During the late 1970s and early 1980s, I read a lot of this type of "madcap" book about colorful misfits roaming the American byways; Tom Robbins is perhaps the king of the form. Dixiana Moon was my favorite of them, and it retains its charm for me even after the others have lost their appeal.
The difference is in its narrator. My previous review remarks on Joe Mahaffey's level of enthusiasm, which is definitely his most endearing quality. Joe also appreciates fine craftmanship: he works in the product packaging industry and often comments on the great color registration or heat sealing on products he comes across:
A.J. was from Louisiana. He had a '62 Cadillac pulling a '69 Airstream and lived with two black Labradors and four cats. His dogs and cats were eating dry kibble. He bought it in fifty-pound bags. Good, heavy-duty, triple-ply bag with a built-in tear-string. World Wide Paper had some board-of-directors deal on this business and no one even tries to compete.
But Joe is also a regular middle-class Northerner, something of a straight man, leaving the true wackiness to other characters. This trait makes him easy to identify with even though his personality is completely different from mine.
During this reading, I noticed how consistent the book was in addressing its theme of optimism in the face of the end of an era. The age of the traveling salesman is almost over, television is replacing the circus and tent revivals, and packaging is becoming cheaper, but the characters don't spend time lamenting their fate:
The old peddlers were dying off. Maybe we were already dead. But the tent circus was dead, too. And the circus-and-religion combination wasn't going to cut it either. But Buck wasn't worried. Loretta wasn't worried. They both knew that down the road was something new. Something bigger and wilder and better, with more money and more fun and more everything of everything.
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