While the rest of us are updating our facebook statuses...

...Stephen Wiltshire is drawing the second largest city in the world from memory.

Modern Pretension + Social Commentary = Shhh

After getting recommended Still Life with Woodpecker, the 1980's post-modern fairy tale of environmentalism and love by the American author Tom Robbins, I bought the book and promptly lost it. A shame, I know.

Luckily enough I'm a thrifter. And who carries more 90's pop-fiction than Goodwill? That's right. No one.

So I stumbled across the author's 6th novel Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas squeezed uncomfortably between an AA rulebook and an already-colored coloring book. Call it fate.

Stuffing Half Asleep into a nutshell sized synopsis could be likened to fitting stockings on an elephant. A wild African elephant that already has pants on and is tripping on Psilocybin. I'm going to come out of this review with bruises.

It's weird enough that Robbins wrote the whole thing in second person. Even stranger, Half Asleep seems to take place in the same posh scene as McInerney's Bright Lights, Big City, coincidentally another second person narrative. But I'm not trying to knock Robbin's originality, he makes up for the lacking setting with an imagination par with J.K. Toole and situations so fantastical all you can do is put down the book and give an incredulous laugh at the ceiling. Christian monkeys, aliens, and tribal legends plague the reader through a "Weekend from Hell," and there's nothing to do but scoff.

Though, perusing the reviews, I see that's all anyone can pay attention to. The plot that borders ridiculous, and Robbins's "inventive" (People), "fuel-injected" (USA Today) prose. When is cynical and contradictory bantering going to stop gaining respect? I'm no novelist, but if you want to be a bestseller praised for your edge and controversy, I've got the formula right here:

Two parts female objectification
One part unoriginal, blatant, racial tension
Three parts unbelievable and profane anecdote (for the left over two-hundred pages)
and One part witty word play

Write an entire book on a Vonnegut side story and throw in some semicolons; you've got yourself a Tom Robbins novel.

But I can't vent my arrogant dislike of two dimensional commentary on Robbins, he took me for a pretty damn exciting ride through places I've never seen. It's not his fault if I don't want to see them again.

6 out of 9