Still Life with Woodpecker

...hyper-plot...

...The difference is only a matter of perception...

...est) Robbins is, as a storyteller, as engaging and as fun to read, as cuddly, as anybody currently working at the trade...

...His novels, laced with deliberately dopey puns, goofy digressions, and half-mixed metaphors, are virtually plotless...

...Robbins, however, does not simply echo "oh, wow": he writes books, and that makes all the difference...

...This accounts also for his most common, and most distinctive, stylistic trick: the animation of the inanimate...

...are elder statesmen, Robbins seems determined, at whatever cost,' to reassert the fact that writing and reading fiction is fun: and, even more daringly, that fun itself is-well, fun...

...No one ever gets hurt very badly (only one chihuahua dies a violent death in Still Life...

...And, as one or any of Robbins's own characters might ask, what can be wrong with that...

...But in that distance between the rationalizing, distraught novelist and his wonderfully liberated creations lies Robbins's real strength and real brilliance...

...Buildings, appliances, molecules, sexual organs- anything in his fiction apparently can, and surely will, be described as if it were alive, conscious, and lovable...

...be wrong with that...

...And in Still Life With Woodpecker the Princess Leigh-Cheri, ecologically-minded daughter of deposed European monarchs living in Washington State, meets, falls in love with, and eventually saves the Woodpecker, an anarchist and dynamiter who may also be, like the Princess herself, the marooned child of supercon-scious extraterrestrial redhead outlaws...

...Nothing is implied here," he writes in Still Life, at the end of a digression on banyan trees, Thomas Jefferson, figs, and red hair...

...But, again, that is his point...

...Leigh-Cheri's love for doorknobs not only inverts what may well be the moment of birth, in fiction, of the existentialist sensibility-the moment in Sartre's Nausea where Roquen-tin discovers the horrifying otherness of the world by grasping a doorknob-it also reverses, precisely, the direction of avant-garde American fiction prior to Robbins...

...Except the possibility that everything is connected...

...Cheerful, even...

...And (dammit, let's be hon...

...Leigh-Cheri had come to consider the smallest, deadest thing as if it had some life of its own...

...Users of pharmaceutical consciousness-raisers, from cannabis to distilled malt, will of course recognize that state of mind in which everything does seem magically connected-the "oh, wow...

...A "second-generation postmodernist" (such are the absurdities spawned by literary-critical jargon), a man for whom Pynchon, Barth, Mailer, Vonnegut et al...

...state of happy and temporary satori...

...And Cowgirls-now being filmed-with a minimum of the hype and hysteria lavished on, say, The World According to Garp, has already become a phenomenal word-of-mouth moneymaker...

...Leigh-Cheri had a vision of the princess as hero...

...In the world of Thomas Pynchon' s stunning, paranoid fables we are all in danger of being reduced to the state of inanimacy, of flesh-and-blood robots, by the dark cartels who control our destiny...

...While Robbins, in his carefully-achieved and carefully-constructed innocence, his delicate assertions that we have a right to be joyful, even in the midst of chaos, can remind us of no one as much as Harpo, that most beautiful, vulnerable, and unassailable of clowns...

...I have said that the plots of his novels are all fairly uncomplicated: a heroine discovers an ancient wisdom that validates her own mystic sensibility and proceeds to save the world (or part of the world) with it...

...But these are harsh words for a writer who is, undoubtedly, the underground undergraduate enthusiasm of the seventies...

...By now there is something almost too familiar about this fare: refried Gnosticism, twice-baked existentialism, and parboiled science fiction have all but lost their tang for us, we have had it so often...

...Her grip lingered on doorknobs much longer than necessary...

...And in the world of Tom Robbins's grownup fairy tales, the world itself is on the verge of becoming as alive, as happy, and as loonily free as we think we ourselves might be in our best moments...

...in Even Cowgirls Get the Blues it may or may not occur after the last sentence in the book...

...In Another Roadside Attraction, an itinerant magician and his luscious, promiscuous lady discover that the corpse of Christ has been hidden in the caves of the Vatican, a refutation of the myths of Christianity and a validation of the ancient, erotic magic our hero and heroine believe in...

...Robbins has published three novels, Another Roadside Attraction in 1972, Cowgirls, and now Still Life...

...So that the real plot of a Robbins novel is very like the real plot of our learning to trust his fiction...

...His stories insist that everything is all right, that everything rightly perceived is beautiful, is part of the Tao (the path, the way, the great lump-all translations work...

...and although the world is threatened by the same dark, soulless business cartels that threaten the worlds of Pynchon, Mailer, and our century, in Robbins it doesn't seem, finally, to matter...

...nothing is sacred," declares our author at the end of Even Cowgirls Get the Blues (1976...

...In Another Roadside Attraction the implied and wished-for mating actually takes place...

...I believe in everything...

...But not quite...

...Furthermore, writers as reticent as Graham Greene and as reticent as Pyn-chon himself have expressed high praise for his work...

...Love or something like it really does conquer all in his parables, with a mixture of stoned gaiety, positive thinking, and Sunday Supplement Taoism...

...Or of a Muppet, an artificial construction of styrofoam, sponge rubber, and imagination whose frantic antics convince us, at least for the moment, that gaiety and grace are our birthright on this planet...

...in which the narrator himself, a definitively masculine and definitively confused writer, falls in love with his own heroine...

...I believe in nothing...

...But his storytellers incarnate his, and our, difficulty in accepting such a simple, pacific, happy gospel...

...Early in Still Life, the Princess imagines what may well be the epigraph for all Robbins's fiction: "Fairy tales and myths are dominated by accounts of rescued princesses," she reasoned...

...Both Pynchon and Robbins, for all their hipness, derive ultimately from an immediately familiar and impossibly old tradition of storytelling, that of the stand-up comic by Dickens out of the Marx Brothers...

...But how can we handle a writer who is comic, satiric, absurdist-but not at all apocalyptic...

...But should we trust a cuddly novelist...

...Cute, we might think...

...The difference between them-and maybe the difference between their decades of origin-is that Pynchon's comedy is most like the corrosive, bitter punning of Groucho at his best and worst...

...Ha ha ho ho and hee hee.'' Yoda couldn't have put it better...

...But that is almost the point of Robbins's novels...

...During the long central section of Still Life, the Princess, isolated from her lover, reinvents her love and incidentally reinvents the history of civilization by contemplating that most banal artifact of advertising technology, a Camel pack...

...Isn't it about time that a princess returned the favor...

...To be sure, this variety of feminism itself would or should offend many feminists: it assumes that our inherited ideas of "male" and "female" roles is not wrong, but has just been misapplied...

...in Still Life With Woodpecker it can never occur, just because the writer of fiction has finally admitted that he is a writer of fiction, that there is no way through his electric typewriter (a minor character in the novel) to the wonderfully sexy heroine he and the typewriter invent...

...He's so cute: his books are full of cute lines populated by unrelentingly cute people, even teeming with cute animals -frogs, chipmunks, and chihuahuas in Still Life With Woodpecker...

...everything is sacred...

...In each of his novels there is also an important subplot (para-plot...

...That may be, indeed, a large part of the problem in reading Robbins...

...But beneath the cuteness is a very high seriousness, indeed: so serious that it refuses to take itself seriously...

...In Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, the beautiful heroine, Sissy Hankshaw (cursed or blessed with incredibly outsize thumbs-so she becomes a hitchhiker) discovers the liberated life of an all-cowgirl, revolutionary feminist ranch in the Dakotas, and incidentally meets a Japanese-American savant (the "Chink") who has discovered the secret of the ancient, pre-Christian Western religion...

...The last twenty or so years of American fiction have taught us that comedy, satire, the absurd are all powerful tools for mapping the shape of the apocalypse upon whose edge we tremble...

...But that is a distortion...