Tom Robbins is a social critic. He pokes fun at the American establishment in both Another Roadside Attraction and Even Cowgirls Get the Blues. These novels feature characters who adopt alternate lifestyles and who are threatened by the repressive forces of the establishment, in both, the FBI.Still Life with Woodpecker shifts Robbins's focus somewhat, as the novel advances Robbins's position that social activism should be subordinate to individual self-development. In Skinny Legs and All, Robbins targets both the art establishment and Christian fundamentalism while in Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas, he points up the emptiness of the 1980s economic revolution of the Reagan era.

Robbins employs elaborate metaphors and striking wordplay in each of his novels, but the advice he offers has changed with the changing American social scene.