Jitterbug Perfume - Immortality, Sex, and Discomfort

As is apparently my preferred introduction: It has been quite a while since I have written anything on my computer, but as generally happens after I manage to read or, dare I say it, complete an actual, tangible book, I now am doing so. I type this knowing that Google docs is using my writing to train adolescent artificial intelligentsia, and theoretically I could make the switch to another software, but as is the case with Adobe, the monopoly’s Matrix-style robotic belly-button parasite keeps a firm hold on my psyche, with an extra bonding agent in the form of a powerful distaste for the effort that it would take to learn an entirely foreign user interface, just to marginally weaken the hold that Google has upon my intellectual property, when they are already in possession of basically all of my identifying information. They could probably construct an AI that would perfectly replicate my online presence, idiosyncrasies and ego included, and the only thing that they would have to do at this point to make convincing blog posts from my perspective is post them about as regularly as an agave flowers. If anything, if this particular post goes up on the internet at all, maybe that’s a red flag- I would have to be a mind outside of my own in order to return to a creative project even after my attention span’s honeymoon.

Whatever. I finished a book, and now I am compelled to write. Actually, I finished two books. The first was Brandon Sanderson’s Mistborn, the first of the Mistborn trilogy, one that i meant to read way back in high school because some youtuber that I liked at the time had recommended it for its magic system- magic systems, as a concept, I would continue to grow increasingly interested in; the books would remain untouched on my shelf. The second was lent to me by one of my housemates, though I can’t remember the conversation that led to that happening- Jitterbug Perfume by Tom Robbins.

Actually, now that I’m thinking about it, the declaration about me being compelled to write after reading books is only true in the barest sense. Yes, I do feel an urge to write after being exposed to writing that I like, but by no means does that mean that I actually end up, or even begin for that matter, writing anything at all! Also, that same urge doesn’t just apply to writing. I consume manga at a frightening pace, and though by saying this it may imply the opposite sentiment: I do not say that in order to brag- the speed at which I go through webcomics and manga alike is, frankly, detrimental to my experience of the media in question, as I end up retaining almost nothing of what I have had my head immersed in so much that my neck develops knots that hold it at a painful right angle to my torso. I don’t really stop and breathe in the images that the mangaka probably spent hours and hours drawing; if anything, I mostly pay attention to the words written on the page which, in turn, presents a palpable irony in that the reason I have felt unable to read traditional books in recent years is that my attention span balks at walls of text! 

Hey, authors! I won’t read your book even though I’d probably like it, because it doesn’t have any pictures in it! Show me your work once you’ve learned to draw!

Oh, holy shit the irony goes even deeper. Even though I feel that creative urge when I read manga, all of my attempts at making comics or even working to be skilled enough at drawing to feel confident in my capacity to do so are stopped in their tracks by the thus far insurmountable obstacle of not being able or willing to pay attention to the thing that I’m drawing for long enough to finish anything. Good lord. 

Anyway, the way Jitterbug Perfume was written really affected me. I still can’t tell if I liked it very much (the writing style), but to be fair, I really loved the way George Elliot’s Middlemarch was written, but I have been thus far unable to finish that book by virtue of its inexhaustibly prim density; therefore I suppose that the content of a book and its writing style tend to stay fairly separate considering my enjoyment, and the former aspect seems to have a stronger influence on whether or not I actually manage to make it to the back cover.

In this case, the content was excellent. Jitterbug Perfume was described to me as being about immortality, smell, sex, and beets, and I can’t honestly think of a better way to describe it. It’s a jigsaw puzzle of a story, if all of the pieces on the table were from different moments in time, and at the end, when the pieces fit, you are left with a complete picture that somehow shows an unbelievably cohesive, intimately personal tale, despite the massive scope, time-wise (there are very important events that take place before the advent of Christianity, and plot points of similar influence continue to happen all the way up until modern day).

Now that I think about it, the quality of maintaining a story’s characters and relationships, and especially keeping them as tantamount to the direction and tone of the piece, even when the scope of the story has expanded to include over two thousand years of history, even if that history is embellished upon or entirely invented, is an incredible achievement, and one that I think deserves unending praise. So frequently I find myself put off of pieces of media when, though I once enjoyed them for their characters’ dynamics or their dialogue or their writing styles, those aspects eventually were beaten out of the story by the metastasizing scale of the events taking place. It becomes very difficult for me to continue to be invested in the little things that I like, and for that matter, for the author to continue stipulating on those little things’ presence, when suddenly the fate of the world is at stake, or the consequences of failure become so dire that there is no longer room in the work for mirth. 

Jitterbug does this by keeping the story focused almost entirely upon a static set of characters. In all honesty, I do tend to find it a bit grating when a book throws pretty much all of the people that will be introduced over the duration at me all at once, and I also tend to get annoyed when a book switches perspectives back and forth frequently, as it is inevitable that I will be more interested in one of the followed points of view above all of the others (or vice versa, that one of the points of view is especially dull). Let it be known, though generally the book in question pays most attention to the characters that happen to be changing the most, it does do this.

The upside, though, is that even as the setting around the characters morphs drastically with all the changes associated with the world and culture since literally the year 1, the reader is still anchored in the everyday realities of the main characters. The tone of the story stays heavily reliant on each of their emotional states and their changing dynamics. The plot directly follows in the tracks of the characters’ desires and aspirations. As opposed to them being “interesting” people to be around in situations that they have no agency in, they are the driving force of the plot itself, and in this way the book can get away with a mind-boggling amount of in-universe time passing without it ever detaching the reader from the story, or impeding their willingness to care.

That feeling of detachment is exactly the sentiment behind me dropping To Your Eternity, a manga that also tackles the concept of immortality, but in a way that I eventually found extraordinarily grating. Some pieces of media, especially if they continue for a really long time, and even more especially if they are about characters that live much longer than a normal human lifespan, end up bestowing upon these characters a very particularly draining character arc: eventually becoming the most fucking boring people ever. This isn’t really, I don’t think, a product of repetition of personality beats -One Piece, for example, has a main cast that are each fairly one-note, but to me they remain compelling because of the unrelenting new situations, characters, and settings that they rotate through- rather, a common sentiment on the concept of immortality is that a person who is subjected to it will elect that it is a much smarter thing to avoid attachments and emotions as a way of staving off the pain of repeated loss. Combine that with the formula of introducing a bunch of new people, spending a lot of time with them, and then killing them off and meditating on how pointless it all was, and you will have on one hand: a philosophically engaging story about life’s purpose and value; and on the other: one that I will not be reading anymore. Fuck you.

Each time skip in To Your Eternity, my dejection would build, and even though I did enjoy the concepts therein quite a bit, I eventually quit reading when there was a time skip that jumped over as many years that the archaic setting I had been enjoying was gone, along with any characters aside from the protagonist that I may have liked, and I no longer had the will to continue.

Anyway, the point is that Jitterbug Perfume deftly avoids this problem by holding the human experience as an inalienable thru-line. Longer-lived characters don’t become harder to identify with- if anything they become more dear to the reader, as the sentiments that are the crux of their longevity are easily identified with. Their goals, whether they are aware of it or not, are the preservation of emotion and connection- things that the reader can presumably empathize with quite well.

The writing style I would describe as “irreverently confident and connotatively confusing.” The majority of the instances in which Robbins describes anything in this book are unrelentingly riddled with descriptors of every kind, and often of opposing kinds- many sentences use several adjectives to describe a single thing, and the adjectives often carry wildly different connotations. A single line may depict something as both gorgeous and disgusting, just by virtue of the words chosen. Jitterbug is more than willing to yank the reader back and forth like this, and the literary whiplash results in this sort of all-encompassing feeling of mild discomfort. The prose itself is captivating, but in less of the fashion of a ballet performance and more so like a lapdance that really walks the line between attractive and nauseating.

Regardless of whether or not I enjoy the style personally (I still can’t really tell, but I’m leaning toward the favorable side), it strikes me as being exactly what the author wanted. Off-putting, certainly, but one hundred percent intentional. A significant portion of the book’s subject matter consists of topics and sentiments that are at most culturally taboo, and at least playing fast and loose with modern morals and sentiments, especially when it comes to sex. This book, which I really enjoyed, which made me smile and frown and think and even write… will not shut the fuck up about sex.

Every character is steeped in it. Every metaphor is constructed with it. I feel like I could purchase a brand new copy of this fucking thing and its pages would already be stuck together. To get a sense of my feelings (historically) about this- one of my favorite quotes of a friend of mine is from when they asked me: “Hey [my name], would you rather have sex or be stabbed with a knife?”

My point about the “motion sickness” writing style being that it works in favor of the subject matter. The fact that the whole novel is written in a way that makes the reader a little nauseous, figuratively, creates a tone that is much more conducive to, well, not necessarily the intimate discussion of what our society views as crossing lines in the social sand or what should or should not be allowed, but rather the regular enunciation of kind of uncomfortable topics. Combined with a fairly unconcerned and playful tone, the book is able to deftly accept the discomfort that arises from a journey that holds sex as a central theme while progressing through several different settings -cultural and chronological- all with differing views and judgements about a traditionally awkward topic.

Anyway, I liked the book. There is a sentence in there that goes: “Like jugged bees, the funeral orations droned on (134).”

If you think you can make it past all of the disconcertingly flowery (ha, ha.) descriptions of bodily fluids for long enough to make it to that absolute banger of a quote, this may be one to check out.