Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates

Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates is Tom Robbins' seventh and longest novel, first published in 2000.

Plot introduction

Invalids follows Switters, our wheelchair-using protagonist, across four continents, in and out of love and danger. Through Switters, Robbins "explores, challenges, mocks, and celebrates virtually every major aspect of our mercurial era." (Quote from the hardcover book jacket.)

Robbins has stated in numerous interviews that in this book he was trying to deal with contradiction. But rather than eschewing his contradictory nature, as is typical Western practice, Switters embraces it. He's a CIA agent who hates the government. He's a pacifist who carries a gun. He's as much in love with his seventeen-year-old stepsister as he is with a forty-six-year-old nun. Switters feels that the core of the universe, the heart of existence, is light and dark existing together. One is not separate from the other, they just exist. This is the core of "Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates", along with an interest in the Lady of Fatima and a squawking parrot. The title of the novel comes from Arthur Rimbaud's A Season in Hell, in which he daydreams about becoming one of "... ces féroces infirmes retour des pays chauds."

Characters

Switters - Switters grew up in Seattle area, raised primarily by Maestra, his grandmother. His mother and father split when he was young, and she remarried to a man with a daughter named Suzy.

When we first meet Switters he is 35 years old, just returning to visit Maestra in Seattle. His love for her is obvious, as is his having arrogated her somewhat over-inflated manner of speaking. He does anything she asks of him, which is how he ends up in, as he puts it, "South too-damn-vivid America."

Switters abhors the more tedious routines of modern life, which he calls, collectively, "maintenance" - showering, shaving, primping of any kind, and, though he has quite an appetite, especially for red-eye gravy, he can't abide to think of the process of excretion. He does not visualize his internal organs, nor their processes. Instead he envisions his viscera as more of a white ball of healing light. While this may smack of New-Age mysticism, Switters himself is aware of his own self-deception while at the same time reveling in it.

As presumably any other member of a national intelligence office, Switters has a few secrets. His most private is his love of show tunes. In the crocodile-skin valise in which he keeps his laptop and his gun, he also has, in a secret compartment, a CD of Broadway tunes, which he listens to in both his darkest and most joyous moments. He is heard - or overheard - singing lines from of one of Stephen Sondheim's most famous songs - "Send in the Clowns".

His primary character trait is his obsession with innocence. He is willing to accept anything that anyone does, so long as it is pure - that it comes from that person's own experience and beliefs, as opposed to simply following orders, instructions, or creed. He cares little for the practice of religion, perceiving it as corrupt, but has studied the Bible, Qur'an, and various mythologies. The exception to this is Zen, which he practices vaguely for the most part, though he does practice zazen.

Like many obsessions, his drive for innocence and purity spills over into his love life. Throughout the novel he carries on a very flirtatious - and occasionally salacious - email dialog with his 17-year-old stepsister Suzy. After his visit to South America, he spends some time convalescing in Sacramento at his mother's house, a setting that puts him in dangerously close proximity to the object of his affection, who, despite a bit of hesitation, returns her paramour's attention.

Later in the novel, Switters falls in love with a 46-year-old nun, who, despite her age, Switters finds just as pure as young Suzy.

External links

• The Aftrlife: A Tom Robbins Playground
• A review by Pat Belford
• Review by Booklist
• SFGate review