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Tom Robbins has a talent for witty prose that borders on the obscenely poetic. His cockamamie imagery will make you simultaneously chuckle and cringe with nervous excitement as you realize life is actually as upside-down as he portrays it in fiction.
In Jitterbug Perfume, he reduces the world to its basic essences -- sex, smells, selfishness -- and does so through characters who are caricatures of ourselves: caricatures because they will say what our hormone-saturated body parts long to say and ask what our higher-order neurons long to ask. He distills human nature down to its reptilian, mammalian, and floral ingredients and stimulates philosophical thought
by giving us a whiff of the the exact makeup of the intense eau de vivre that we humans subconsciously secrete from our mental pores. Robbins' literary style is not for everyone, but that's not to say that his books won't set neurons firing and hormones racing in one direction or another, no matter whom they might belong to.
Review by Chris
