But then he really doesn’t look to be into his forties: dressed in fluorescent green track shoes, blue jeans and faded work shirt, he is slim, well-proportioned and just a few inches and ten pounds over the category of “slight.” He has an immediately likable, diffident air that persists even with friends a sense that he’s always a touch puzzled by his surroundings-even though it soon grows clear that he knows exactly what’s going on and just what he wants to have to do with it. The first is that Robbins-consummate counterculture novelist-is at least a couple of decades older than his hard-core following. There are two immediate surprises in our meeting. WE MEET IN SAN FRANCISCO AND DRIVE OVER THE GOLDEN Gate Bridge to see a little-known, found art/curiosa headquarters in Mill Valley: an ideal Robbins’ oddity dubbed the Unknown Museum that features, among numerous bizarre attractions, an automobile entirely encrusted with sequins. But even so, Robbins remains a relatively mysterious figure rumors abound among his fans as to his lifestyle and whereabouts, and it took considerable arm-twisting simply to coax him out of his Washington state retreat to do a handful of interviews and appearances for Cowgirls. Not, in all, a bad track record for a novelist whose previous fiction experience was limited to childhood fantasies and one first place win in an Air Force short story contest. And it has also suggested a new way to reach that audience: an object lesson couched in solid sales figures that could help change the nature of American fiction publishing. Robbins’ second book, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, has found a similarly appreciative audience. His first book, Another Roadside Attraction, became, with almost no publicity, an underground classic among a generation not terribly inclined toward the novel form in the first place-perhaps because, in many ways, ARA is the quintessential counterculture novel. Tom Robbins has already managed two remarkable feats during his brief career as a novelist.
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