All three characters disappear relatively early on-Q-Jo simply vanishes, which given her size is no mean trick (Gwen’s joke, not mine), Andre runs away and a crestfallen Belford spends the rest of the novel in vain pursuit of him. Her boyfriend, Belford Dunn (think Ralph Bellamy) has a pet ape named Andre, who had once been sentenced to death for stealing jewels on the French Riviera, that is, until Belford rescued him. Gwen’s best friend and neighbor is Q-Jo Huffington, a 300-pound psychic. On this clothesline Robbins hangs a number of bizarre plots and characters who interweave and overlap like an army of ants building a colony out of blotter acid.

Ostensibly, the plot concerns the Angst Gwendolyn Mati-an ambitious but slightly unethical yuppie stockbroker-goes through on the Easter weekend following the stock market crash. That was equally true of many of those late night discussions, but I’ll try anyway. The book jacket warns that trying to describe a Tom Robbins novel by summarizing its plot is like pointing to a snowflake and asking someone to grasp the concept of downhill skiing. No doubt Robbins’ legion of fans will plunge headfirst into his latest storm of cosmic revelations without a life raft, but the uninitiated should be warned that their guide is a prim Filipina who narrates the book in the second person. It was pure coincidence that I read the latest Tom Robbins’ (that guru of ’60 wit) novel, “Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas,” over the Woodstock ’94 weekend: not just because of the rain, which permeated the book and drenched the festival, but because it evoked memories of midnight discussions I’d had around the years of the first Woodstock, which dealt with similar if equally outrageous premises.

Half asleep in frog pyjamas