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“Disaster’s always best when it’s on a grand scale.��

�� and the scale certainly is grand in Tom Robbins�� rollicking riot of a novel. 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.

This was my first Robbins novel, and despite its flaws I did enjoy it. I am particularly impressed by his unique descriptive style: instead of telling us that someone has the chills he writes that “ice cubes clink against the swizzle stick of your spine.�� Nice touch, Mr. Robbins. I look forward to exploring the rest of his canon in the future. I just hope that there’s more madcap glee than abstruse philosophy.

Grade: B-