"Nothing could be more obvious," says John Gardner [in On Moral Fiction], "than that art should be moral and that the first business of criticism, at least some of the time, should be to judge works of literature (or painting or even music) on grounds of the production's moral worth." Acknowledging our usual embarrassment in the presence of words like "morality," he sets out to demonstrate the practice of moral criticism. Gardner positions his moral telescope...

There is a paragraph toward the end of On Moral Fiction in which Mr. Gardner tells us about the kind of frustration which must have led him to publish his beliefs about art in this form.

… I've been in conversations where no one seemed to care about the truth, where people argued merely to win, refused to listen or try to understand, threw in irrelevancies—some anecdote without conceivable bearing, some mere ego flower. A thousand times I have heard some person—some ...

It is not surprising … to find Gardner publishing On Moral Fiction, a theoretical/critical book which will probably be quoted as widely as Gass's Fiction and the Figures of Life was a few years ago, not because Gardner's formulations of the new fictional conservatism are particularly brilliant but because he articulates feelings and tastes many disgruntled readers share. Gass's essays had an elegant uselessness; Gardner's appeal is plain talk and righteousness. I have hear...