifting to the Pacific Northwest, a little bit of a twang remained — lengthy I’s changing into ahs, g’s droppin’ like mayflies.
“I’m descended from an extended line of preachers and policemen,” he informed Excessive Instances journal in 2002. “Now, it’s frequent data that cops are congenital liars, and evangelists spend their lives telling implausible tales in such a method as to persuade in any other case rational people who they’re factual. So, I assume I come by my narrative inclinations naturally.”
His unique fan base drew from the twentysomethings of the hippie period and its aftermath; as he stored writing, that base stayed the identical age.
As was the case for Mr. Vonnegut or Hermann Hesse, considered one of Mr. Robbins’s idols, his careening sensibility and hyperimaginative fashion burrowed deep into the minds of youthful readers, however their attraction typically curdled as followers moved towards center age, alongside jam bands and psychoactive medicine.
Although his books continued to debut on the New York Instances best-seller listing, critics more and more demeaned him as a relic of the Sixties, a dig to which he took nice offense. He expressed much more frustration with critics who insisted that he select between humor and gravity, as if the 2 had been mutually unique.
And certainly his work, particularly his early books, was not merely nostalgic fluff. Their ridiculous sentences and shaggy-dog plots obscured severe literary ingenuity, whereas he was many years forward of the pack in taking over themes about ecology, feminism and faith.
“What bothers most critics of my work is the goofiness,” he informed The New York Instances in 1993. “One reviewer stated I have to make up my thoughts if wish to be humorous or severe. My response is that I’ll make up my thoughts when God does, as a result of life is a commingling of the sacred and the profane, good and evil. To try to separate them is fallacy.”
Thomas Eugene Robbins was born on July 22, 1932, in Blowing Rock, N.C., a small city northeast of Asheville, and later moved along with his household to the suburbs exterior Richmond, Va. His father, George, labored for {an electrical} firm, and his mom, Katherine (Robinson) Robbins, was a nurse. Each his grandfathers had been Southern Baptist preachers.
It was, he later stated, the proper starting to an extended literary profession, which he traced to his earliest imaginative scribblings at age 5.
As a young person he informed his dad and mom he needed to be a novelist. His father, hoping to push his son towards a extra sensible profession, persuaded him to enroll at Washington and Lee College, a Virginia college recognized for its journalism program. As a sports activities reporter for the campus newspaper, he was edited by Tom Wolfe.
Mr. Robbins left after his sophomore 12 months, satisfied that extra time within the classroom would do nothing for his writing profession. He enlisted within the Air Drive, which despatched him to South Korea as a meteorologist; he later stated most of his time was spent fencing black-market toiletries.
After his discharge in 1957, he returned to Richmond, the place he enrolled within the Richmond Skilled Institute (now Virginia Commonwealth College) and developed an area popularity as a coffeehouse poet.
He additionally labored as a replica editor for The Richmond Instances-Dispatch, a job he continued after graduating with a level in journalism in 1959.
However he chafed below the restrictions of Jim Crow-era Richmond, together with a prohibition on the newspaper towards printing images of Black folks — a transgression he nonetheless dedicated a number of instances.
Finally, all of it acquired to be an excessive amount of, and he moved to what appeared just like the farthest level from Richmond within the Decrease 48 states: Seattle.
He entered a graduate program in Far East research on the College of Washington and went to work at The Seattle Instances, first as an editor after which as an artwork critic. He additionally hosted a bohemian-inflected radio present known as “Notes From the Underground.”
In 1963 he ingested 300 micrograms of pharmaceutical-grade lysergic acid diethylamide — his first LSD journey. It was, he stated, life altering and life affirming. He stop his job to write down freelance for underground newspapers.
He developed an area popularity as an offbeat author, however it wasn’t till 1967, when he reviewed a live performance by the Doorways, that he discovered his fashion, impressed by the liberating otherworldliness of Jim Morrison and his band. He moved to La Conner and started to write down a novel.
After publishing “One other Roadside Attraction” in 1971, he settled right into a tempo of a few guide each 5 years, writing eight novels, a narrative assortment, a novella and, most just lately, a memoir, “Tibetan Peach Pie: A True Account of an Imaginative Life” (2014).
Most of his novels had been optioned by Hollywood, despite the fact that Mr. Robbins thought of them largely unfilmable. He was proved proper when the director Gus Van Sant launched his model of “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues” in 1993; The Instances, amongst others, dismissed it as “tortured” and “labored over.”
Mr. Robbins’ first three marriages resulted in divorce. He married Alexa D’Avalon, a psychic, in 1994. Alongside along with his son, from a earlier marriage, she survives him, as do two different sons, additionally from his earlier marriages, Rip and Kirk; and a grandson.
One of many keys to his lasting success with followers was the identical factor that irked lots of his critics: At the same time as he (they usually) aged, he retained the identical philosophical goofiness that outlined his earliest writing — although he resisted calling it irreverence.
“I’m extraordinarily reverent; it simply relies upon what I’m taking a look at,” he informed The Instances in 2014. “From the skin, my life might look chaotic, however inside I really feel like some type of monk licking an ice cream cone whereas straddling a runaway horse.”