There are different ways of enjoying a book. For most of "Mickelsson's Ghosts," John Gardner's new novel. I felt like sprawling out in a big chair and just having a good time with it, taking the pleasure as it comes. It seemed to me to be doing just about everything a novel can do. It offered characters I liked, but who troubled me, so that I wanted to see them feeling better, doing better. It gave me the kind of sense of place that one doesn't often find in serious novels today: A thick texture of landscape, community, friendships, infatuations, intrigues, insanities.
Mickelsson, the protagonist, has a romance with a house, rebuilding and redecorating it as a preliminary or a substitute for rebuilding or redecorating himself. The house is haunted by its past, just as he is, and Mr. Gardner manages this so adroitly that one can almost regard these "ghosts" or apparitions as creatures of Jung's racial unconscious. Mickelsson's wife, Ellen, who has just thrown him out, is a fine portrait of the sort of person Mr. Gardner was opposing when he wrote "On Moral Fiction." She is one of those trendy people who hates every human contract or convention as an infringement on her freedom….
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