Still Life with Woodpecker

Although born in North Carolina in 1932, Robbins has lived in Washington state since moving there to attend the University of Washington for a master’s degree in the 1960s. While in Seattle, Robbins worked as a journalist, specifically an art critic, and hosted a radio show. While working as a journalist, Robbins spent nights working on his first novel, Another Roadside Attraction.

Another Roadside Attraction was published in 1971 and became an immediate cult classic. Robbins followed this success with his second novel, Even Cowgirls Get the Blues, which was adapted by director Gus Van Sant into a 1993 film starring Uma Thurman. Still Life with Woodpecker was Robbins’s third novel and firmly established him in the canon of 20th-century American authors. In 2000, Writer’s Digest named Robbins one of the 100 Best Writers of the 20th Century, and he was famously called “the most dangerous writer in the world today” by Fernanda Pivano, an Italian critic for Corriere della Sera.

Robbins’s novels are defined by their humor and wordplay, which inform the satirical nature of his work. Satire is a genre in which the author uses humor—including exaggeration, sarcasm, and irony, among other devices—to expose the flaws in social, cultural, and political institutions. On the surface, Robbins’s work is light and playful, but he explores serious issues and current events at the time of publication. Robbins also plays with literary convention, using traditional literary tropes and then subverting them to expose the flaws in leaning too heavily into narrow perspectives both in art and life. It is important to note that, in his work, Robbins uses racism and sexism to satirize the casual acceptance of such bigotry that still existed in the late 1970s and early 1980s. The intention is to deconstruct these terms, but the overt use of them in a novel with such a playful tone can be read as a recreation of bigotry, not a deconstruction. This aspect of his work reveals a complicated, unspoken issue in much of American literature: Authors like Robbins who are viewed as progressive for their era still operate on the presumption of a white audience who has not experienced the violence of racism.

Robbins’s work is also often categorized as “fabulism.” Fabulist literature uses elements of fantasy, myth, and folklore in otherwise realist literature in order to better explore its thematic content. As a form of magical realism, fabulism is often seen as operating outside the traditional rules and conventions of realism. In a book like Still Life with Woodpecker, Robbins’s use of fabulism echoes the thematic messages of the novel, which advocate for subverting traditional roles and rules and disrupting convention. Leigh-Cheri redefines the role of princess, moving from passive to active, making herself the hero of her story, and Bernard redefines “outlaw” as being distinct from “criminal,” giving the trope a moral aspect. Even Gulietta redefines her role as nursemaid, transcending her social status to become a queen. Through his adoption of fabulism in his novels, Robbins uses literary devices and techniques to support the thematic messages of his work.