The Adaptable Educator’s Book Review – Skinny Legs and All by Tom Robbins

Tom Robbins’ Skinny Legs and All reads like a party thrown by a philosopher with a taste for slapstick and haute cuisine — simultaneously exuberant and argumentative, mischievous and serious. The author is less interested in plotting than in setting ideas loose: the novel delights in collisions — between high and low culture, sacred and profane, the corporeal and the metaphysical — and in watching what happens when those collisions yield sparks.

At its best the book functions as a satirical kaleidoscope. Robbins deploys his trademark lyric irreverence — puns, associative riffs, and sudden metaphysical detours — to interrogate larger contemporary preoccupations: commodification (of art, bodies, spirituality), the commodified self, the hunger for authenticity, and how narrative itself comforts us against an indifferent cosmos. Rather than offer tidy answers, he stages conversations: among strangers, between humans and objects, and across the boundary of authorial voice. Those conversations are where the novel’s intelligence shows — playful, humane, and mildly prophetic about late-20th-century consumer culture.

Stylistically, Robbins is at once showman and stylist. His sentences coil and uncurl with deliberate theatricality; a paragraph will sprint into a comic list and then swerve into a serious axiom about loneliness or love. The effect can be intoxicating; it also risks excess. For many readers, his verbal pyrotechnics are the point — they animate the book’s moral seriousness by refusing solemnity — but for others the digressions can feel like deliberate obfuscations that distract from emotional focus. This tension — between rhetorical bravura and narrative centripetal force — is the engine of the novel: it keeps meaning mobile.

Thematically, the novel is preoccupied with appetite in its many guises. Food, sex, fame, art — Robbins frames these as forms of hunger and proposes—often slyly—that satiation is a misunderstanding of desire. Art is repeatedly cast as both nourishment and provocation: it sustains, agitates, and resists full assimilation into capitalist logic. Likewise, it treats religion and ritual with a mixture of affection and satire. He sees ritual as an attempt to make life meaningful; he refuses, however, any fixed metaphysical consolation, insisting instead on play, curiosity, and ethical attentiveness as our practical alternatives.

Gender and sexuality receive Robbins’ characteristic blend of frankness and comic inversion. He refuses easy binaries and delights in sexual politics that unsettle received moralizing. At times this provocation feels liberating; at others, under-examined jokes or archetypal portrayals can date the novel’s feminist credentials. Read now, three decades after publication, parts of the book both sparkle and jar — which is itself instructive: The author is so committed to the presentness of the moment that he rarely polishes his observations for posterity.

Critically, Skinny Legs and All is less a novel that aspires to classicism than one that models a particular ethic: curiosity as resistance. Robbins offers humour as a mode of seriousness, an insistence that lucidity and delight need not be opposed. The book’s refusal to settle — its movement from anecdote to aphorism, from slapstick to sermon — enacts the very restlessness it diagnoses in western culture.

Who should read it? Lovers of linguistic bravura and philosophical misrule will find it irresistible. Those seeking tight plotting or understated restraint may be vexed. But judged on its own terms — as a satirical, humane, and sometimes maddening meditation on desire, art, and the ethics of living in a commodified age — Skinny Legs and All succeeds: it makes you laugh, it makes you think, and, in that felicitous Robbinsian way, it makes you feel that laughter and thought are not opposites but allies.