Books, Arts & Manners: The Beet Goes On

Jitterbug Perfume, by Tom Robbins (Bantam, 342 pp., $15.95)

Tom Robbins was born in 1936, in Blowing Rock, North Carolina, a fact to which his public reaction has been, “So what?” He attended Washington and Lee University in Virginia, where he was bored by the notion of becoming a perfect Southern gentleman. Like many young men before him, he went west, settling in Seattle and laboring for a while as art critic for a Seattle newspaper, work that he found “soul-deadening.”