The Sacred Nothing

By: Jordan Tappis | Photography By Ulf Andersen | August 05, 2009 | Fiction In Print Lifestyle Profile

Tom Robbins may be the coolest living writer. Since bursting onto the American literary scene in 1971, Robbins has maintained one of the most unconventional and imaginative minds in popular culture. For nearly four decades, his 10 wildly abstract novels, which include favorites Even Cowgirls Get The Blues, Skinny Legs and All, Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates and his acclaimed 2009 release, B Is for Beer, have challenged everything from politics and religion to sexuality and consumerism by tapping into a now-famous writing style that is as heavily influenced by Eastern philosophy and astronomy as it is with Robbins’ private life in Puget Sound.

With a propensity to satirize almost all social taboos (bestiality, anyone?), Robbins, a 70-something-year-old case study in human contradiction, continues toying with the absurdity of modern civilization’s conservative social structure. Adult men normally get in trouble if they flaunt an obsession with underage women. Tom Robbins, like his musical equivalent Leonard Cohen, is celebrated for it. Perhaps this cultural exception is partly due to Robbins’ equal fascination with older women. And while Robbins’ personal life may have quieted down over the past few years, consider this: As we waited — and waited — for the notoriously adventurous writer to set up the interview you are about to read, we began to get nervous about our deadline. That is, until we received the following letter from his assistant:



















You’re latest novel B Is for Beer tells the story of a six-year-old girl with an itchy curiosity. What inspired you to write a novel disguised as a children’s book whose plot revolves around a little girl’s fascination with beer?
Actually, I wouldn’t say that B Is for Beer is “disguised” as a children’s book. Definitely neither a parody nor a satire, it’s intended equally for both young and old. I suppose it could be classified as a “hybrid.” (Considering current governmental enthusiasm for hybrids, do you think I might qualify for a tax credit?) As for specific inspiration, I must point to a New Yorker cartoon in which a martini-sipping publishing executive is saying to a down-and-out writer in a bar, “I doubt that a children’s book about beer would sell.” It was a joke but for better or for worse, I took it as a challenge. It has sold very well, by the way.

B Is for Beer was published through Ecco. For you, what does it mean to be published by the same house that released seminal works from writers like Charles Bukowski and Leonard Cohen?
Leonard Cohen, the Zen bon vivant and poetic genius, is among the two or three living persons I most admire, so it’s a prime-time honor to be marching under the same flag as he. Long may it wave.

What inspired you as a young author and what drives you to continue writing today?
I’ve been blessed — or cursed — with curiosity, imagination and a love of language for as long as I can remember. I suppose a life of writing fiction was the inevitable result. After 10 books, I still feel a compulsion to twine ideas and images into big subversive pretzels of life, death and goofiness on the chance that they might help keep the world lively and give it the flexibility to endure.

Your main characters often poke fun/make light of the world’s great issues like war, politics, sex, religion, etc. Do you have a fundamental beef with seriousness?
I would contend that intelligent, creative, fearless humor is very serious, indeed. It’s both a form of wisdom and a means of survival. A comic sensibility can open doors in consciousness that are closed to the sober and prudent, and in my own way I’m as serious as any Russian playwright. We might as well laugh at the universe because it sure as heck is laughing at us.

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