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additive style, analysis, how to write a sentence, jitterbug perfume, stanley fish, tom robbins, writing
The additive-style sentence I’ve chosen to analyze comes from Part IV of Tom Robbin’s novel Jitterbug Perfume, published in 1984. It can be found on page 271 and reads as follows:
She made that devastating discovery immediately upon returning to her studio apartment, where the refrigerator made noises at night like sea cows ruminating, where the toilet sounded like the audio portion of a white-water rafting expedition, where fallout from fifty failed base-note experiments perfumed the peeling wallpaper, and where the Kotex box on the bathroom shelf was empty now, except for a couple of frayed and yellowing pads.
To put things in context, the “she” here is Priscilla, one of the main characters of this story, and the “devastating discovery” she makes is that she has lost a very important bottle of perfume—the best smelling perfume in the whole world, the ingredients of which may or may not also hold the secret to eternal life. A “devastating discovery” indeed.
What makes this sentence so great, in my opinion, is that Robbins builds Priscilla’s apartment for the reader by giving them a tour of it, in all its “devastating” glory. ‘This is the apartment our heroine comes home to,’ he says, ‘and finds that she has lost the most significant item in the story.’ He indicates the refrigerator, and then the toilet, and the fairly unpleasant noises that they make. Then he points out Priscilla’s “experiments” (she is trying, like so many different characters in the novel are, to concoct the ultimate perfume) and the remnants that they leave—peeled wallpaper and sort of funny smells. Then he takes us back to the bathroom to show us our heroine’s barren shelves and her feminine products that are “yellowing” (yellowing!) with age and disuse. Each element he adds is just as disappointing as the last one, and when considered all together they truly do make up a devastating picture. ‘This is where Priscilla lives,’ Robbins says. ‘She has lost The Bottle, and this is where she lives.’
A funny thing about the way Robbins give us this tour—the way he builds this place for the readers—is that it almost calls to mind a frantic search: the kind of search one might conduct if one has lost something really, really important (the word “immediately” lends the reader some of that urgency and panic). It speaks of Priscilla, panicked, going from place to place to place looking for that precious bottle. Checking in the most unlikely places—did I put it in the fridge? maybe it’s by the toilet? what about over here? maybe I should check in this Kotex box?—only to find her efforts are fruitless.
But the reader already had an inkling that her efforts were going to be fruitless; very early into the sentence, Robbins starts dropping hints that things aren’t going so well. The word “toilet” speaks volumes, I think. If you’re looking for the secret elixir of life in your loud and off-putting toilet, you probably already know that success is not at hand. Robbins keeps giving us hints that the search is futile—the “fallout of fifty failed… experiments” and the “peeling wallpaper” and the empty Kotex box are all omens that bode ill for Priscilla’s search—until finally it all ends with “a couple of frayed and yellowing pads.” The search is done (it was useless anyway) and so is Priscilla. All her perfume-related plans are dashed. Without The Bottle, she is stuck—as she was at the beginning of the novel—in her devastating studio apartment. She is as frayed as her pads.
It’s sentences like this one that make Robbins such great fun to read. Jitterbug Perfume is itself a sort of wild journey, but it is comprised of so many smaller, quicker journeys like the one Priscilla goes through here—from confident to devastated in a matter of mere moments. It’s wacky, it’s wild, and it’s utterly Tom Robbins. But it’s also, I think, a comical mirror held up to real-life and all its little journeys.