She also grows into a beautiful woman, and is drafted into occasional modeling work by the Countess, a male homosexual feminine-hygiene tycoon. After she runs away from her oafish parents at the age of seventeen, she becomes an underground legend, her hitchhiking exploits spoken of throughout the land. But, apparently heeding the call of her own physiological destiny, she develops a love of hitchhiking. Her thumbs are so impossibly large that she is impaired from performing mundane tasks such as buttoning her dress. It also distances us from the characters, who often seem to be arbitrary constructions of the author’s mind, every bit as much as the novel’s ideas.Įven Cowgirls Get the Blues follows the life of Sissy Hankshaw, a Richmond Virginia girl born with unusually large thumbs. This self-consciousness is a distancing mechanism that serves as a disclaimer to the many philosophical ideas presented in this book. Its self-consciousness, best seen in Robbins’ recurring statements of what “the author” does or doesn’t know, serves Robbins as a means of humanizing his author and assuring us of the author’s lack of omniscience. Tom Robbins’ Even Cowgirls Get the Blues is a self-conscious novel-a novel that knows it is a novel, and reminds you of this fact at every opportunity.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |