FICTION
‘Tibetan Peach Pie’
By Tom Robbins
Ecco/HarperCollins, $28, 384 pages
In his classic comic novel “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues,” Tom Robbins dispenses an offhand aside about the quest of a lifetime. A wandering gourmand sells everything he owns and sets out for a remote monastery of lamas in the Himalayas — just to sample a dish he’s long dreamed about, Tibetan peach pie. But when the exhausted foodie finally arrives, the lamas inform him that they’re all out of peaches.
“Okay,” he says, “make it apple.”
Robbins alludes to the story in the introduction to his new memoir, “Tibetan Peach Pie,” calling it “a sort of parable about the wisdom of always aiming for the stars, and the greater wisdom of cheerfully accepting failure if you only reach the moon.”
Oddly enough, he demurs on including the full pie anecdote in the book bearing its name, suggesting readers either find it in the earlier novel or write him for a complete retelling. It’s a peculiar instance of reserve from an author whose excesses roam freely in his 10 seriocomic best-sellers and also in the latest nonfiction work, dubbed “a true account of an imaginative life.” The pie-in-the-sky story, though, perfectly complements this revelatory chronicle of a personality driven by insatiable appetites.
“This is not an autobiography,” Robbins protests from the start, noting that he’s made efforts to avoid autobiographical details in his novels, “wishing neither to shortchange imagination nor use up my life in literature.” Despite the semantics, these recollections make it clear that the artist’s personal history isn’t so far removed from his creations. He marshals readers through one charming tall tale after another: episodes involving romantic rattlesnakes, reclusive Appalachian midgets and suggestions of divine intervention.
Born in 1932 in Blowing Rock, N.C., a place where the snow falls upside down (due to a geological oddity), the author owns up to a Southern oral tradition inspired by “bib-overalled raconteurs, many of who spun stories as effortlessly … as they spit tobacco juice.” By age 5, the precocious prodigy, affectionately dubbed “Tommy Rotten” by his folks, announces his intentions to become a writer. He takes to reciting fictional yarns while beating the yard with his “talking stick.” “That could explain why … I’ve always paid special attention to the rhythm of my sentences,” he says, “realizing instinctually that people read with their ears as well as their eyes.”
Young Tommy Rotten develops a fascination with Tarzan films and sideshow freaks, joining “that exclusive order of men who believe a woman in pink circus tights holds all the secrets of the universe.” At age 9, he briefly joins a traveling circus.
The chapters in “Tibetan Peach Pie” are structured thematically (concerning topics as random as Halloween pranks, ill-advised gin concoctions and religious fervor) but proceed more or less chronologically. We follow Tommy Rotten as he blossoms into a cultural omnivore and restless free spirit, the kind of kid who’ll rush back into a burning dormitory to rescue a suitcase of Dominican rum.
It’s slightly jarring when the teller of these bawdy incidents of afternoon adultery and psychedelic trips on magic mushrooms pauses to remind readers that he’s now an octogenarian. Robbins shows his age with a few rambling recollections early in the book and a weakness for corny one-liners. Still, the authorial artistry manifests when he uses even the most lightweight of scenes to connect the dots on the memoir’s greater themes, the pervasive search for faith and meaning. Taking cues from a mishmash of Eastern sages, Robbins comes to see life as a “beautiful joke that is always happening.” He quotes Indian mystic Ramakrishna, who achieved enlightenment and affirmed that “what Nirvana most closely resembled was laughter.”
Like any good tell-all, the concoction delivers a few juicy celebrity cameos. His stint at Washington and Lee University brings in future televangelist Pat Robertson and encounters with a young dandy named Tom Wolfe.
After finding work as an art critic in Seattle, Robbins rubs elbows with Shelley Duvall and Timothy Leary, and shares an odd moment with “Dear Abby” herself, Abigail Van Buren. The transition from newspaper columnist to novelist perhaps doesn’t receive the prominence that die-hard fans might crave, though one funny chapter relates how “Still Life with Woodpecker” led to a run-in with the FBI.
Speckled with larger-than-life characters and slapstick scenes almost too zany to be believed, “Tibetan Peach Pie” goes down much like a Tom Robbins novel. His laugh-out-loud one-liners, and talent for off-color metaphors all work to garnish a thoughtful contemplation on the liminal spaces between the holy and the profane.
In one of the book’s most finely crafted passages, Robbins experiences a startling moment of transcendence while driving through a blizzard. Creeping along in zero-visibility conditions, he spots a large, glowing circle ahead — and then suddenly understands “the unbroken circle of life, the continuity of consciousness, the mysterious flower of the soul.” The source of this ephemeral eureka? A billboard featuring a giant neon golf ball.
If nirvana really is laughter, then kudos to Tommy Rotten, thy kingdom has come.
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