Jitterbug Perfume

We often think of certain emotions having a particular colour. Anger is red, jealousy is green. Critics might call a piece of music melancholic, brash or aggressive. A sommelier might claim the experience of the tasting a particular wine can lead us think of nostalgia, masculinity, and notes of wet concrete. I once had a white rum from the Dominican Republic that tasted like bacon fat.

Why should our experience of reading prose be any different? I'm not just talking about plain metaphor. Writing can easily appear flat and lacking vibrancy like a chastised soufflé. It can be electric and fast, bouncing like an EDM track in your head, or nagging and slow like thick gorse. Just as our senses can stumble over each other, creating quirky synaesthesia in our conscious broadband, so too can written prose produce its own weird experiences.

Jitterbug Perfume is written like a Jackson Pollock painting and illustrated like an episode of Superjail. The story and characters, locations and sensations are all strung along like the floating pinpricks of fairy light, suspended in the night sky by Robbins' irreverent, erratic and disillusory prose. Each paragraph has its own smell and colour, a lecherous goblin coxswain beating its own languid pace and yelling obscenities at its page mates. It is a book to be tasted, so full of imaginative detail and filigree that an eye could never appreciate it all. I'd even go as far as say that some of his metaphors defy visual understanding (as the many-buttocked thighs of Seattle with have acknowledge lmao).

Curiously, no one in Jitterbug Perfume is egocentric or domineering. Few of the characters seem to know or care that they're meant to be holding up a plotline, readily enjoying themselves in sticky carnality and critical musings. Free-wheeling paragraphs lean out from the page to spritz us with and erotic vapour to keep us in a daze, distracting us from the sock hung over the doorknob as the protagonists take a literary five. It takes until the last third of the novel for the different subplots to even lift their head from the sheets and acknowledge they're all in the same room.

This is a book that needs to be enjoyed before it can be read. The cast will stamp their feet in frustration if you approach them with too serious an eye. The poetry will blow a raspberry if you try and question its melodrama. In order to appreciate the absurdist theme, the lewd topnote and the beet-red basenote of laughter that holds it all together as a base, you'll need to first ask yourself: am I ready to smell fun?