When the stock market crashes on the Thursday before Easter, you - an ambitious, though ineffectual and not entirely ethical young broker - are convinced you're facing the Weekend From Hell. You don't know the half of it! This is, after all, a Tom Robbins novel.

Obviously, before the market reopens on Monday, you're going to have to scramble and scheme to cover your butt, but there's no way you can anticipate the baffling disappearance of a 300-pound psychic, the fall from grace of a born-again monkey, or the intrusion in your life of a tattooed stranger intent on blowing your mind and most of your fuses.

Over these fateful three days, you are jerked from one trial and one revelation to another; forced to confront things ranging from mysterious African rituals to legendary amphibians, from tarot-card bombshells to street violence, from your own sexuality to outer space. The weekend isn't from Hell, it's from Sirius the Dog Star.

And by the time it's over, the glide path of your destiny has been knocked widely askew. You may or may not be a better person, you may or may not have found love, the world may or may not be a different place, yet cosmic connections have been established that cannot be broken. And as an indication of lust how strange it has all become, you - prosaic, materialistic, irritable you - are left with a complete understanding of the surprisingly serious phrase "half asleep in frog pajamas.".

According to the Los Angeles Times, "Trying to describe a Tom Robbins novel by summarizing its plot is like pointing to a snowflake and asking someone to grasp the concept of downhill skiing." Robbins's eagerly awaited sixth novel is no exception, but the foregoing provides a cursory peek at the narrative drift of a daring, entertaining, and illuminating reading experience.

In Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas, the author explores new terrain. As always, however, his prose is funny, wise, provocative, erotic, lyrical - and a little on the wild side. Longtime Robbins readers will be delighted. Newcomers will be amazed.