Tom Robbins Meets the Beer Fairy

Through Gracie’s visit with the Beer Fairy, Robbins explores the theme of the Mystery, namely the idea that the divine is present in real life and that, as the Beer Fairy puts it, adults thirst for “that alternative to the unsatisfying reality men have constructed for themselves.” According to the Beer Fairy, a foamy brew serves as the vehicle that connects people, on rare occasions, to the transcendent and the mystical.

The book’s highlight is the Beer Fairy’s meticulous and clear explanation of how beer is made, which is both fascinating and easy to understand, but it comes sandwiched within the larger story of Gracie, her insensitive dad, oblivious mother, and authorial avatar Uncle Moe. The story is quirky—Gracie has spunk, her Sunday-school teacher has breath that could “paralyze a rattlesnake,” and Uncle Moe runs off to Costa Rica with his podiatrist at the drop of a hat. However, emotional complexity is largely absent and the characters feel like placeholders, present only to further the book’s dogmatic purposes.

The beautiful language masks a schizophrenic plot. On one hand, there’s Robbins’ attempt to explain the history of beer and how it’s made; on the other hand, he wants to write a sarcastic fable that holds the readers’ narrative interest and allows him to take a couple of cheap shots at institutional religion.

Although Robbins issues a disclaimer to the effect of “kids, don’t try this at home,” the fact that 6-year-old Gracie chugs a beer, pukes, and is rewarded by a visit from the Beer Fairy speaks louder than Robbins’ warning. He also explains vocabulary inconsistently. The word “podiatrist” gets an in-text definition, but “that ethereal plateau, where, to paraphrase Baudelaire, all human whimsies float and merge” goes unexplained.

At the end of the day, The New Yorker cartoon may be right— a children’s book about beer wouldn’t sell, unless it were poetically written by Tom Robbins for a primarily adult audience. He makes a valiant effort to meld history with fairytale, but some of his readers might have preferred a cold frosty mug of narrative exposition.

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Lizzie Stark is a freelance journalist who has written for the Philadelphia Inquirer and The Daily Beast. She also edits the lit-mag Fringe and is at work on a narrative nonfiction book about Live Action Role Play.