[The subjects of the debate between Lars-Goren and Brask in Freddy's Book]—art and language—are an authorial intrusion that spoils this book and points to the weaknesses of Gardner's recent work. A quite natural dialogue of hope and despair turns into an aesthetic argument between the knight of moral fiction and the bishop of empty rhetoric, a debate between communication and performance, substance and elegance, emotional response and dead perception, John Gardner and a "stylist" who might be mistaken for William Gass. The book's self-consciousness—its self-reference and its nervousness—is Gardner's fault, not Freddy's, because the same kind of defensive contentiousness mars October Light and On Moral Fiction.
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