Skinny Legs and All

Skinny Legs and All is the fifth book by the American novelist Tom Robbins, published in 1990 by Bantam Books. As with his other novels, it weaves disparate and seemingly unrelated themes into a single narrative.

The opening scene follows newlyweds Ellen Cherry Charles and Randolph Petway the third, known as Boomer, driving across the country in a caravan that has been welded into the shape of a giant turkey. Ellen Cherry is travelling to make her way as an artist, and the book tracks the objects she loses along the way and the recognition that Boomer gains, so the art world is treated as a field with its own rules rather than as a backdrop. The restaurant across the street from the United Nations belongs to an Arab and a Jew, and the book keeps that pairing inside the same frame as the comedy about a caravan welded into the shape of a turkey.

The restaurant, Isaac and Ishmael's, is presented as an experiment in international brotherhood and is attacked by Arabs, Jews and Christians alike. The novel's method is to keep the political material and the domestic comedy in the same frame.