Ms.pegasus's Reviews > Even Cowgirls Get the Blues

Robbins' paean of cheeky irreverance was published in 1976. There are not so veiled references to Nixon, Gerald Ford, hippy communes, LSD, and the Hare Krishnas. That said, the issues are still familiar: gender inequality, political hypocrisy, repression of non-conformity, to name just a few.

Robbins skewers feminity; extols Feminism. His protagonist, Sissy, has one extraordinary aberration. Her thumbs are huge. Mama frets. How will Sissy find a husband with such an abnormality? Sissy adapts. She cultivates a unique gift — for hitchhiking (of course!). In New York she works as a model for (literally) a douche magnate; in South Dakota she meets the cowgirls of the Rubber Rose Ranch. The ranch begins as a beauty spa. It's manager Miss Adrian confides: “'What really sets us apart, however, from the Maine Chance and all other spas is our program of intimate conditioning....When a woman comes to a beauty spa, she does so to make herself sexually attractive to men....[O]ur client is a mateless bird in need of preening.'” (p.119) A cowgirl revolt will put an end to all of that.

In one of his most successful riffs, Robbins casts the Pentagon, Petroleum and the President as an unholy alliance secretly anticipating the demise of the whooping crane while pretending to champion its protection. It's a P.R. ploy designed to blame the cowgirls, destroy their resistance, and insulate the President from blame.

Robbins rants against equating the conventional and the normal. Sissy's husband Julian insists Sissy view her thumbs as a deformity. She must strive toward normality rather than adapt. A character named Dr. Robbin (a.k.a. The Author) contends: “'Normality is the Great Neurosis of civilization. It's rare to discover someone who hasn't been infected, to greater or lesser degree, by that neurosis....I believe Sissy should be protected from normality. Freed from the center and left to return to the edge. Out there, she's valuable. In here, she's just another disturbing noise in the zoo.'” (p.242)

Another convention Robbins questions is the lockstep tyranny of time: schedules, day planners, clocks and calendars arbitrarily dictate an unexamined notion of “progress.” His argument is literary as well as literal. He effects unheralded time shifts in his narrative and inserts non sequitur whimsies (e.g. an argument between the thumb and the brain).

Robbins aims his barbs at a culture of mediocrity as well. He dismisses Sissy's extravagant thumbing technique at one point: “It was flashy but there was no real joy in it, no substance or spontaneity. It was what is known as a virtuoso performance. It lacked soul.” (p.88) Later, he compares a featureless landscape to a “style identical to that of rural weekly newspapers throughout the middle of the nation: blandness in such high concentration as to become finally poisonous.” (p.216)

Robbins is a brilliant writer, but he pours his efforts into a chaparral of clever one-liners, mischievous puns, and syntactic acrobatics. (Who can resist a line like: “the gunfight at the I'm OK/You're OK Corral” to describe the confrontation between Dr. Robbins and the censorious Dr. Goldman?) As a novel, this book never coheres. I never cared about any of the characters. The one question of substance that he poses — the contradiction between freedom and happiness — is never explored.

Over 40 years have gone by since Robbins wrote this book. His incendiary libertarianism feels self-indulgent. The raunchy sex scenes are distractions. His manichaean mythology of the Paternalistic vs. the Feminine? Please. The System with a capital “S”? These are anachronisms that stuck out like, well, sore thumbs. Dr. Robbins exhorts his patients: “'Don't be outraged, be outrageous!'” (p.173) We have become too connected to each other to rally behind this battle cry for individuality. Retreat to a commune or a cave is not feasible.

I read this book because it was the selection of a local book club. I slogged through it, pausing frequently to lament the number of pages remaining to be read. At the end of it all, I felt like many precious hours had been stolen from my life. Not something I'd recommend to anyone.