Novel: Still Life with Woodpecker

Overview
Still Life with Woodpecker is a playful, philosophical love story by Tom Robbins that pairs improbably romanticism with sharp social satire. The novel centers on Princess Leigh-Cheri, a royal with a conscience and a flair for environmental causes, and Bernard Mickey Wrangle, an outlaw whose rough edges and stubborn individualism both attract and frustrate her. Robbins uses their relationship as a vehicle to explore questions of freedom, loyalty, and the absurdities of modern life.
The narrative blends fable, metafictional commentary, and comic digressions. Recurring motifs , most famously a persistent woodpecker and a fascination with red hair , give the book an emblematic texture, turning intimate scenes into springboards for larger meditations about identity and the human need for connection.

Plot
The story follows the unlikely courtship between a disenchanted princess and a self-styled outlaw. Their initial attraction is electric and physical, yet it quickly becomes a philosophical clash: she seeks meaning and ethical clarity, while he prizes autonomy and an irreverent rejection of conventional duty. A dramatic incident involving the outlaw forces both characters into crisis and exile, after which much of the novel proceeds through their separation and a torrent of letters.
Those letters, interspersed with the narrator's asides, reveal shifting loyalties and evolving self-understanding. Each character tries to justify their choices while grappling with consequences that test their principles. The woodpecker, the princess's environmental concerns, and the outlaw's guerrilla impulses crystallize into a practical and existential debate about whether love requires sacrifice or whether freedom must remain uncompromised.

Themes and Style
Robbins writes with a buoyant, irreverent voice that mixes elegiac tenderness with caustic wit. The text moves freely between slapstick humor, erotic candor, and earnest philosophical probing. Robbins is particularly interested in the tension between rules and rebellion, using the lovers' conflict to interrogate whether societal obligations crowd out authenticity or whether bonds and promises give life shape.
Environmentalism, consumer culture, and the performative aspects of identity are recurrent concerns. Robbins toys with romantic clichés even as he upends them; the princess's activism and the outlaw's countercultural pose become lenses for examining how authenticity is constructed and how desire reshapes moral calculus. The woodpecker functions as a symbol of obsession and persistence, and red hair serves as a tiny myth of otherness and magnetism.

Characters
Princess Leigh-Cheri is at once ingénue and activist: regal by birth, earnest in her convictions, and vulnerable in love. Her internal debate about duty versus longing drives much of the emotional current. Bernard Mickey Wrangle, the outlaw, is charismatic, stubborn, and paradoxical , a man who demands freedom but whose attachments pull him toward possessiveness and self-sabotage.
A chorus of secondary figures , court functionaries, activists, and miscellaneous eccentrics , populate the novel, amplifying its satirical take on institutions and trends. A semi-omniscient narrator threads the pieces together with rueful commentary, offering aphorisms and moral puzzles that invite the reader into the novel's speculative game.

Legacy
Still Life with Woodpecker has become a cult favorite for readers attracted to its mixture of whimsy, erotic frankness, and philosophic curiosity. It stands as a quintessential example of Robbins's voice: exuberant, idiosyncratic, and defiantly anti-didactic. The novel's insistence that love, like life, resists tidy answers continues to resonate, prompting readers to laugh at the absurdities of human attachment while pondering what it means to be true to oneself and to another.