The fierce invalid in Tom Robbins's seventh novel is a philosophical, hedonistic U.S. operative very loosely inspired by a friend of the author. "Sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll are enormously popular in the CIA," claims Switters. "Not with all the agents in the field, but with the good ones, the brightest and the best." Switters isn't really an invalid, but during his first mission (to set free his ornery grandma's parrot, Sailor, in the Amazon jungle), he gets zapped by a spell cast by a "misshapen shaman" of the Kandakandero tribe named End of Time. The shaman is reminiscent of Carlos Castaneda's giggly guru, but his head is pyramid-shaped. In return for a mind-bending trip into cosmic truth--"the Hallways of Always"--Switters must not let his foot touch the earth, or he'll die.

Not that a little death threat can slow him down. Switters simply hops into a wheelchair and rolls off to further footloose adventures, occasionally switching to stilts. For a Robbins hero, to be just a bit high, not earthbound, facilitates enlightenment. He bops from Peru to Seattle, where he's beguiled by the Art Girls of the Pike Place Market and his 16-year-old stepsister, and then off to Syria, where he falls in with a pack of renegade nuns bearing names like Mustang Sally and Domino Thirry. Will Switters see Domino tumble and solve the mystery of the Virgin Mary? Can the nuns convince the Pope to favor birth control--to "zonk the zygotic zillions and mitigate the multitudinous milt" and "wrest free from a woman's shoulders the boa of spermatozoa?" Can the author ever resist a shameless pun or a mutant metaphor?

The tangly plot is almost beside the point. Switters is a colorful undercover agent, and a Robbins novel is really a colorful undercover essay celebrating sex and innocence, drugs and a firm wariness of anything that tries to rewire the mind, and Broadway tunes, especially "Send in the Clowns." Some readers will be intensely offended by Switters's yen for youth and idiosyncratic views on vice. But fans will feel that extremism in the pursuit of serious fun is virtue incarnate. Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates is classic Tom Robbins: all smiles, similes, and subversion. --Tim Appelo


From Publishers Weekly
Fans of Robbins (Jitterbug Perfume; Still Life with Woodpecker) will be delighted to find that his first book in almost six years contains many of the elements they have come to expect from this imaginative author. Sex, sedition and similes abound in a tale of loves both indictable and divine. Unlike Robbins's previous work, however, the novel's story line, though typically eclectic, feels contrived. Switters, the protagonist, is an errand boy for the CIA, a secret lover of Broadway show tunes and a pedophile. On assignment in Peru (he has been ordered to verify the philosophical commitment of a new CIA recruit), Switters encounters a Kandakandero medicine man who gives him mind-altering drugs and wisdom, but in exchange inflicts a curse: if Switters's feet ever touch the ground, he will be struck dead instantly. So Switters spends the rest of the novel in a wheelchair, although this in no way slows him down. He returns to Seattle, chases after his 16-year-old stepsister and numerous art students, then embarks on a mission to Syria to sell gas masks to Kurds; there, he beds a nun who even so remains a virgin. In true Robbins style, the writing throughout is lush and sexy, containing a great deal of witty social and political commentary. But this time around, his story fails to catch hold until too far into the text. And although Robbins's signature prose is in effect here--he mentions, for example, "a pink wink of panty"--he leaves too many loose ends dangling. Agent, Phoebe Larmore. (May) Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
A witch doctor with a pyramid-shaped head, an aged parrot whose only words are "People of zee wurl, relax," and an isolated band of nuns that possesses the last remaining copy of the Virgin of Fatima's mysterious third prophecy all figure into Robbins's latest seriocomic foray. Wheelchair-bound Switters, the "fierce invalid" of the title, is a wisecracking CIA operative and James Joyce aficionado. While in South America meeting a new recruit, he journeys to the Amazon, where a witchdoctor places a bizarre curse on him: he will die immediately if his feet ever touch the ground. Switters takes on a mission to the Middle East for a renegade ex-agent. Sidetracked in the Syrian Desert, he forms an unlikely alliance with the nuns as they battle the Vatican for ownership of the prophecy. Best-selling author Robbins (Even Cowgirls Get the Blues) balances the comic and the cosmic much as a juggler might balance a kitchen chair on a spoon. Highly recommended.-DLawrence Rungren, Merrimack Valley Lib. Consortium, Andover, MA Copyright 2000 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review, James Poniewozik
Tom Robbins, whose cosmic-absurdist, stoner-philosophical novels have moved undergraduates to scrawl "So true!!!" in the margins for decades, has again deputized himself to carry the freak flag of irreverence and fleshly indulgence.


From AudioFile
Tom Robbins is famous for detailed prose that describes a character's psyche as casually as his physical makeup. This audiobook continues the trend with the adventures of Switters, one of the most psychologically complex characters Robbins has ever created. Keith Szarabajka tackles the outrageous text, as well as its subtle nuances, and delivers a performance that is compelling and energetic. It would be easy to get bogged down in Robbins's narrative asides and way- out rants, but it all works out in the end and Szarabajka presents the tale with finesse. It's a pleasure to have another Tom Robbins audiobook and even better to have it narrated so well! R.A.P. © AudioFile 2000, Portland, Maine-- Copyright © AudioFile, Portland, Maine


From Booklist
Robbin's seventh novel is an incredibly humorous and completely outlandish romp through the world of international intelligence. Switters is a young CIA agent who has a wacky old grandmother who breaks into his e-mail, and he has the hots for his nubile, much-too-young stepsister. As we join Switters, he is on his way to Peru for business purposes; when his grandmother hears of his intended destination, she persuades him to take her pet parrot back to the jungle to liberate him. Switters' almost-beyond-belief Peruvian adventures pale in comparison only beside what awaits him on his next assignment, in Syria. He's in the Middle East to run gas masks to the Kurds. But because of a curse put on him in the Amazonian jungle--a warning that if his feet ever touch the ground again, it will be curtains for him--he has confined himself to a wheelchair. So he gets to the Middle East and what does he do? He takes a sojourn in a convent full of defrocked nuns, whose abbess was the model for a Matisse painting of a nude that just happens to be in the possession of Switters' grandmother. He even gets involved in a touch-and-go struggle over a Vatican secret: the controversial third prophesy made to three peasant children by the Virgin Mary at Fatima, Portugal, in 1917, the nature of which has been sealed in Vatican archives since then. The high jinks couldn't be any wilder here, but Switters is such a likable guy that the reader comes away envying his untamed life. Brad Hooper


From Kirkus Reviews
Long-term hospital patients or transcontinental Greyhound riders might happily kill time trudging through Robbinss lectures on every hackneyed social evil from advertising to dogmatism. Everyone else, skip over the pages-long polemics, and enjoy a whimsical tall tale of a pot-smoking, teenager-shagging CIA agent who travels the globe in hopes of shaking a South American shamans curse. A trip up the Amazon to repatriate his grandmothers parrot finds the Zen-meditating spymaster Switters peace-piping with a jungle-dwelling guru who, in exchange for a drug-trip-cum-glimpse-of-divine truth, exacts a price: Switters's feet must never again touch the ground, lest he be struck instantly dead. Any doubt in the curses authenticity bites the dust when his acquaintance, similarly cursed to die upon touching another mans penis, keels over the moment he gingerly prods, as a test, Switterss purposefully exposed member. Switters, taking no chances, rolls himself back to the US in a wheelchair, determined not to allow his feet on the ground until the curse is undone. Temporarily distracted from his predicament by lust for his 16-year-old stepsister, he solicitously assists with her school paper on the prophecies of the Lady of Fatima and then, through a series of amusing, unbelievable plot twists, ends up in a convent of excommunicated Catholic nuns in the Syrian desert where the Ladys prophecies are actually kept. Switters now finds himself in requited yet unconsummated love with one of the chaste, and arbitrating the convent's potentially life-threatening dispute with the Vatican. One way or another, all is resolvedfrom curse to pedophilic crush to Vatican standoffwhen Switterss feet finally do touch the ground again. A lot of fun, but less so if an overdeveloped sense of reader-duty wont let you pass by the plot-stopping diatribes that have become Robbinss habit (Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas, 1994, etc.). (Author tour) -- Copyright ©2000, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.


Review
"Superb."
-- New York Post

"As clever and witty a novel as anyone has written in a long time ... The plot is sustained by [Robbins's] usual virtuoso writing and brilliant flashes of insight. ... Robbins takes readers on a wild, delightful ride. ... A delight from beginning to end."
-- Buffalo News

"Dangerous? Wicked? Forbidden? You bet. ... Pour yourself a bowl of chips and dig in."
-- Daily News, New York

"Robbins is a great writer ... and definitely a provocative rascal."
-- The Tennessean

"Whoever said truth is stranger than fiction never read a Tom Robbins novel. ... Clever, creative, and witty, Robbins tosses off impassioned observations like handfuls of flower petals."
-- The San Diego Union-Tribune


Review
"Superb."
-- New York Post

"As clever and witty a novel as anyone has written in a long time ... The plot is sustained by [Robbins's] usual virtuoso writing and brilliant flashes of insight. ... Robbins takes readers on a wild, delightful ride. ... A delight from beginning to end."
-- Buffalo News

"Dangerous? Wicked? Forbidden? You bet. ... Pour yourself a bowl of chips and dig in."
-- Daily News, New York

"Robbins is a great writer ... and definitely a provocative rascal."
-- The Tennessean

"Whoever said truth is stranger than fiction never read a Tom Robbins novel. ... Clever, creative, and witty, Robbins tosses off impassioned observations like handfuls of flower petals."
-- The San Diego Union-Tribune


Book Description
Switters is a contradiction for all seasons: an anarchist who works for the government; a pacifist who carries a gun; a vegetarian who sops up ham gravy; a cyberwhiz who hates computers; a man who, though obsessed with the preservation of innocence, is aching to deflower his high-school-age stepsister (only to become equally enamored of a nun ten years his senior).

Yet there is nothing remotely wishy-washy about Switters. He doesn't merely pack a pistol. He is a pistol. And as we dog Switters's strangely elevated heels across four continents, in and out of love and danger, discovering in the process the "true" Third Secret of Fatima, we experience Tom Robbins -- that fearless storyteller, spiritual renegade, and verbal break dancer -- at the top of his game.

On one level this is a fast-paced CIA adventure story with comic overtones; on another it's a serious novel of ideas that brings the Big Picture into unexpected focus; but perhaps more than anything else, Fierce Invalids is a sexy celebration of language and life.


From the Inside Flap
Switters is a contradiction for all seasons: an anarchist who works for the government; a pacifist who carries a gun; a vegetarian who sops up ham gravy; a cyberwhiz who hates computers; a man who, though obsessed with the preservation of innocence, is aching to deflower his high-school-age stepsister (only to become equally enamored of a nun ten years his senior).

Yet there is nothing remotely wishy-washy about Switters. He doesn't merely pack a pistol. He is a pistol. And as we dog Switters's strangely elevated heels across four continents, in and out of love and danger, discovering in the process the "true" Third Secret of Fatima, we experience Tom Robbins -- that fearless storyteller, spiritual renegade, and verbal break dancer -- at the top of his game.

On one level this is a fast-paced CIA adventure story with comic overtones; on another it's a serious novel of ideas that brings the Big Picture into unexpected focus; but perhaps more than anything else, Fierce Invalids is a sexy celebration of language and life.

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Imaginary Invalid

Like many of his characters, Tom Robbins appears to thrive on contradictory stimuli. His last novel, Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas, set its account of spiritual enlightenment and extraterrestrial influences against the credibly rendered backdrop of a faltering stock exchange. His latest, Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates, is also concerned with the quest for enlightenment but chooses for its hero a renegade operative for that supremely unenlightened, reflexively conservative institution, the Central Intelligence Agency.

The operative in question is named, simply, Switters, and he gives new meaning to the phrase "loose cannon." Switters, along with a number of his fellow agents, sees himself as an "angel," a subversive element dedicated to opposing the "cowboys" of the CIA, those zealots who have done so much damage in the name of our national interests. A born anarchist, Switters meditates, indulges in mind-altering substances, reads and rereads Finnegans Wake, and obsessively ponders the fate of language in the cybernetic future that is rapidly taking shape around us. He is the antithesis of such traditional CIA employees as his pompous—and perfectly named—superior, Mayflower Cabot Fitzgerald.

Fierce Invalids begins when Switters, who is bound for Peru on Company business, agrees to perform an act of mercy for his octogenarian grandmother, who wants him to return her pet—an aging parrot named Sailor Boy—to its ancestral home in the Amazon rain forest. Switters's mission is interrupted when a British ethnographer—R. Potney Smithe—introduces him to a tribal shaman named, variously, End of Time and Today is Tomorrow, whose head is shaped exactly like a pyramid, and who believes that laughter is one of the animating forces of the universe. Switters spends a single hallucinatory night in End of Time's company, in the course of which he eats his grandmother's parrot and takes a drug-induced trip through "the Hallways of Always," where the secrets of the cosmos reside. In the dazed aftermath of revelation, he learns that arcane knowledge exacts a heavy price. From that day forward, Switters is forbidden—on literal penalty of death—to rest his feet on solid ground.

That is merely the beginning of this wild, unsummarizable tale, a contemporary picaresque in which Switters travels—sometimes by wheelchair, sometimes with the aid of stilts—from one continent to another, finding love, adventure, and spiritual fulfillment as he attempts to come to terms with the magically altered circumstances of his life. His travels take him from Peru to Seattle, from Seattle to Syria, and from Syria to a climactic encounter in Vatican City. Along the way, he encounters a number of bona fide miracles, meets the model for a famous nude portrait by Henri Matisse, uncovers the lost prophecy of the Lady of Fatima, and attempts—with varying degrees of success—to seduce both his 16-year-old stepsister, Suzy, and a 46-year-old cloistered nun named Domino Thiry (pun most definitely intended).

As in most of Robbins's novels, the rambling narrative is designed primarily to accommodate the author's steady stream of observations on the quality of life at the tail end of the 20th century. The result is a baroque, gently didactic novel in which Robbins comments, with wit, acuity, and an increasing sense of personal urgency, on the inadequacy of our political and religious institutions, on the public and private sources of our prevailing spiritual malaise, and on our willing submission to the dictates of a ravenous consumer culture. In the face of all these things, Robbins—like his fictional Peruvian shaman—continues to insist on the primal power of laughter and continues to believe that joy is possible, that dullness of spirit is the one unforgivable sin.

In Fierce Invalids, as in his earlier novels, Robbins's philosophy of joie de vivre is endlessly reflected in the moment-to-moment deployment of his lush, intricate style. There are no dead spaces in a Robbins novel, no drab or perfunctory phrases. Every sentence carries its weight. Every sentence adds something distinctive to the overall ambience of the narrative. Here, for example, is a brief reflection on the quiet pleasures of Seattle's weather: [Switters] liked its subtle, muted qualities, and the landscape that those qualities encouraged if not engendered: vistas that seemed to have been sketched with a sumi brush dipped in quicksilver and green tea... And here is a smoke ring, its evanescence captured forever: He expelled a dancing doughnut of smoke. Like every smoke ring ever blown—like smoke, in general—it bounced in the air like the bastard baby of chemistry and cartooning. Fierce Invalids is animated throughout by the "mindful playfulness" that is Robbins's dominant aesthetic characteristic. While it is unlikely to win over his numerous detractors (who will doubtless decry its relentless—and deliberate—"self-indulgence"), it will surely strike his many admirers as cause for celebration. Tom Robbins is a genuine original, a philosopher clown whose skewed perspective is both startling and illuminating. Like the best of his earlier books, Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates is humane, funny, and deeply adventurous fiction, a vibrantly comic refutation of the angst-ridden spirit of the age.

—Bill Sheehan

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Switters is a contradiction for all seasons: an anarchist who works for the government; a pacifist who carries a gun; a vegetarian who sops up ham gravy; a cyberwhiz who hates computers; a man who, though obsessed with the preservation of innocence, is aching to deflower his high-school-age stepsister (only to become equally enamored of a nun ten years his senior).

Yet there is nothing remotely wishy-washy about Switters. He doesn't merely pack a pistol. He is a pistol. And as we dog Switters's strangely elevated heels across four continents, in and out of love and danger, discovering in the process the "true" Third Secret of Fatima, we experience Tom Robbins — that fearless storyteller, spiritual renegade, and verbal break dancer — at the top of his game.

On one level this is a fast-paced CIA adventure story with comic overtones; on another it's a serious novel of ideas that brings the Big Picture into unexpected focus; but perhaps more than anything else, Fierce Invalids is a sexy celebration of language and life.

FROM THE CRITICS

Playboy

Switters, the addled hero of Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates, practically bursts off the page....

Barnes & Noble Guide to New Fiction

Best-selling author Robbins gets his two cents in on every hackneyed social evil from advertising to dogmatism in his latest wacky, wit-filled work. This latest tale of whimsy introduces a pot-smoking, teenager-shagging CIA agent who travels the globe in hopes of shaking a South American shaman's curse.

Publishers Weekly

Fans of Robbins (Jitterbug Perfume; Still Life with Woodpecker) will be delighted to find that his first book in almost six years contains many of the elements they have come to expect from this imaginative author. Sex, sedition and similes abound in a tale of loves both indictable and divine. Unlike Robbins's previous work, however, the novel's story line, though typically eclectic, feels contrived. Switters, the protagonist, is an errand boy for the CIA, a secret lover of Broadway show tunes and a pedophile. On assignment in Peru (he has been ordered to verify the philosophical commitment of a new CIA recruit), Switters encounters a Kandakandero medicine man who gives him mind-altering drugs and wisdom, but in exchange inflicts a curse: if Switters's feet ever touch the ground, he will be struck dead instantly. So Switters spends the rest of the novel in a wheelchair, although this in no way slows him down. He returns to Seattle, chases after his 16-year-old stepsister and numerous art students, then embarks on a mission to Syria to sell gas masks to Kurds; there, he beds a nun who even so remains a virgin. In true Robbins style, the writing throughout is lush and sexy, containing a great deal of witty social and political commentary. But this time around, his story fails to catch hold until too far into the text. And although Robbins's signature prose is in effect here--he mentions, for example, "a pink wink of panty"--he leaves too many loose ends dangling.

Library Journal

A witch doctor with a pyramid-shaped head, an aged parrot whose only words are "People of zee wurl, relax," and an isolated band of nuns that possesses the last remaining copy of the Virgin of Fatima's mysterious third prophecy all figure into Robbins's latest seriocomic foray. Wheelchair-bound Switters, the "fierce invalid" of the title, is a wisecracking CIA operative and James Joyce aficionado. While in South America meeting a new recruit, he journeys to the Amazon, where a witchdoctor places a bizarre curse on him: he will die immediately if his feet ever touch the ground. Switters takes on a mission to the Middle East for a renegade ex-agent. Sidetracked in the Syrian Desert, he forms an unlikely alliance with the nuns as they battle the Vatican for ownership of the prophecy. Best-selling author Robbins (Even Cowgirls Get the Blues) balances the comic and the cosmic much as a juggler might balance a kitchen chair on a spoon. Highly recommended. [Previewed in Prepub Alert, LJ 2/1/00.]--Lawrence Rungren, Merrimack Valley Lib. Consortium, Andover, MA Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\

AudioFile - AudioFile Review

Tom Robbins is famous for detailed prose that describes a character's psyche as casually as his physical makeup. This audiobook continues the trend with the adventures of Switters, one of the most psychologically complex characters Robbins has ever created. Keith Szarabajka tackles the outrageous text, as well as its subtle nuances, and delivers a performance that is compelling and energetic. It would be easy to get bogged down in Robbins's narrative asides and way- out rants, but it all works out in the end and Szarabajka presents the tale with finesse. It's a pleasure to have another Tom Robbins audiobook and even better to have it narrated so well! R.A.P. ￯﾿ﾽ AudioFile 2000, Portland, Maine