62 pages • 2 hours read
Tom RobbinsStill Life with Woodpecker
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 1980A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Prologue-Phase 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Prologue Summary
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussions of miscarriage.
An unnamed character gets a new typewriter, the Remington SL3, and is preparing to write a novel. His previous typewriter was an Olivetti, and he is a little intimidated by the new one but remains convinced it can do anything. His plan is to begin that night, after having a drink.
Phase 1, Chapter 1 Summary
It is the “last quarter of the twentieth century” (3), and something important is going to happen—everyone seems to feel it. Theories about this happening range from the Second Coming of Jesus to the discovery of Atlantis. Princess Leigh-Cheri doesn’t know what is going to happen, but she knows that it is a difficult period for lovers, exemplified by the fact that no one understands the moon anymore.
Phase 1, Chapter 2 Summary
In August, Leigh-Cheri looks out her attic window at the full moon. She wonders aloud, to her pet frog, Prince Charming, if the moon has a purpose. When the author asks his typewriter, the Remington SL3, if her question is a silly one, it quotes both Albert Camus and author Tom Robbins. However, they both get it wrong; the only serious question is, “Who knows how to make love stay?” (4). The answer to this question will reveal the moon’s purpose.
Phase 1, Chapter 3 Summary
Although Leigh-Cheri is a princess, she and most of her peers know that their positions are purely ceremonial. Her family, including her father, King Max, and her mother, Queen Tilli, are exiled from their kingdom. Max played poker until he had a heart valve replacement, which made his heartbeat audible and bluffing impossible. He switched to sports, which he spends hours watching on television every day. Queen Tilli spends her days changing clothes and talking to her Chihuahua. Her English is limited, and she mostly relies on her favorite phrase, “Oh-Oh, spaghetti-o” (6). Their sons—the number of whom she can “scarcely recall”—live throughout Europe, mostly engaged in shady business enterprises, and their daughter, Leigh-Cheri, spends her days in the attic.
Phase 1, Chapter 4 Summary
Leigh-Cheri’s family, the Furstenberg-Barcalonas, live in exile in a house in Seattle given to them by the CIA. It is surrounded by thorny blackberry bushes. Their former kingdom is now ruled by a military junta supported by the US government, which pays King Max to stay out of the politics there.
Phase 1, Chapter 5 Summary
Although Max and Tilli know that the house is bugged by the CIA, they spend their days complaining about their circumstances. Leigh-Cheri tries to convince them to move, but Max knows that will not change anything.
Phase 1, Chapter 6 Summary
Leigh-Cheri lives in the attic, with all the windows painted black but one, through which she can see the moon. She could leave but chooses to be there. The attic is bare, with only a pack of Camel cigarettes, a chamber pot, and her bed.
Phase 1, Chapter 7 Summary
Leigh-Cheri hasn’t always lived in the attic; after she was forced to leave the cheerleading squad, and college itself, she lived in her parents’ house in an average teenage bedroom with her pet frog, Prince Charming.
Phase 1, Chapter 8 Summary
Gulietta, the family’s only remaining servant, gave Prince Charming to Leigh-Cheri. Despite being in her 80s, Gulietta runs the entire household with Chuck, who serves as the gardener, chauffeur, and general handyman. Everyone knows that Chuck is a CIA operative, planted in the household to make sure Max wasn’t making plans to return to his homeland.
Gulietta has cared for Leigh-Cheri her entire life, telling her the same bedtime story each night. Despite the fact that Gulietta speaks no English, after years of hearing the story every night, Leigh-Cheri has come to understand it.
When Leigh-Cheri had a miscarriage while cheering during a football game, leading her to leave school and break up with her boyfriend, it was Gulietta who understood how deep the princess’s grief actually went. Gulietta gave her the frog, and Leigh-Cheri, believing that Gulietta knows something about magic that she does not, named it Prince Charming.
Phase 1, Chapter 9 Summary
Over the years, Leigh-Cheri has tried nearly every form of contraception but finds all the options cold and industrial. She wonders if their real purpose is to distance women from their own bodies, and from sex itself, because the distractions of sex don’t serve a capitalist society’s purposes. At college, Leigh-Cheri is disappointed by sex with her boyfriend and decides to enter a period of celibacy but gets pregnant before she can change her plans.
Phase 1, Chapter 10 Summary
Leigh-Cheri reflects that her boyfriend wanted her to get an abortion, but she had one before and didn’t want another one. The rules of royalty in her country complicate matters—if she wants royal privileges, even as an exile, she can’t marry or have children until she is 21 years old. She wants her royal privileges because she wants to do some good with her power. As a princess, instead of being rescued, she wants to be the rescuer.
Phase 1, Chapter 11 Summary
When Leigh-Cheri miscarried during a cheer routine at a college football game, she was asked to quit the squad, and then dropped out of school entirely. She moved home and agreed to submit to her parents’ rules.
Phase 1, Chapter 12 Summary
After Leigh-Cheri’s miscarriage, her parents insist that she grow up, but she is so privileged that she doesn’t know exactly what maturity is. Her parents, meanwhile, realize that Leigh-Cheri is beautiful and begin to see the possibilities for an advantageous marriage. They’ve never been interested in trying to marry Leigh-Cheri off, but now realize that if they do, they might be able to escape the CIA’s reach. Leigh-Cheri agrees to grow up, putting away her childhood and educating herself about the state of the world.
Phase 1, Chapter 13 Summary
One Sunday in early January, Leigh-Cheri reads about the Geo-Therapy Care Fest taking place in Hawaii and gets excited about something for the first time in years. She persuades Tilli to take her.
Phase 1, Chapter 14 Summary
Leigh-Cheri isn’t the only one who has realized, in the last quarter of the 20th century, that if humans want the world to survive, they have to change their ways. The Care Fest promises a wealth of presentations on different topics from presenters as famous as Ralph Nader. His presence is exciting to Leigh-Cheri, who has always admired him. In addition, she is excited about the birth control presentation.
Max and Tilli are relieved that Leigh-Cheri seems to have recovered and give her permission to go. Tilli, however, doesn’t want to go to Maui, and they decide that Gulietta will accompany Leigh-Cheri instead. When she finds out, Gulietta buys a bikini.
Phase 1, Chapter 15 Summary
Gulietta causes a commotion in the airport when security discovers Prince Charming in her luggage. Leigh-Cheri remembers the strict guidelines about bringing anything into Hawaii. She remembers hearing about how mongooses were brought into Hawaii to solve the rat problem, which resulted in an infestation of mongooses.
Bernard Mickey Wrangle, also on the flight, watches the chaos instigated by Gulietta’s frog, making it easier for him to smuggle seven sticks of dynamite onto the flight.
Phase 1, Chapter 16 Summary
Leigh-Cheri is excited for the Care Fest, imagining it to be an apolitical version of the United Nations, with every mind focused on solving the world’s problems. She doesn’t see the irony in the fact that, as she thinks about how many important problems there are to be solved in the world, she flips through magazines solely focused on romance, gossip, and beauty, all pointing toward love.
Further back in the plane, Bernard eats Twinkies.
Phase 1, Chapter 17 Summary
The plane lands in Hawaii, and Bernard, otherwise known as the Woodpecker, is excited to have successfully smuggled his dynamite to Hawaii.
Phase 1, Interlude Summary
The writer isn’t sure that the Remington SL3 is the right tool to write this novel. He can imagine it writing more professional things, but its electric hum and blue color seem too modern and technological for this task. He is intimidated and considers writing the rest with a pen. He imagines the perfect writing instrument, a carved wooden typewriter, with living mushrooms as its keys, which seems almost animalistic. He worries that the very modern Remington SL3 may not be able to deal with the story he wants to tell.
Prologue-Phase 1 Analysis
The Prologue, Interlude, and Epilogue stand apart from the main narrative of the novel. The Prologue establishes these sections as asides wherein the author of the narrative speaks directly to the reader. However, it is important to distinguish between the real author, Tom Robbins, and the “author” who functions as a character in the book. Although the author has the same occupation and is documenting his writing of the book in these chapters, he is not the real-life author, but a constructed character. This character returns in the Interlude at the end of Phase 1, in which he reenters the text to comment on both the writing process and the ongoing creation of the novel.
The Prologue also establishes the tone of the novel. The first paragraph ends with the author’s statement that “This is the cherry on top of the cowgirl. The burger served by the genius waitress. The Empress card” (2). This blend of mixed metaphors illustrates the stylistic wordplay characteristic of Robbins’s work, which features to some degree in all of his novels. His various references to feminine images and symbols, such as the Empress—a tarot card—also foreshadow the exploration of femininity and mysticism that arise throughout the novel.
In the Prologue, the Remington SL3 enters the text as the author’s new writing instrument, but also as a motif that recurs in these sections and occasionally in the main narrative. Rather than being merely the author’s tool, the typewriter becomes at various points both his ally and his enemy. The Remington SL3 is an electric typewriter, the author’s first, and as such, plays an important symbolic role in the text. One of the themes that Robbins explores is the ways in which technology distances humans from both their primal natures and the world. Robbins will return to The Modern World, the Old World, and the Human Animal through the author’s sections as he becomes increasingly convinced that the typewriter is not the right tool for his task. Phase 1 closes with an Interlude in which author is further along in the writing process and the Remington SL3 has become an adversary: “It appears to be looking over my shoulder even as I am looking over its” (33). Robbins’s interest in the power humans ascribe to inanimate objects is a thread that runs throughout the narrative. The author-as-character reimagines the typewriter—a modern tool—as a part of natural life that is grown, not built, with the idea that it would serve his purpose and thematic meaning better: “Better, a carved typewriter, hewn from a single block of sacred cypress; decorated with mineral pigments, berry juice, and mud; its keys living mushrooms, its ribbon the long iridescent tongue of a lizard” (33). Through the implication that a more “natural” instrument would better support his goal, the authorial character removes his own agency from the process of writing to some degree, another way in which Robbins juxtaposes the modern and natural worlds.
From the opening of Chapter 1, which begins with “the last quarter of the twentieth century” (3), Robbins firmly sets the story in a realistic time and also looks to the future, asserting that “Something momentous was bound to happen soon” (3). With this statement, Robbins foreshadows the novel’s inciting incident, in which Leigh-Cheri’s status quo is disrupted by the Care Fest, but broadens this shift to include the disruption of the world’s status quo as well. With this strategy, Robbins establishes the story firmly in the modern world. He brings up US global policy of the decades prior to the novel’s 1980 publication through the US government’s interference in King Max’s country: “the U.S. […] was loath to interfere in the internal affairs of a sovereign nation, particularly a nation that could be relied upon as an ally against those left-leaning nations in whose internal affairs the U.S. did regularly interfere” (7). Although the novel has a humorous tone, with asides like this, Robbins offers pointed commentary on then-current events, such as the moral implications and ideological justifications of the US government’s interference in other countries’ leadership.
By positioning the story as taking place in a longer continuum of human history, Robbins both increases the significance of contemporary events, but also diminishes them. This is one of several ways in which he balances addressing current events with the fairy tale construct that organizes the plot and characters. He also exercises this approach through the moon motif that is threaded throughout the narrative. In the first chapter, Leigh-Cheri asks Prince Charming, “Does the moon have a purpose?” (4). Robbins chooses the moon—a distant mysterious object that humans have, for thousands of years, imbued with symbolic significance—to juxtapose an older, more elemental understanding of the world with the modern setting of the novel. The moon motif appears through the novel’s structure as well: It is divided into four parts, labeled “phases.”
In Phase 1, Robbins develops additional themes he will explore throughout the rest of the novel. For instance, Leigh-Cheri is an exiled princess who is determined to play an active role in her own life and transcend the trope of the passive princess waiting for a hero to rescue her; in this sense, she becomes A Modern Fairy Tale Princess. This novel also tracks her coming of age, although—typical of Robbins—the author subverts the conventions of the traditional coming-of-age genre, establishing A Reverse Bildungsroman: Growing Up to Immaturity. Leigh-Cheri is determined to become more mature after leaving college and moving back to her parents’ house. Her initial goal—to use her power as royalty for the common good—suggests that her arc starts from a point of seriousness and conscientiousness indicative of growing maturity. However, through the introduction of Bernard the outlaw, Robbins sets Leigh-Cheri on a trajectory toward adulthood that involves moving toward immaturity.
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