Even in one dimension, the point is ‘Incognito’

“Still Life With Woodpecker.” “Another Roadside Attraction.” “Even Cowgirls Get the Blues.” Tom Robbins’ novels have been captivating readers for decades with their wonderfully wacky story lines undergirded with an easygoing Zen-like philosophy, stories that add up to not so much a resolution or an answer, but a kind of meditation on life. Robbins’ work regularly peers into the nature of divine existence and how it is manifest in this world, his writing resplendent with metaphorical language and linguistic pyrotechnics, his plots downright weird. Robbins’ books are just the ticket when lying on a beach, pondering the temperament of the universe, the way all things, both organic and inorganic, seem sentient.

But things seem too familiar in his latest work. Laced with Robbins’ lively analogies and riotous descriptions, “Villa Incognito” is ultimately a rehashing of the philosophical terrain the author has previously covered. It’s been said that writers have only one story to tell and that they find ways to tell that story endlessly. If so, Robbins may have wrung his tale dry.

The premise is characteristically oddball. The first chapter opens with a badger-like creature, known as Tanuki, sailing from the “World of Animal Ancestors” into this realm, in search of sake and young pretties. Tanuki has rambunctious sex with every young woman who’s willing and manages to impregnate quite a few. A trickster figure derived from Japanese folklore, Tanuki comes and goes throughout the narrative and is to be considered, Robbins tells us, like God.

“As anybody who knows anything about the Unknowable well knows, ‘God’ and ‘gods’ are interchangeable. The exclusive patriarchal Jehovah/Allah freaks are not incorrect when they insist that there is but one Supreme Being and that ‘he’ is immutable and absolute. However, neither are the wide-eyed inclusive pagans and primitives wrong when they recognize gods of fire alongside gods of rivers.... Thus, if the reader is wise enough not to try to impose human limitations or narrow notions of uniformity on the Divine Principle, is nimble-minded enough to realize that he or she can be (perhaps should be!) simultaneously monotheistic and pantheistic, then he or she will have scant problem in accepting the paradoxical essence of our small friend, Tanuki of the tanukis.”

We meet a cast of eccentric characters: There’s Lisa Ko, a young woman who trains tanukis for the circus and may have tanuki blood running in her veins. (The great-granddaughter, perhaps, of Tanuki?) There’s Tanuki’s buddy Kitsune, the wise fox who serves as a go-between with the World of Animal Ancestors and this world, as well as Lisa Ko’s cohorts, a trio of MIAs who went missing during the Vietnam War and have since established a new life in Laos at the Villa Incognito where they refine heroin and smuggle drugs. The MIAs prefer to stay missing. “If they brought us to the Rose Garden to pin medals on us,” one of them suggests, “we could suddenly jump on the President and bite off his ears.”

The slapstick narrative is peppered to the point of inducing sneezing fits with its authorial or character-driven philosophical rants. One MIA, for example, maintains a group of concubines to whom he regularly expounds about the temperament of the soul, animism and religion. It’s as if the characters are little more than mouthpieces for the author and the conventions of plot are simply a foil so that Robbins can jam-pack the tale with his views on life, tossing in puns and jokes every now and again for good measure. (MIA Dickie, he writes, had “taken to Lao village life like a duct to tape.”) Readers are not asked to enter the tale in any meaningful way, as much as to listen to the lectures and laugh at the jokes.

Robbins’ ensemble of characters never rises from its one-dimensional outline. The reader is given little incentive to take them sincerely as they meander through the unfocused plot. Robbins might tell us these are good things: Uncertainty is to be embraced, to be celebrated as the novelty that makes life interesting. No character or predicament should ever be taken seriously. Identity, Robbins says, is illusory, and should never be taken at face value.

Eschewing earnestness and embracing novelty may make for a splendid philosophy in life. It certainly was enough to launch Robbins’ career and to fuel quite a few engaging books. But after wringing all he can from that premise, there doesn’t seem to be enough substance left over to sustain an interesting visit to the “Villa Incognito.”