Myths in Tom Robbins’s Another Roadside Attraction

Questioning Myths in Tom Robbins’s Another Roadside Attraction

Tom Robbins’s controversial first novel, Another Roadside Attraction, epitomizes the declination of religious devotion, especially Catholicism, in America during the 1960s. Influences on Robbins while conceiving this novel include the early history of Christianity, eastern religion, and author Joseph Campbell. Campbell is famous for his massive and detailed comparisons of Western and Eastern spirituality, myth, and belief. Additionally, the experimentation with psychedelic drugs such as LSD and psilocybin mushrooms led Robbins to new perspectives and mind expansion and consequently to question the validity of Christianity and the divinity of Jesus Christ. Robbins was intrigued by the extent to which Western Civilization—from its cultural myths to individual behavior—was predicted on the divinity of Christ. He wanted to explore questions and possible answers about what would happen if American Christians learned conclusively that Christ was not divine; questions such as, "What would this say about Western Civilization, about the future of Western Civilization? Could we continue to lead moral and ethical lives if Christ was proved to have died and stayed dead?" (Whitmer 245). This premise, conceived while writing art reviews for the Seattle Times, led Robbins to speculate about the consequences of world religion if the corpse of Jesus Christ was unearthed. When he approached Luther Nichols, west coast editor of Doubleday Books in 1968 with the concept for Another Roadside Attraction, Nichols bought the idea and Robbins was off and running on his first piece of fiction (Hoyser 9-12).

While Robbins’s work was at first ill received, by the mid-1970s the public had started to warm up to this quirky and thought provoking writer. Even today, his work invites inquiry about what prompted him to write this controversial novel. That is, who and what influenced this line of thought? What was happening in America and with Christianity during the period, in which he wrote and researched this piece of fiction? And, finally, why did he write in this sporadic, nonlinear fashion, inserting seemingly non-related details and encrypting an official report within the structure of a novel? And how does this relate to the influences mentioned above? All of these questions and more offer themselves up from the pages of this funny and whimsical, yet philosophical and wise novel, Another Roadside Attraction.

Robbins began penning his first novel in 1968 while working for the Seattle Post-Intelligencer. Before that he held many journalistic jobs and had a varied and colorful education.