Consider the beet.

Does a better opening line exist in fiction? Confidently giving the reader an earnest command: The beet, consider it! For my return to reading after a year-long hiatus, I selected Tom Robbins’ Jitterbug Perfume from my bookshelf. I often said “this is my favorite book” even though I haven’t opened it since 1995. It’s an epic story of magical realism, or perhaps surreal magicalism. The story bounces from multinational perfume manufacturing, to the beet fields of ancient Bavaria, to a bayou-based drug dealer, to a beautiful waitress trying to dodge the amorous advances of her best friend, to the adventures of Alobar, a deposed king, who has been pals with the pagan god Pan for a thousand years.

A year ago, my vision split. Where I used to see one image, now sat two. I make it sound like it happened all at once. It didn’t. It took twenty-five years. I began to get double vision after a head injury. I had a pair of glasses made with prisms in the lenses. They bent my sight. Instead of seeing a bit off to the left with my left eye, I saw what sat in front of me. My left eye saw the same image as my right eye even though my eyes don’t point in the same direction. Every year or two, my eyes would drift a little more, and I needed new, stronger prisms in my glasses. A few years ago, the degradation accelerated, and I needed new glasses every six to eight months.

The final incident: driving a dark, deserted highway late at night, I couldn’t focus on the road. Two images overlapped, making it hard to judge where concrete barrier on the side of the road sat. I slowed from sixty-five to forty-five and ignored Eli’s pleading to let him take over the wheel. That was the last time I sat down to read a book.

I hyperbolize. Since then I’ve probably read a dozen short stories and a dozen more David Sedaris essays, but each time I tried, I quickly got frustrated with my vision and put the book down after fifteen minutes. It often took me days to read a twenty-page story.  

I started reading Jitterbug Perfume three months ago. After eye surgery, after five or six post-surgery eye appointments where we tried to figure out what strange mischief was afoot in my seemingly changing-by-the-week vision, I got a prescription, I got a pair of glasses made, and I picked up Jitterbug Perfume. The first thing I noticed: “Consider the beet” is not the opening line. I guess I made that one up in my head. The actual opening sentence is “The beet is the most intense of vegetables.” Oh, you think mine is better? So do I.

After reading forty or so pages, I realized the glasses weren’t right for me. Back to the eye doctor, back to the optician, lather, rinse, repeat. I got those glasses made three times. I finally have the correct prescription. I finished Jitterbug Perfume over the past week. So, is it still my favorite book? Wow, a lot has changed in thirty years. I’ve changed, the world has changed, what I consider good writing has changed quite a bit.

Robbins published Jitterbug Perfume in 1984. Just like many of the movies that came out in the early eighties, Jitterbug Perfume is wildly inappropriate. It’s loaded with language that—since Trump’s Access Hollywood hot mic incident came to light in 2016—has been dubbed locker room talk. Lots of bawdy discussion of genitalia, men’s and women’s, by men and women. Older men pursued by much younger women. Lascivious discussion of lesbian sex clearly included to pique male readers’ interests. Language I once saw as normal or edgy or even titillating, I now just see as immature. Beginning to end, it’s an entire book of eighties frat-boy discourse.

At an event at the library where I work a few weeks ago, one of the board members came up to me and asked me her question of the night: “What are you reading?” I didn’t want to get into the fact that I really hadn’t read anything in a year, and since Jitterbug Perfume was sitting cracked open on my living room side table awaiting a correct prescription, I decided to tell her that. “It’s one of my favorite books!”

“Oh, I haven’t heard of that before. What’s it about?” As I started talking about immortality and perfume and Pan-the-god-of-fertility and hallucinogens and gobs of sex, it occurred to me that this might not be the book I want to recommend to one of the board members.

“Uh never mind, it’s probably kind of inappropriate. Um, you might not want to read it.” Dolt! She wrote it in her phone. I’m still waiting to hear her report.

Lastly, the writing: Man, can this dude ramble! What can be said in three words always takes six. What can be said in a paragraph takes a half a page. Last time I read this book, I hung onto every word, every phrase. In a previous copy, I underlined the passages I thought distilled the meaning of life. Now I found myself skipping lines thinking “God he’s still talking about Pan’s erection?”

I’d stamp Jitterbug Perfume with three stars. Pretty lame considering it used to be my favorite book. Some of the concepts are cool, I mean c’mon, one of the characters is Pan, but the writing is overindulgent and juvenile. Revisiting our past is always a risk, sometimes we don’t really like the person we used to be. The guy who loved this book is long gone. Now I’m afraid to read Christopher Moore’s Lamb—my other “favorite book.” I think it’s cut from the very same cloth.