Most reviews I found on the Internet were about the movie instead of the book (which was almost universally panned, by the way; why anyone would try to make this book into a movie is beyond me, with Pat Morita as the Chink for crying out loud), but those that were about the book started out by saying the book was about Sissy Hankshaw, a girl born with obnoxiously big thumbs that carried her into the hitchhiking hall of fame.
I’m sorry. This book is no more about Sissy Hankshaw and her thumbs than Moby-Dick is about Ishmael and the restlessness that takes him to the sea. Even Cowgirls Get the Blues is a book about looking at life in a way different than society has demanded, life not measured out in days and years but life not measured at all, life experienced for what it has to offer rather than regimented to fit some false construction. That’s what the book is about and that’s interesting, but, sadly, too much of Sissy and her big thumbs get in the way of enjoying that.
A Book of Sentences
I think what I liked best about it was the freedom with which it was written, both in terms of structure and narrative voice. Robbins appears as both a character in and the omniscient narrator of the story. And in this regard he takes omniscience to a new level, frequently commenting on not just the elements of the story, but on elements on the story’s construction. After all…
A book no more contains reality than a clock contains time. A book may measure so-called reality as a clock measures so-called time; a book may create an illusion of reality as a clock creates an illusion of time; a book may be real, just as a clock is real (both more real, perhaps, than those ideas to which they allude); but let’s not kid ourselves -- all a clock contains is wheels and springs and all a book contains is sentences.
Happily, your author is not under contract to any of the muses who supply the reputable writers, and thus he has access to a considerable variety of sentences to spread and stretch from margin to margin as he relates the stories of our Thumbelina, of the ranch a douche bag built and -- O my children, cock your ears to this! -- of the clockworks and its Chink. For example:
This sentence is made of lead (and a sentence of lead gives a reader an entirely different sensation from one made of magnesium). This sentence is made of yak wool. This sentence is made of sunlight and plums.
Robbins makes a hard point here, telegraphing without question that he plans to deconstruct “the novel” right in front of our eyes. But then, sadly, he goes on and on for almost an entire page with “sentence” after “sentence.”
This sentence is made of ice. This sentence is made from the blood of a poet. This sentence was made in Japan. This sentence glows in the dark. This sentence was born with a caul.
We get it, Tom. All you’re doing by adding sentence after sentence like this is turning your treatise into a farce.
The Infinite in the Finite
But maybe that’s your intention. On the positive side, like the aforementioned Moby-Dick, Robbins is attempting to do something quite profound.
“Hitchhiking, schmitchhiking. Don’t you see that it doesn’t matter what activity Sissy chose? It doesn’t matter what activity anyone chooses. If you take any activity, any art, any discipline, any skill, take it and push it as far as it will go, push it beyond where it has ever been before, push it to the wildest edge of edges, then you force it into the realm of magic. And it doesn’t matter what it is that you select, because when it has been pushed far enough it contains everything else. I’m not talking about specialization. To specialize is to brush one tooth. When a person specializes he channels all of his energies through one narrow conduit; he knows one thing extremely well and is ignorant of almost everything else. That’s not it. That’s tame and insular and severely limiting. I’m talking about taking one thing, however trivial and mundane, to such extremes that you illuminate its relationship to all other things, and then taking it a little bit further -- to that point of cosmic impact where it becomes all other things.”
Like Melville, Robbins is looking for (and finding) the infinite in the finite. For Melville it was the whale, sliced and diced throughout in the novel to reveal the profound in all of its anatomies, allusions, and allegories. For Robbins, it is, evidently, hitchhiking -- or maybe more precisely, Sissy Hankshaw’s enormous thumbs.
Meanwhile, she took refreshed delight in the old thumb, the monstrous left one, the one that broke the bank at Monte Weirdo. Sissy oiled it and perfumed it, sunned it and fanned it, flexed it and rotated it, made awful ovoid shadows with it on ceilings and walls, aimed it at stars and planets, let it splash in the tub, rolled it over her erogenous zones, flashed it at imaginary speeders on the Highways of the Heart and talked over old times with it. It was like a second honeymoon. The only occasion when the reconciled appendage failed to thrill and cheer her was when she thought of it smacking skulls. Then she would shudder like the sanitation man who had to collect the garbage at Frankenstein’s castle.
Free Femininity
But unlike Melville’s whale, Robbins’s thumbs are a little less mysterious about what they are meant to represent. There are not-so-subtle clues given along his farcical path.
Every time she said it to herself, however (there before the mirror), every time she thought “Dr. Dreyfus” or “normal life,” he thumbs talked back to her in thumbtalk: tingles, throbs and itches. Until at last she knew. Accepted what she had always sensed. She had been correct when she had howled at the dance. They were not a handicap. Rather, they were an invitation, a privilege audaciously and impolitely granted, perfumed with danger and surprise, offering her greater freedom of movement, inviting her to live life at some “other” level. If she dared.
They are her innate feminine spirit, yearning to be free of the cultural constraints that would otherwise be placed upon her. They, and the hitchhiking that they enable, represent a kind of freedom (sexual and otherwise) that Robbins must feel is beaten out of most women before it can emerge. Here’s a typical scene in which Sissy’s husband Julian is frightened by the power that Sissy’s thumbs represent.
It was when Sissy announced her intentions to hitchhike to Dakota that conversation took on a tin edge, and Julian foamed and wheezed. He couldn’t understand it; he couldn’t comprehend it; he couldn’t fathom it; he couldn’t (choose your synonym). It frightened him, saddened him, drove him to the Scotch bottle and even to the medicine cabinet to fondle his nail scissors theatrically (Having no facial hair, Indians seldom own razors). He unleashed barrage after barrage of his heaviest asthmatic artillery. But Sissy stood her ground, and the next morning when the Countess phoned, Julian told him:
“She’s delighted to be of service. She’ll leave on Sunday. She’s starting early because (sob) she insists on hitchhiking. God, just when I thought she was getting over it. Those thumbs or hers, those unfortunate redundancies; they are of no significance, yet how they complicate our lives.”
In the bedroom, sorting out her old jumpsuits, Sissy overheard the complaint. Slowly, she turned her hands in the mirror, like stems, like daggers, like bottles missing labels.
They seemed the best part of her body, her thumbs. The substantial, uncomplicated part. No orifices riddled them; no hair hung from them; they secreted nothing and harbored no senses to satisfy. They contained no slimy entrails; ganglia did not adorn them; they produced nothing that might be compared with earwax, tooth decay or toe jam. They were but the sweet, the unadulterated, the thick pulp of her own life, there in smooth volume and closed form, complete.
Trembling while she did so, and blushing afterward, she kissed them. She blessed her life.
These thumbs. They had created a reality for her when only somebody else’s crippled notion of reality, some socially sanctioned parody of reality, was to be her lot.
They are, quite explicitly, her freedom, perhaps her free femininity -- and they scare the hell out of the men in her life and others who would have her be what society tells them she should be. In the idiom of the novel, the world wants Sissy to be a housewife, while Sissy wants to be a cowgirl.
“You dig me, don’t you? A little boy, he can play like he’s a fireman or a cop -- although fewer and fewer are pretending to be cops, thank God -- or a deep-sea diver or a quarterback or a spaceman or a rock ‘n roll star or a cowboy, or anything else glamorous and exciting … and although chances are by the time he’s in high school he’ll get channeled into safer, duller ambitions, the great truth is, he can be any of those things, realize any of those fantasies, if he has the strength, nerve and sincere desire. Yep, it’s true; any boy anywhere can grow up to be a cowpoke even today if he wants too bad enough. One of the top wranglers on the circuit right now was born and raised in the Bronx. Little boys may be discouraged from adventurous yearnings by parents and teachers, but their dreams are indulged, nevertheless, and the possibilities of fulfilling their childhood expectations do exist. But little girls? Podner, you know that story as well as me. Give ‘em doll babies, tea sets and toy stoves. And if they show a hankering for more bodacious playthings, call ‘em tomboy, humor ‘em for a few years and then slip ‘em the bad news. If you’ve got a girl who persists in fantasizing a more exciting future for herself than housewifery, desk-jobbing or motherhood, better hustle her off to a child psychologist. Force her to face up to reality. And the reality is, we got about as much chance of growing up to be cowgirls as Eskimos have got being vegetarians. I’ll tell you.”
Heavy-Handedness
So we’re never left uncertain about the novel’s central metaphor. Not only does Robbins pretty much hit you over the head with it, he frequently tells you that he’s hitting you over the head with it. In this regard, take note of Chapter 100.
Well, here we are at Chapter 100. This calls for a little celebration. I am an author and therefore in the same business God is in: if I say this page is a bottle of champagne, it is a bottle of champagne. Reader, will you share a cup of the bubbly with me? You prefer French to domestic? Okay, I’ll make it French. Cheers!
Here’s to the one hundredth chapter! Hundred. A cardinal number, ten times ten, the position of the third digit to the left of the decimal point, a power number signifying weight, wealth and importance. The symbol of hundred is C, which is also the symbol for the speed of light. There are a hundred pennies in a dollar, a hundred centimeters in a meter, a hundred years in a century, a hundred yards on a football field, a hundred points in a carat, a hundred ways to skin a cat and a hundred ways of cooking eggplant. There also are a hundred ways to successfully write a novel, but this is probably not one of them.
Don’t be so quick to agree. ‘Even Cowgirls Get the Blues’ can still teach you a thing or two. “For example?” you ask snottily, while helping yourself to my champagne. For example, this: on a number of occasions this book has made reference to magic, and each time you’ve shaken your head, muttering such criticisms as “What does he mean by ‘magic,’ anyhow? It’s embarrassing to find a grown man talking about magic in such a manner. How can anybody take him seriously?” Or, as slightly more gracious readers have objected, “Doesn’t the author realize that one can’t write about magic? One can create it but not discuss it. It’s much too gossamer for that. Magic can be neither described nor defined. Using words to describe magic is like using a screwdriver to slice roast beef.”
To which the author now replies, Sorry, freeloaders, you’re clever but you’re not quite correct. Magic isn’t the fuzzy, fragile, abstract and ephemeral quality you think it is. In fact, magic is distinguished from mysticism by its very concreteness and practicality. Whereas mysticism is manifest only in spiritual essence, in the transcendental state, magic demands a steady naturalistic base. Mysticism reveals the ethereal in the tangible. Magic makes something permanent out of the transitory, coaxes drama from the colloquial.
Let me interrupt here, Robbins-esque, and plant a flag. That’s a whole lot of word salad. Got any more?
All right, I’ll try to expound, if you insist. And just to prove I’m no sorehead, I’ll conjure up another magnum of Dom Perignon. Here. Say when. Mysticism is self-contained and beyond external control. Something either has a mystic emanation or it doesn’t. It is present in a single entity, animate or inanimate, where it is known to those who have faith that it is there. Mysticism implies belief in forces, influences and actions, which, though imperceptible to ordinary sense, are nevertheless real.
Magic, on the other hand, can be controlled -- by a magician. A magician is a transmitter just as a mystic is rather strictly a receiver. Just as love can be made, using materials no more ethereal than an erect penis, a moist vagina and a warm heart, so, too, can magic be made, wholly and willfully, from the most obvious and mundane. Magic does not seep from within of its own volition (or appear unannounced to someone in a state of heightened awareness); it is a matter of cause and effect. The seemingly unrealistic or supernatural (“magic”) act occurs through the acting of one thing upon another through a secret link.
The key word here is secret. When the substance of the link is revealed, the magic fades or can be counteracted by rival magicians. Thus, ‘Even Cowgirls Get the Blues’ may call your attention to some magic that results from, say, the acting of the smells of the female body upon the last surviving flock of wild whooping cranes, but it may never give away the secret link between them.
Guess not. More word salad, and I’m not even going to go into the whooping cranes. But somewhere in that salad is a tomato or two of truth -- that the author is a magician, that he can weave spells with his pen, and that if he reveals too much (does not keep it secret) the magic fades.
Hmm. The author can sense that Chapter 100 displeases you. Not only does it interrupt the story, it says too much and says it too didactically. Well, a book about a woman with sugar-sack thumbs is bound to be a bit heavy-handed.
Come on, now, that’s enough champagne. Either give me a kiss or get out of here.
That, I think, is the problem. It is heavy-handed. And instead of apologizing for that, he pretends that being heavy-handed is beside the point, that there is something magical happening here, not just despite the heavy-handedness, but perhaps, because of the heavy-handedness.
Poetry is nothing more than an intensification or illumination of common objects and everyday events until they shine with the singular nature, until we can experience their power, until we can follow their steps in the dance, until we can discern what parts they play in the Great Order of Love. How is this done? By fucking around with syntax.
Ultimately, I’m not sure I buy it. Robbins makes a good case that the infinite can always be found in the finite, but as he is actually rooting around in the finite I find myself wondering if the result is revelatory or simply masturbatory.
I just can’t tell.
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This post first appeared on Eric Lanke's blog, an association executive and author. You can contact him at eric.lanke@gmail.com.
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