When You’re in Cognito, Baby…
By Breanne Boland July 3, 2003 Issue

The enthusiasm and adventurousness of this book, combined with the rambling feeling that no one but Tom Robbins knows exactly where the book is going make up for Villa Incognito’s occasional shortcomings.

Its 241 pages aren’t filled with simple lines between A and B and C. The story can’t be summarized as “This happens to who when this happens.” In fact, it’s difficult to summarize it at all. To fully describe the plot would take a few minutes, and would likely conclude with, “Aaah, you’ll have to read it yourself.”

The story begins with Tanuki, an Animal Ancestor, which means he’s a sort of badger, but can talk and think. He spends his days seducing the lovely ladies of post-feudal Japan. He impregnates a farmer’s daughter, and they set up house in a cave. When Tanuki and the woman break up, she flees with their daughter.

Cut to approximately 70 years later, when the Vietnam War is in full swing, and three intellectual smart-alecks are assimilated into a Lao (not Laotian, as Robbins explains thoroughly) village, and with the aid of a repaired Korean helicopter, they capitalize on the opium trade. Enter Madame Ko, badger trainer extraordinaire…

Aaah. Describing the rest would take paragraphs and paragraphs—not even the book flap attempts it. Suffice it to say that the following 200 pages contain circus performers on the lam, opium for the power of good, dim-witted idiosyncratic sisters, puns, chrysanthemums, politics, and forays to Seattle, North Carolina, Bangkok, Kyoto, and the mountains of Laos.

Much of Incognito’s time is spent in Laos and Thailand, and it is when the book embraces the lush, humid feel of the setting that it is at its best. The book starts with a tale that reads like an Asian folk story, its edges (and accuracy) worn down by time and retellings. Later sections of the book, which take place in the 1970s and in present day, also have an immortal, sprawling feel to them. The Vietnam War is a specific recent event, but it is large and far-reaching enough that references to it don’t have the same jarring effect as those to Britney Spears and Johnnie Cochran.

The prose is ornate, but also hit and miss. A beautiful passage comparing novelty’s inevitable lost luster to the reliable conversion of uranium to lead will make you gasp in pleasant surprise. But a remark that one night was so black not even Michael Jackson’s plastic surgeon could lighten it will make you sigh as you are yanked from the story and reminded that despite the story spanning more than a hundred years, Robbins is writing now, that’s right, now.

He also seems too entertained by the preciousness he creates, at least in parts of the book. Two lesser characters, sisters in Seattle tangentially involved in the story at best, are defined only by one thinking seasonal changes are cute, and the other thinking clowns are sexy. Should you forget which sister is which, fear not; Robbins will remind you every time you see them.

But sometimes his overwriting works and adds to the feeling that anything could happen. Like some of the characters, intellectual but sometimes pretentious MIAs of Vietnam with a tendency toward soliloquy, Robbins’s sprawling paragraphs sometimes yield gems of ideas and observations, but other times, they cause the reader to want to yell “digression!” The sections where he talks aimlessly about cities or mayonnaise can be tiring, but most of them make the story fuller and more believable, and the good ones make the dull ones worth it.

In the end, Villa Incognito is like a well-constructed drunken yarn. It is disjointed and scattered, but never boring. The end isn’t readily apparent at the beginning, or the middle or the beginning of the end, for that matter, but the journey is interesting enough that, like any good road trip, getting there is most of the fun. (Top)

Bantam Dell, 241 pp, available at local book retailers and libraries.

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