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 Yippie formulas for living the good life across the rainbow from the reality principle. The speed of his ricocheting metaphors may well hustle you past the patent falsity of the moral that crowns his tale of a princess and her princely savior….

[All the] whirligigs of plot spin out opportunities for the elaboration of the Woodpecker's thought, which is the chief sweetener in the whole concoction of metaphor...