If Thomas Pynchon were a Muppet, he would write like Tom Robbins.

That may be, indeed, a large part of the problem in reading Robbins. 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. No one ever gets hurt very badly …, 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. Love or something like it really does conquer all in his parables, with a mixture of stoned gaiety, positive thinking, and Sunday Supplement Taoism. (p. 153)

But these are harsh words for a writer who is, undoubtedly, the underground undergraduate enthusiasm of the seventies…. Furthermore, writers as reticent as Graham Greene and as reticent as Pynchon himself...