Diana Page Jordan | Book Reviews and Inspiration

B Is for Beer

By Tom Robbins

Published April 21, 2009 (Hardcover) Ecco Books

I’ve had maybe five beers in my entire life, which makes me a highly unlikely consumer of this book.  Let’s make that a highly delighted consumer.

Maybe because I grew up in an alcoholic household, it didn’t make me mad that six-year old Grace — the heroine in B is for Beer — was drinking beer.  That would be the only downside to this daringly – is that a word? I don’t care, I’m drunk with laughter – hysterical book.  It is a book billed as both a children’s book for grown-ups and a grown-up book for children.

Tom Robbins manages to be completely politically-incorrect at the same time as he weaves an amusing fairy tale — with a Beer Fairy!

Young Grace — about to celebrate her sixth birthday — is seduced by beer by her “nut job” Uncle Moe who vanishes before he is able to fulfill his promise to show her how beer is made.  Her lawyer-father is a philanderer who breaks every promise, and her mother is prissy and weak.  Can you say dysfunctional family.

Grace — abandoned on her sixth birthday — gets drunk, and finds the magical place between this world and the other world.  It used to be called magic, but Robbins says that word got too tired, so he uses Mystery, and populates that space with a Beer Fairy who takes Grace everywhere she needs to see.

I quit drinking eighteen years ago, but I’ve never quit Mystery.  Oh honey, don’t worry, I have had my party years.  It’s just that I looked down the road back then, and saw how drinking — a lot — had poisoned most of my family.  Black Russians.  Scotch on the rocks.  Shots of tequila.   So I quit.  Cold turkey.

Robbins writes “Beer, if it’s just the right amount…may on occasion transport one through that crack and carry one close enough to the gates of the Mystery so that one’s granted a quick but entirely rapturous peek inside.”

Gracie asks what is looks like, and the Beer Angel answers, “…what do forever and laughter and liberty look like?…It’s the meaning of meaning, the other that has no further, and the which of which there is no whicher.”

See what I mean?  Delightful!

I do remember one of those beers.  I was in radio — a few years before my kids were born — and I was on stage on one of the hottest days the Portland-area had to offer.  That cold beer hit the spot.  It was a music festival called “Freeday in the Country.”  I caught a glimpse of that Mystery that day.

And I have seen her many, many times since then — without an alcohol boost.  I haven’t seen the Beer Fairy, but I have seen many other fairies and angels.  And, even an elf or two.

Cheers, Tom!