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 heard "Kill the Aestheticians" murmured in my university library. Gardner responds to this kind of frustration with academic jargon by using words, such as Beauty, Truth, and Goodness, that most critics walked away from years ago. These abstractions come to have a sludge-like quality, Gardner's distinctions often lack precision (a favorite pejorative is "creepy"), and his readings of recent fiction are sometimes militantly unimaginative. But On Moral Fiction is still a necessary book because its earnest force requires even the reader who resists it page by page to examine his assumptions about fiction and because no other writer—Tom Wolfe in The Painted Word excepted—has reminded us recently that art is by and for human beings.
Gardner finds most contemporary American fiction and its criticism mediocre or worse…. What we need, argues Gardner, is a moral fiction, one that improves life through its sane and healthy vision and through its creation of character models for our imitation. The moral artist is the poet-priest who creates by a process of careful imitation, testing his fiction against the larger reality of human experience. A true criticism would judge fiction, at least partially, on moral grounds. This summary does little violence to Gardner's positions. While they are filled out with some explanation of central terms, with references to classic authorities, and with discussions of contemporary writers (John Fowles as hero, William Gass and mostly unnamed nihilists as villains), Gardner's arguments are meant to be fundamental. He insists on a common sense view, an enforced simplicity, and he has the Platonic assurance that we—always it is "we"—know the good but just can't find it.
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