Stillborn Still Life

INVOKING HIS typewriter as a 20th century muse, Tom Robbins launches into his third novel with the warning, "If this typewriter can't do it, then fuck it, it can't be done." Like a keypunch operator waiting for a computer to spew out solutions, Robbins must have sat hopefully in front of his Remington SL3 expecting that, if he hit a button here and there, the sophisticated machine would spit back a novel of answers. Still Life With Woodpecker does not bear him out.

A hodgepodge of lukewarm witticisms and stale contemporary insights, Robbins's latest attempt to explain away the questions that have piqued man's curiousity for centuries succeeds in transcending the limits of arrogance set in his first two books. If he had something thoughtful to say, Robbins might be pardoned for relegating fiction to the role of facade for his musings. But the container he constructs with his la-dee-da plot and plaster-mold characters cannot bear the weight of his philosophical spoutings. The ideas strain to be released until the storyline can no longer bear the pressure, and at the end of the novel the bottom falls out.

Subtitled "A Sort of a Love Story," Still Life With Woodpecker tangentially concerns itself with the romantic woes of Leigh-Cheri Furstenberg-Barcelona, a princess from some made-up nation who resides in exile in Seattle with her parents. Having concluded that World Causes lend meaning and satisfaction to life (love had given her only an abortion and a miscarriage), Leigh-Cheri journies to Maui to attend the Geo-Therapy Care Fest, where she meets the other mouthpiece for Robins's thoughts, Bernard Mickey Wrangle, alias the Woodpecker. Wrangle, who has come to Maui to bomb the Fest, teaches the feeble-minded but articulate princess that (surprise) love is the only cause worth fighting for. Ergo, the challenge of life, the two heroes conclude, is to discover how to "make love stay."

After the authorities nab Bernard Mickey and throw him in jail, Leigh-Cheri sits in her room for half a year and discovers the meaning of life by staring at a pack of Camel cigarettes. She promises to marry an Arab Sheik, provided he builds her a pyramid. The Woodpecker eventually gets out of the clink, meets her in the pyramid and reiterates the dilemma of transitory love. The sheik bombs the pyramid. The princess and the frog go deaf and, maybe, learn to make love stay. They live happily ever after.

UUNFORTUNATELY, however, that is not "the end." Woven in among the tenous plot threads are various images and metaphors that Robbins feels compelled to pick apart in the last few pages of the book. Why all this talk about pyramids and Camel packages and red-headed people and princesses and the moon? The reason, explains Robbins, is that all of these sundry things share one characteristic: they are means of connecting ourselves with "the mystery" that makes love important to the human race. The author extends his argument by noting that although mystery likes movement, we only perceive it when we stand still. Somehow, the reader gleans, the title of the novel relates to this concept.

Earlier passages hint at what Robbins may be trying to get at during the epilogue. Consider one of the sermonettes Woodpecker delivers to Leigh-Cheri:

There's always the same amount of good luck and bad luck in the world. If one person doesn't get the bad luck, somebody else will have to get it in their place. (etc., etc.) We can never alter the ratio of good to evil. All we can do is keep things stirred up so neither good nor evil solidifies. That's when things get scary. Life is like a stew, you have to stir it frequently, or all the scum rises to the top.

Robbins has conceived passage after passage of insights like this, most of them capped off by similes that reel under the weight of overwriting. Unable to resist the opportunity to sneak in a comparison wherever it will or will not fit, Robbins allows himself to write these words: "Leigh-Cheri took a swig from the bottle.... She felt as if she were Saturday night television and there were an orchestra up her nose."

Granted, this style makes for an occasional humorous line, and few will charge Robbins with the crime of dullness. If Robbins were better writer, one might be tempted to compare his style with Kurt Vonnegut's. But the pseudo-ideological dregs that comprise the stuff of the novel overpower and stifle the cleverness; and Robbins has not earned the right to be off-handed and conversational with his readers.

Smatterings of vague humility, however, do punctuate choice sections of Still Life. Every 75 pages or so, Robbins evaluates the performance of his Remington SL3, often admitting that somehow it is not performing up to par, despite the technological conveniences it manifests. Only once does he shift the blame for Still Life to himself, only once does he acknowledge the lone clear message conveyed by his prose--only once does he refer to himself as "an underdeveloped novelist with an overdeveloped typewriter." Yet he does take the poor machine out of it agony for the last half of the epilogue; he writes the "mystery of love" section in longhand. At least that last desperate gesture lends credence to his first sentence--emphatically, it couldn't be done.