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 cent...

In considering contemporary fiction, John Barth writes, "My own analogy would be with good jazz or classical music: one finds much on successive listenings or on close examination of the score that one didn't catch the first time through; but the first time through should be so ravishing—and not just to specialists—that one delights in the replay." Tom Robbins's Still Life With Woodpecker does not fare well with this kind of test. As witty as the novel is in places,...

Old fashions of escape literature never die; they come back with new drapes, dyes and hemlines, and the cotton candy of yesteryear is now laced with cocaine to dull the ache in teeth rotted by sugar. Fairy tales that charm the young invite their elders to scan them as symptomatic fantasies of flight from the anxieties of the age. So there's something for everyone in ["Still Life With Woodpecker"], Tom Robbins's medley of antique fairy tales, Aquarian shibboleths and didactic Yipp...