In the best of all possible worlds, an anthology of Tom Robbins' short writings would be a literary humidor for fragrant spliffs of Taoist-Beat haiku. As it is, Wild Ducks Flying Backward reads like the draft fragments of a mostly incomprehensible novel. Travel pieces sifted of information and bad poetry, with the occasional New York Times, Esquire or Playboy humdinger offered as a sweetener (of the Doors, he wrote, 'Their style is early cunnilingual, late patricidal'; of McDonald's, 'The wedding of high technology and food service has produced a robot cuisine, a totalitarian burger, the standardised sustenance of a Brave New World').

Robbins has always been a sporadic performer. A year from 70, he has produced both epochal works of wonder (Still Life With Woodpecker, 1980) and garbage (Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas, 1994). His universe is peopled by red-haired bombers, bisexual female hitchhikers with suggestively large thumbs, and artistically inspired waitresses (the first of his three wives was a waitress). There are flashes of such mythomaniacal elan throughout Wild Ducks, if not enough. Of a resort hotel in Florida, he writes: 'Pink is what red looks like when it kicks off its shoes and lets its hair down ... Pink is as laid back as beige, but while beige is dull and bland, pink is laid back with attitude. The Don CeSar ... wears that attitude well. It knows that it looks ... as if it mutated from a radioactive conch patch.'

His sensibility is both florid and stoned, half-formed, romantic and yet fuelled by freewheeling boners - a kind of philosophical paisley. Kneejerk reactions to Reaganomics, developers, tax breaks and the colour beige are understandable in an unhappy alumnus of Virginia's Hargrave Military Academy. (He once described Virginia as 'racist, sexist, homophobic, hide-bound, purse-lipped, gun-toting' and more in that vein.)

Like every good East Villager of the 60s, he's devoted to anti-establishmentarianism. The difference? His gift as a novelist separates him from his ideological peers. Brautigan, Bukowski, Ginsberg ... their limited attention spans were better suited to crystallised insights than to the broad sweep of a sustained narrative. They honoured Whitman's challenge to the world. Life was their medium.

The real problem is that Robbins' allergy to fact disqualifies him from reportage. He belongs to the school of hyperbolic intellectual impressionism favoured by Dali and sometimes Joyce, with presentations by Ram Dass and R.D. Laing. An example? 'The lethal lullaby of the tsetse ... is arguably preferable to the anaesthetic drone of computers, freeway traffic, and television sets; and the wild, hot beauty of the Selous is worth almost any risk.'

A taste for mannered prose extends to a certain predictability of outcome - Didion will never relax into a passionate memoir; P.J. O'Rourke will never pen a treatise on western economic injustices in Africa - and in this respect, Robbins is much the same. He will never seriously apply himself to his subjects, preferring hallucinatory shimmers to the rigours of ostensibly objective accuracy.

It's all about freedom - freedom from consumerism, freedom from homogenisation, freedom from expectations of consistency. But is he fundamentally humanist or onanist? Robbins lives only for the 'Tarzan yell of man the innocent, man the free. It warbles back and forth across the boundary between human and beast, expressing in its extremes and convolutions all the unrestrained and holy joy of ultimate aliveness.'

Wild Ducks may well be more indulgence than a testament to his talent, but Robbins remains a dharma bum to the end. After all, 'tranquility is also a necessary component of romantic adventure.' Who cares about the status quo? As he writes: 'An unlikely, unexpected burst of linguistic imagination will usually reveal greater truths than the most exacting scholarship'. He uses books in the same way a photographer uses a golden reflector - language as the flattering light shed on an utilitarian reality. To him, art is a 'temporary visa to a less ordinary dimension, where our existential burden is momentarily lifted and we surf a wave of pure perceptual pleasure'.

In short, something of a moonshine arpeggio.