** EVEN COWGIRLS GET THE BLUES
Sissy Hankshaw, born with oversize and decidedly phallic thumbs that inspire her to become a compulsive and virtuoso hitchhiker, never stopping anywhere long enough to pitch a tent, works occasionally as a model for a decadent New York queen known as the Countess, who uses her in feminine-hygiene-spray ads. He wants her to appear in a commercial featuring a flock of whooping cranes that periodically migrate through his dude ranch and beauty salon, the Rubber Ranch, and he sends her there, not realizing that the cowgirls running the place are on the verge of seizing it and turning it into a radical feminist collective with a different set of priorities.
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This is the central premise of Tom Robbins’s 1976 hippie novel, though it hardly begins to describe its proliferating characters and issues. For starters, there’s a Mr. Natural sort of guru hiding out in the mountains overlooking the Rubber Ranch–a Japanese American known as the Chink, who periodically has sex with one of the cowgirls, Bonanza Jellybean, and eventually impregnates Sissy, and who maintains a Rube Goldberg sort of timepiece that was bestowed on him by a group of renegade Indians known as the Clock People. There’s also a tender affair that develops between Sissy and Jellybean, not to mention a lot of interest on the part of the federal government in the fate of the whooping cranes, which are periodically fed peyote by another one of the renegade cowgirls, Delores Del Ruby. And there’s an Indian watercolorist named Julian living in New York with whom Sissy has an affair before she heads out west.
Moreover, Robbins’s exuberant, knowledgeable digressions and all-around playful prose, both functions of his bantering white-southern jive, aren’t really suitable for replay to the degree that, say, Thomas Pynchon’s are, because they don’t involve the same sort of formal and conceptual design. The book’s delights are relatively local and momentary–closer to imaginative stand-up routines than to lasting myths or visions. This doesn’t necessarily make them less enjoyable–the novel is still a lively read–but it does make them seem more arch on second reading.
