When Tom Robbins published "Another Roadside Attraction" in 1971 and then topped it with "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues" in 1976, it appeared a new madman-genius of fiction had been loosed from the American counterculture. But the counterculture grew up, and in 1981, when he put out the humdrum and commercial "Still Life with Woodpecker," he sold some books, but phrases like "sold-out" and "burned-out" kept coming to mind.

Well, not true. The old Tom Robbins is back, and with his newest novel, "Jitterbug Perfume," he proves he is fully as crazy as ever, as full of astonishing word play, unimaginable characters and swooshing flights of observation. "Jitterbug" is as funny and weird and wise and wide-ranging and bizarre as even the most jaded ex-Robbins fan could ask.

It is about beet pollen.

And a thousand-year-old man. And three succulent women, and one aging fat one. And Pan, and perfume, and Paris, and permanence, and perfidy. And sex.

Robbins writes about sex the way Roger Kahn writes about baseball, the way Calvin Trillin writes about food, the way Boswell wrote about Johnson, and none of his books lack a woman of such sexual pliance and aptitude that most people probably could live happy, fulfilled sex lives just savoring Robbins' leftover fantasies.

["Jitterbug Perfume"] is generally about the value and enhancement of life and the creation of the ultimate scent. It isn't easy to explain Tom Robbins books.

It is easy to extoll them, though, and this one in particular takes the wild energy and fancy of his early books and combines them with a raft-in-a-rapids sort of control that, in comparison to his first work, makes "Jitterbug Perfume" at times seem downright disciplined. Without sacrificing any of his remarkable unravelings of imagination and his renegade comic philosophy, without diluting the wonderful madness at the heart of what he does, Robbins has produced an intricately fitted novel capable of neatly resolving the relations of beets and gods and immortalists and perfumists while having and giving a very good time.