Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates
by Tom Robbins
The fierce invalid in Tom Robbins's seventh novel is a philosophical, hedonistic U.S. operative very loosely inspired by a friend of the author. "Sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll are enormously popular in the CIA," claims Switters. "Not with all the agents in the field, but with the good ones, the brightest and the best." Switters isn't really an invalid, but during his first mission (to set free his ornery grandma's parrot, Sailor, in the Amazon jungle), he gets zapped by a spell cast by a "misshapen shaman" of the Kandakandero tribe named End of Time. The shaman is reminiscent of Carlos Castaneda's giggly guru, but his head is pyramid-shaped. In return for a mind-bending trip into cosmic truth--"the Hallways of Always"--Switters must not let his foot touch the earth, or he'll die.
Not that a little death threat can slow him down. Switters simply hops into a wheelchair and rolls off to further footloose adventures, occasionally switching to stilts. For a Robbins hero, to be just a bit high, not earthbound, facilitates enlightenment. He bops from Peru to Seattle, where he's beguiled by the Art Girls of the Pike Place Market and his 16-year-old stepsister, and then off to Syria, where he falls in with a pack of renegade nuns bearing names like Mustang Sally and Domino Thirry. Will Switters see Domino tumble and solve the mystery of the Virgin Mary? Can the nuns convince the Pope to favor birth control--to "zonk the zygotic zillions and mitigate the multitudinous milt" and "wrest free from a woman's shoulders the boa of spermatozoa?" Can the author ever resist a shameless pun or a mutant metaphor?
The tangly plot is almost beside the point. Switters is a colorful undercover agent, and a Robbins novel is really a colorful undercover essay celebrating sex and innocence, drugs and a firm wariness of anything that tries to rewire the mind, and Broadway tunes, especially "Send in the Clowns." Some readers will be intensely offended by Switters's yen for youth and idiosyncratic views on vice. But fans will feel that extremism in the pursuit of serious fun is virtue incarnate. Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates is classic Tom Robbins: all smiles, similes, and subversion. --Tim Appelo
Book Club Questions for Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates (Fiction)
Book Club Questions for Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates (for Non-Fiction)
This one of the few Tom Robbins books I haven’t read yet (btw-Jitterbug Perfume is AWESOME!) but it’s totally in line to be one of the ones read next! Especially since my best friend’s dog is named Switters!!!!
That’s the wonderful thing about books isn’t it? You get to see the world through someone else’s eyes and it’s almost as if you’ve lived another life or have seen the world from a different perspective. I’ve heard of the two books you mention, Skinny Legs and All and Another Roadside Attraction, but have not read either. Will have to take a look at them sometime.
It would be fun to have a book club discussing all of Tom Robbins books. He is wonderful. I think Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates is the funniest of all his books. My favorites are Skinny Legs and All and Another Roadside Attraction. I still haven’t read Jitterbug Perfume, but I’ve read everything else! If you haven’t read anything by him yet, you should. They are the kind of books that will give you a new perspective on life.
