Can innovative fiction address the world and its problems, yet remain free of the limiting conventions of realism? Following the achievements of the avant-garde, can there still be fiction with feeling? A newly emergent group of writers in the late 1970s has defined itself in response to these problems. Best characterized as the authors of "bubble gum fiction" (as "bubble gum music" of the last decade was an answer to the abrasiveness and stridency of the period's heavier rock), William Kotzwinkle, Tom Robbins, Rob Swigart, and Gerald Rosen have tried to write a socially responsive fiction which does not sacrifice the aesthetic gains of the great sixties innovators. (p. 123)
The first underground classic of bubble gum fiction is Tom Robbins' Another Roadside Attraction…. Robbins, a former student of religion and practicing art critic, brings a wealth of philosophical interest to the writing of this novel. He feels that the excessive rationalization of Western culture since Descartes has severed man from his roots in nature. Organized religion has in like manner become more of a tool of logic and control than of spirit. Robbins' heroine, Amanda, would reconnect mankind with the benign chaos of the natural world, substituting magic for logic, style for substance, and poetry for the analytical measure of authority. But to show the reader how magical, suprarational connections work, to involve the reader in recomposing the world according to their wacky structures, Robbins describes each point of action with a mind-bending metaphor or simile, often run to considerable length…. [Some] examples are about language itself ("The 'but' that crouched like a sailor there in the doorway of his second sentence did not in any way tie his first remark to his second one. It was a 'but' more ornamental than conjunctional")…. At his best, Robbins gives the reader one metaphor, then asks cooperation in tying a second one to it, as in "It was a peekaboo summer. The sun was in and out like Mickey Rooney."… (pp. 124-25)
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