Wild Ducks Flying Backward

INTRODUCTION

It’s six o’clock in the afternoon, approximately, give or take a tick or two, and the sun’s attention span is rapidly shrinking. The sun, we might say, should we choose to venture further down the path of anthropomorphic hyperbole, has seen quite enough of you for one day and is entertaining other options. Weary of the old ice-cream castle Judy Collins routine, clouds, too, are shifting priorities, gathering forces, adopting attitudes. By nightfall, you could be in for some rain. Perhaps freezing rain. Even snow. Obviously, we’re privy neither to your whereabouts nor your season. You’re in freaking North Dakota for all we know. November.

What we do know is that you have availed yourself of the most recent book by novelist Tom Robbins, and what we can assume, though it may be only a conceit, is that you have every intention of beginning it this evening (you couldn’t very well have begun it at work today), so if external weather conditions prove foul, so much the better. Should it pelt, should it blow, the cozy factor (almost always a boon to literary experience) will increase severalfold, thereby fertilizing the narcotic poppy of reading pleasure.

The climate indoors is another matter. Serious reading is hardly a social activity and every halfway serious reader is perpetually subject to a form of coitus interruptus. Family members or friends who lack the desire, the courage, or the opportunity to burst in on you when there’s some indication that you could be sexually entwined will seldom hesitate to interject themselves between you and a page, even though the act of reading is often as intimate and intense as a full-fledged carnal embrace. You must take steps to ensure your privacy.

It’s a Monday, so more than likely your male companion and his buddy, eager for three solid hours of beer commercials and televised football, have already commandeered the sofa. Good. That frees up the bedroom.

Or, switching genders (though not necessarily), your girlfriend’s in bed with monthly cramps, a heating pad on that sweet little tummy you so love to nuzzle, medication making her sleepy, soft rock on the radio. You suppress a smile of relief. The sofa is all yours.

Of course, if you live alone, both bed and sofa are available — you have only to choose your spot, change into something comfortable, adjust the lighting, and disconnect the phone.

No, there’s one other thing: this is a Tom Robbins tome you’re about to sit down with, and while special fortification is certainly not mandatory, it wouldn’t hurt to adjust your mental thermostat a bit. Nothing drastic. No overhaul. You know. Just rotate your tires. Yet, while a weak gin-and-tonic might go well with, say, E. M. Forster or Virginia Woolf, while a tumbler of bourbon might help you wash Faulkner down, Robbins requires a more — shall we say, exotic? — accompaniment.

Stealthily, nonchalantly, you make your way to your dresser, open your underwear drawer, dig out that bottle of anaïs nin (green label) you’ve been hoarding there. Careful! Don’t pour too much. Remember what happened that time on your birthday. Besides, ever since the revolution in Punto del Visionario the stuff has been almost impossible to find. And by the way, in case you haven’t heard, it’s been placed on the government’s list of controlled substances.

Okay. At last you’re set. You prop up your feet (we should always read with our feet up, even on the subway or a bus), and retrieve the book, feeling in your hands the weight, the newness, the bookness of it. For a brief second you close your eyes, sip your libation (Jesus! Wow! No wonder there’re two dots over the ï!), and allow yourself to wonder what Robbins is up to this time around. What strange lights on what distant mountainside have attracted his focus? Over whose campfire — gypsy? guerrilla? Girl Scout? shaman? — has he been toasting his ideas, his images, his figures of speech?

Curiosity suitably aroused, anticipation at a delicious pitch, you take in a small breath and open the book and… Whoa! Wait a damn minute. Hold on. This isn’t the new Tom Robbins novel. Oh, it’s by Robbins all right, but… You look again at the cover. The Short Writings of… It’s printed right there on the jacket. Maybe it could have been in bigger type but it isn’t as if you’ve been tricked. It’s your own fault, you should have paid closer attention. This will teach you to dash into a bookshop on your lunch hour. Wild Ducks Flying Backward is not a novel at all.

Somewhat disgruntled, you riffle the pages. Hmm? Travel articles. Riffs on various exceptional people. A short story or two. Poems. (Robbins, at any rate, calls them “poems”: your old English professor would probably shake his head and call them something else entirely.) Essays. Responses. Musings. A treatment for a movie you’d wager will never be made.

There are even a couple of examples of the author’s art criticism, included, you suppose, to demonstrate to those who might suspect otherwise that a man’s expressed preference for right-brain activity need not necessarily constitute an admission of weakness on the left. In fact, so sober and coolly cerebral is Robbins’s analysis of the painter Morris Louis that you find it difficult to believe it could have been written in the same year (1967) and by the same person (Robbins) as the overheated, rocked-out, purple-lipped paean to The Doors also contained herein. The contrast both intrigues and confounds you.

About the same time that young Tom was deconstructing modern art and eulogizing psychedelic rockers, he was deciding once and for all to move his professional residence to the land of make-believe, the land of effects as opposed to facts, the country where Style is king and Paradox and Enigma (which must hide between the lines in reportage) are granted diplomatic immunity. He began writing his first novel in 1968 and he’s made it clear that if he’s remembered, he wants it to be for his fiction. Still, for whatever reason — to meet an editor’s challenge, maybe, or to charm the groceries — the novelist has over the years made occasional forays across the inky divide into journalism. Considering the source, aren’t you at least tempted to test the results? And what about that short story, the one he calls “Moonlight Whoopee Cushion Sonata”?

You’re warm, snug, alone, loosely clothed, and the anaïs nin (green label) is working your blood like a Vegas entertainer working a room. If you don’t burrow further into this modest if unusual collection, what else can you possibly do with yourself tonight?

You don’t have to answer that.