Freddy's Book is profoundly dissatisfying. I came to it as a great admirer of John Gardner's previous fiction—Grendel, October Light, the tales in The King's Indian—but as a disparager of his unscholarly Chaucer biography and his self-righteous critical tract, On Moral Fiction. In his fiction Gardner has been inventive, witty, and entertaining. In his criticism he has been plagiaristic, self-serving, and sanctimonious. Freddy's Book, a novel, shares more qualities with Gardner's criticism than with his fiction. (p. 36)

In On Moral Fiction Gardner claims that "Art … discovers by its process what it can say" (emphasis his). But in the first part of Freddy's Book there is no discovery by process. Characters are always where Gardner needs them: Winesap goes to Agaard's house for no really interesting reason; heavy snow confines him there for the night, conveniently, so he can be goaded into reading demented Freddy's little book...