Faded Jeans

By John Skow

SKINNY LEGS AND ALL by Tom Robbins

Bantam; 422 pages; $19.95

Really superior flapdoodle is hard to find, and nobody wrote it better, a couple of decades ago, than Tom Robbins. His rowdy novels Still Life with Woodpecker, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues and Another Roadside Attraction were cheerful, raunchy, anti-Establishment rambunctions. Their woozy aesthetic principle was that of Jack Kerouac and Richard Brautigan: Keep typing, Cowboy; brilliance may be just around the corner. And sometimes -- look what I found! -- it was.

Well, shucks. It's been a long time since we all bought our jeans blue and faded them on the hoof. Now mainstream fiction runs to my-divorce novels and the acid-washed prose of minimalism. Dreary stuff, which is why the old-time, down-home Robbins would be welcome, a leftover '60s bystander reflects. But Skinny Legs and All falls awkwardly between storytelling and pamphleteering, and the old, bouncy irreverence sours into preachiness and windy bosh.

Robbins is fed up, as well he might be, with the murderous tribalism that so often is the public face of organized religion. He sets in motion an American tel-evangelist whose septic inspiration it is to blow up the Dome of the Rock, the holy Muslim shrine in Jerusalem, thus bringing on World War III, the Second Coming of Christ and Judgment Day.

Judaism, Christianity and Muhammadanism are male dominant, and Robbins seems to feel -- though this and much else are not clear -- that worship of the goddess Astarte in early times was gentler. His novel's heroine is an Astarte- Venus-Jezebel figure, a young artist named Ellen Cherry. Her husband Boomer, a lame, redneck welder, appears to represent the lame god Vulcan in this strange jumble of myths.

Several inanimate objects, such as a painted stick and a conch shell holy to Astarte, travel across country by magic, talking lengthily about the follies of mortals in passages that are as cute and irritating as you would expect. Satire is intended, but the jawboning has no bite. The viewpoint Robbins is searching for seems to have chewed through its leash and wandered off well before Chapter 1.