HALF ASLEEP IN FROG PAJAMAS by Tom Robbins

Finished We 4/6/22

This is one of my ancient trade paperbacks that I bought at the library book sale on Sa 6/9/18, but I had never read.

Very funny and the writing was clever and there was a phrase or passage on nearly every page of the book that was notable. 

Gwen Mati is an American/Philippine who is 'badly' together with a rich guy, but sexually attracted to Larry Diamond. They both work in the investment game, but Larry is a fringe character and the market has just tanked. 

The boyfriend owns a monkey and he has escaped and can only be seduced with banana popsicles. 

The action takes place over an Easter weekend in the Seattle area. 

 From a reviewer at Goodreads:

"It opens with the beginning of a disastrous three-day weekend for one Gwendolyn Mati, a lovingly unlikable stockbroker whose ambitions are sky high and whose perceptions seem hopelessly shallow. It is the night before Good Friday and there has been a disastrous plunge in the stock market that has the whole economy screaming disaster, and Gwen finds herself facing termination on Monday morning thanks to some shady ethics she exercised in her client’s portfolios that have been brought to light by the crash. Her once-promising boyfriend, Belford, is annoying her to no end after developing an unhealthy dose of Christian guilt that is compelling him to leave his promising real estate career for (gasp!) social work. Gwen desperately needs to find a way to keep her job before Monday morning, but she can’t seem to get a seemingly sleazy former stockbroker named Larry Diamond off her mind. And things only get worse the following day, when Belford’s born-again pet monkey escapes and Gwen’s best friend, a 300 pound psychic named Q-Jo, vanishes. All this happens in the first hundred pages of “Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas,” and the Robbins roller coaster has only just begun. There’s still a curious cancer treatment, a bunch of overly rich and rowdy teenagers, celestial interference, a sex offender, disappearing frogs, a transfixing Van Gogh sketch, aliens, and more to come.

“Half Asleep” is at its riotous best in its first half, when Robbins gives free reign to his limitless imagination, and the result is a philosophical-comedy mind-warp that could give Vonnegut’s masterful “Breakfast of Champions” a run for its money … until the second half of the novel devolves into a talky jumble of rambling philosophical dialogue that does more to annoy the reader than to enlighten him. I like what Robbins is saying underneath it all (that we need to chill out, think about how we define our lives, and focus on what really matters instead of allowing money and ambition steer us off course), but he weakens his argument by muddling it with random references to alien mushroom spores, enemas, et al. His specious asides confound more than anything else, and make you long for the carefree opening salvo that had said so much more without trying nearly as hard. The ending is also truly disappointing because it is all too sudden and leaves you with too many questions."

I skimmed the last fifty pages because I just wanted to get to the end. I have other books by the author and I would be willing to give them a try. I remember I even had the soundtrack to 'EVEN COWGIRLS GET THE BLUES' (John Cale) on cassette tape.