I found an interview with Tom Robbins on Borders' site, he had a very interesting (and eloquent answer). His books are usually very odd, as are the main characters, but he seems brilliant and impressively weird. I'm jealous.

September 11 doesn't play a huge role in the novel, but it's there. The book suggests that American arrogance, self-satisfaction, and focus on the minutiae of capitalist life were directly responsible. Do you agree? Also, having read that you take a very methodical approach to your writing, I wondered if you began this book before or after the attacks.

TR: Perhaps the supreme tragedy of the September 11 attacks is how easily they could have been avoided if the U.S. had a foreign policy that was even remotely worthy of a nation that professes to be moral, benevolent, and favored by God. It would be easy enough to catalog the evils of that policy and the unevolved shysters who formulate it, but I try to avoid the overtly political in both my life and my work. My approach is to encourage readers to say "yes" to life, on the assumption that anybody who's saying "yes" to life will automatically say "no" to economic determinism and the destruction and self-destruction that economic determinism invariably spawns.

Villa Incognito was begun nearly a year before the attacks, but since the protagonist of my last novel, Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates, proclaimed that "terrorism is the only logical response to America's foreign policy," the knowledge that such an event was inevitable obviously lay napping somewhere in the basement of the text. When 9/11 occurred, it slid up the stairs and into the narrative as effortlessly as an amoeba sliding up a soda straw.