A t the beginning of his picaresque novel, Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates, Tom Robbins quotes a Hindu verse, "Sometimes naked / Sometimes mad / Now the scholar / Now the fool / Thus they appear on earth: / The free men." Thus, Robbins reveals the crux of his story—the world and its people are full of contradictions; the ones who understand this are the free men, or in the words of the protagonist, "enlightened and endarkened."

The protagonist embodies some of the contradictions Robbins wishes to illuminate. Switters is an unorthodox CIA agent who takes the designer-drug, XTC, for enlightenment, a vegetarian who eats red-eye gravy, a hacker who hates computers, a tough guy who is squeamish about bodily functions, a lover of innocence and purity who lusts after his teenage stepsister and has sex with a nun. Even Switters cannot decide whether he is a hero...