It's a rule, seemingly, that a Gardner novel will be—in at least one of its dimensions—the story of somebody's intellectual life.

And for part of its extreme length, "Mickelsson's Ghosts" obeys the rule. As with any novel set in academia, there's a measure of plain socializing in its pages (the inevitable stiff academic dinner party) and a good deal of caricature (the inevitable artsy-clerksy faculty musicale). But there's also—highly unusual in academic novels—a serious representation of teaching and thinking….

We're offered a believable account of peaks and pits in the desk life of an academic essayist, and at intervals the novelist engages a genuinely challenging philosophical theme, namely the mind's endless—and doomed—hunt for self-knowledge….

In the early going Gardner works hard and effectively to maintain a tight seal between the particulars of his hero's emotional life and the brainier flights of his...