It was author Tom Robbins — Another Roadside Attraction, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues — who first hinted to me that a novel can do anything. Really. Any thing. His books are funny, insightful and light on their toes. After finishing reading any of them, I understood I was reading for the journey, not the destination.
I’m sad he’s gone. I recommend him highly. It’s his fault that a bundle of letters in my first novel, “The Tabernacle Bar”, has its own consciousness.
Here’s a thing he wrote back in 1983 for Esquire magazine when asked to respond to one of his fiercest critics:
“When Still Life with Woodpecker was published, the Seattle Post-Intelligencer, a newspaper in whose turkey pen I used to toil, assigned it (not wishing to show me favoritism) to one Irene Wanner, a sensible middle-cass quicke nibbler and academic dullard. Like all those “serious critics” who’ve had their sense of wonder deadened by hours of analyzing Andrew Marvell in stuffy rooms, Wanner believes that delicately understated anguish is where it’s at in literature. Naturally, I could not expect such a mind to distinguish between what is truly serious and what is merely dour, yet I was stung when she declared, “Robbins clearly has great ability as a writer, but he is so infatuated with frivolousness…” Stop right there! Do Stop. How uncharacteristically insensitive, my dear madam, how egregiously presumptuous. I’m not infatuated with frivolousness. We’re just good friends.”
Susan Palmer's Exquisite Now 