Butterfly nut
Auberon Waugh
Another Roadside Attraction Tom Robbins (W. H. Allen £2.25) Love on the Coast William Cooper (Macmillan £2.50) "There are only three things that I like," proclaims Amanda, the heroine of Tom Robbins's new novel. "These are: the butterfly, the cactus and Infinite Goof." Later she amends this list to include mushrooms and motorcycles as well, but the concept of the Infinite Goof is surely the most important, embracing in a phrase the entire philosophy of the Californian novel. Almost unnoticed in this country, the novel has had a most extraordinary renaissance in California over the past few years. Kerouac is often hailed as the father of the Californian-novel, but I have never been able to see anything very original in his work, and would put it much later, with Brautigan. Certainly, I think he is the father of the Infinite Goof.
Perhaps I can best define the concept of the Infinite Goof by quotations from Mr Robbins's novel. Amanda announces the five things she believes in: birth, copulation, death, magic and freedom. The Goofish element in this is obviously magic. Logic, we learn from the mouth of the idiot, only gives a man what he needs. Magic gives him what he wants. Amanda suffers from an incontinent bladder and has to stop constantly on her journeys in order to relieve herself:
This did not annoy Amanda, for it had long been her theory that human beings were invented by water as a device for transporting itself from one place to another.
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