Novel: Skinny Legs and All

Synopsis
Tom Robbins spins a rambunctious, panoramic tale that tracks an unlikely mechanical oil painting as it wanders out of an artist's studio and across America, catalyzing collisions with love, hunger, faith, and outrage. The painting, animated by equal parts craftsmanship and mystique, becomes a provocateur and mirror: its peregrinations intersect with a troupe of eccentric humans and animals whose private obsessions reveal broader cultural anxieties. The narrative hops from intimate domestic scenes to roving meditations on sex, art, religion, and politics, braided together by Robbins's appetite for paradox and paradoxical tenderness.
Rather than a conventional plot driven by a single protagonist, the novel spreads its attention across a mosaic of lives and digressions. Encounters along the painting's route expose hypocrisies and yearnings, and seemingly marginal characters attain symbolic force. Episodes range from comic skirmishes to surprisingly tender reckonings, and Robbins uses each episode to interrogate how people justify their desires and construct meaning.

Characters and Movements
The cast is a carnival of the strange and humanly recognizable: artists, soldiers, lovers, a preacher, a dishwasher, and various beasts, each propelled by private longings and public narratives. The mechanically animated painting functions as both catalyst and confidant, an object that prompts confession and upheaval wherever it goes. The ensemble structure lets Robbins examine diverse viewpoints without privileging any single moral center.
Characters tend to be sketched with affectionate exaggeration, their eccentricities serving to illuminate larger philosophical and social questions. Moments of comic bravado frequently give way to sincere vulnerability, and Robbins treats both with equal moral seriousness, suggesting that farce and revelation are closely related.

Themes
Sex and sensuality course through the book as forces of creation and subversion, repeatedly posed against institutionalized religion and political posturing. Robbins probes how erotic impulse resists categorization and how taboos serve as both constraint and fuel for imagination. Art becomes a central metaphor: aesthetic creation is shown as a relationship with the world that can provoke, heal, and destabilize.
The novel also interrogates faith and power, asking how belief systems, sacred or secular, shape behavior and legitimize violence. Politics appears less as policy than as group storytelling, and Robbins delights in exposing the theatricality behind public pieties. Hunger, literal and metaphorical, recurs as a motif: appetite drives both craving and compassion, from petty needs to transcendent longings.

Style and Voice
Robbins's prose is exuberant, witty, and richly associative, moving fluidly between aphorism, comic riff, and lyrical observation. The narrative voice delights in wordplay and paradox, often pausing to issue barbed generalizations or playful metaphysical asides. Structural looseness is intentional: digressions are the point, and the book rewards readers who savor rhetorical meandering and unexpected philosophical turns.
Satire and tenderness coexist; Robbins skewers pomposity while reserving a soft spot for human frailty. The novel's tone can shift from raucous comedy to bittersweet intimacy within a single paragraph, and this volatility is part of its charm, an argument that seriousness and silliness are complementary modes of reckoning.

Closing Impression
Skinny Legs and All operates as a carnival of ideas disguised as a road story, an invitation to reconsider the ordinary as absurdly sacred and the sacred as frequently absurd. Its roaming structure, colorful cast, and relentless curiosity make it less a linear argument than an ongoing conversation about desire, creativity, and the social forces that shape human lives. The result is a combustible, humane book that asks readers to laugh, think, and feel in equal measure.