Still Life with Woodpecker
Tom Robbins's 1980 novel pairs Princess Leigh-Cheri, the exiled daughter of a deposed monarchy, with Bernard Mickey Wrangle, a bomb-throwing outlaw who calls himself the Woodpecker. They meet at an environmental conference in Hawaii and end up locked in a love affair that quickly turns into a long argument about what holds people together and what blows them apart. Robbins narrates with a peacock voice, peppering the story with digressions on pyramids, redheads, Camel cigarettes, and the geometry of romance. The result is a book that reads as a fairy tale for adults who like their fairy tales philosophical and a little stoned. It became one of the defining cult novels of its decade.
What you might want to know about Still Life with Woodpecker
The questions readers send us most often, answered without spoilers.
An exiled princess falls for a redheaded outlaw with a thing for dynamite, and the two argue about love, royalty, and how to make love stay.
Barrymore listed it on both her One Grand Books top ten and her 2016 favorites for The Week, where she called it like a fairy tale for wild adults.
No. Still Life with Woodpecker is self-contained and is often where new readers first meet his voice.
Still Life with Woodpecker was written by Tom Robbins, published in 1980 by Bantam.
Still Life with Woodpecker is 277 pages in standard print editions, though page counts vary slightly between hardcover, paperback, and large-print formats.
At an average reading pace of about 250 words per minute, Still Life with Woodpecker takes most readers 4 to 6 hours to finish.
Still Life with Woodpecker is available in hardcover, paperback, ebook, and audiobook formats from Amazon, Bookshop.org, ThriftBooks, and most major bookstores.