Novel: Jitterbug Perfume

Overview
Tom Robbins' Jitterbug Perfume is a comic, metaphysical caper that braids together ancient legend and contemporary farce into a single pursuit: the creation of a scent that resists decay. The novel alternates between an epic, centuries-spanning tale of two seekers of immortality and a modern-day quest among eccentrics who hope to distill that elusive aroma. Robbins treats mortality, desire, and the chemistry of smell with irreverent intelligence and erotic exuberance.

Plot
The narrative follows Alobar, a defiant monarch who refuses to bow to ritualized death, and Kudra, a woman of singular appetites and resilience. Their escape from execution and subsequent travels teach them unusual lessons about longevity, pleasure, diet, and ritual that they pass between one another across time. Parallel threads show a handful of present-day characters, perfumers, chefs, and oddball entrepreneurs, obsessed with reconstructing an ancient aromatic formula rumored to confer a vitality beyond the ordinary.

Convergence
As centuries fold into one another, the stories converge around the idea that scent is not merely a luxury but a portal to memory, identity, and possibly extended life. The modern seekers peel back science and superstition to track down ingredients, methods, and the philosophical implications of trying to trap time inside a bottle. Confrontations of commerce, aesthetics, and ethics emerge as the characters negotiate what it would mean to bottle immortality and who would deserve it.

Themes
Mortality and the refusal to accept a culturally prescribed death are at the center, handled with both whimsy and seriousness. Robbins probes how rituals, religious, culinary, sexual, shape life and how breaking or inventing rituals can reorient existence. Smell functions as an organizing metaphor: ephemeral yet powerfully evocative, scent becomes a means to interrogate memory, desire, and the slippery boundary between bodily life and legend.

Characters
Alobar and Kudra embody two complementary approaches to living: deliberate, sensory attention and stubborn freedom from institutional constraints. The contemporary cast mirrors their obsessions in modern guises, bringing science, marketing, and urban longing into the mix. Side characters provide comic counterpoint and moral complication, complicating any simple claim that longevity is either purely heroic or purely selfish.

Style and Tone
Robbins writes with a lush, jazz-inflected exuberance that blends aphorism, shaggy anecdote, and philosophical aside. Sentences leap and loop, often turning to erotic and culinary imagery to make metaphysical points feel bodily and immediate. Humor tempers the book's deeper questions, so reflection and farce sit comfortably side by side.

Impact
Jitterbug Perfume is both a satire of modern obsessions and a love letter to sensual life. It invites readers to reconsider ordinary pleasures, eating, loving, smelling, as possible routes to meaning rather than mere distractions from mortality. The novel's raucous intelligence and sensual optimism have made it a durable favorite for readers who enjoy fiction that thinks as playfully as it seduces.