When one stands back to consider the shape of John Gardner's works as a whole, certain recurring "obsessive metaphors" or polysemous "figures" (in the terminology of Charles Mauron and the Russian Formalists) force themselves upon the imagination. One of the most resonant of these figures is the magician as artist or criminal. The figure involves the idea of a shaper—part magician, part storyteller—who purposely manipulates reality and therefore may either en...

In a recent essay, [John Gardner] deplores the "shoddy morality of much of our fiction" and insists that "instruction is art's most basic function, whether or not it ought to be." Hence, a great responsibility rests on the artist to "seek positive moral values, provide models of goodness." "Fiction," Gardner says, "should spellbind and inspire, though it should not lie." Unlike Flannery O'Connor who was trying mainly to conv...

It is the interesting fate of "Freddy's Book" to follow John Gardner's critical essay "On Moral Fiction" on the ever-longer shelf of his books. Interesting because the new novel is a very enjoyable one, an entertainment high and bright, in every sense; and yet it can't expect to escape the dead-earnest question, is it moral? Its very structure—a novel within a novel, or rather, a fairytale-historical novella with a long fictional preface explaining how...

[The Resurrection and Nickel Mountain, two novels from the "very early" phase of Gardner's career,] resemble each other in several ways. They share an upstate New York setting, which Gardner will replace with more fabulous realms in the later novels. They share an omniscient narrator, presenting plausible characters who speak convincing dialogue; Gardner will use self-conscious and unreliable first-person narrators in the later novels. They share a conventional chronological structure, ...

Arnold Deller is a practitioner of the most ephemeral of the arts. He is a cook. But because he is an artist, he knows that an artistic response is fitting when his son is killed in Vietnam. Art is love, he says. And because that son had written to him about the joys of eating an ancient Chinese dish called Imperial Dog, Arnold believes that he must prepare that meal in honour of his dead son…. That's a brief summary of the title story in John Gardner's The Art of Living and Other Stori...

It is a good bet that John Gardner enjoys writing his novels far more than the public enjoys reading them. Mickelsson's Ghosts is dreadfully long and padded, and it often degenerates into drivel. Gardner has striven to become America's Tolstoy, or, perhaps in this new novel, its Dostoevsky. He's failed, but has convinced a lot of critics. In a split of critical sensibilities, the National Book Critics Circle, by a single vote, conferred its 1976 fiction award on Gardner's October...

Most of the 10 stories in John Gardner's new collection ["The Art of Living and Other Stories"] develop the common theme of art and its vexed relation to life. This was also the subject of Mr. Gardner's book-length essay, "On Moral Fiction."… There he made substantial use of Tolstoy's argument for a strictly moral art, as developed in the pamphlet "What is Art?" Some of Tolstoy's later fiction is sadly marred by his determination t...

The best key, although a reductive one, to John Gardner's fiction is the narrator's question in Jason and Medeia: "Is nothing serious?" In his fiction Gardner engages us in a search for the answer to this question, a search to determine if life is nothing more than a series of comical, meaningless exercises. A representative of order and one of disorder, an adherent to forms and a believer in magical chaos, conduct the quest through a series of bizarre confrontations…. Myt...

"Freddy's Book," John Gardner's eighth novel, begins as a conventional horror story, with the familiar Gothic appurtenances. At a party in Madison, Wis., given to celebrate his lecture on "The Psycho-politics of the Late Welsh Fairy Tale," the narrator, a Professor Winesap, meets a "doll-like" "Scandinavianist" named Sven Agaard, who announces suddenly, "I have a son who's a monster." The following day, Winesap accept...

[Freddy's Book] is a well-written, persuasive, philosophically dramatic, and concise work in which Gardner brings into explicit, exciting battle the debilitating forces of the late 20th century existentialism and the right, or the will, to be happy, secure, and productive in life…. An admirably good, peaceful hero like Lars-Goring would be fictionally weak if the novelist considered his goodness as a Leavisian moral absolute; hence the battery of existential "tests" Gardner subje...

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 unu...

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...

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 w...

If the author of such basically dissimilar books as "Grendel," "October Light," and that curmudgeonly manifesto "On Moral Fiction" is noted for any particular qualities, they are probably his distinctively energetic and impudent variety and vitality. Some of the variety, at least, surfaces in ["The Art of Living and Other Stories"]…. For example, there's the least typical story here, "The Joy of the Just," which portrays a m...

Going strictly by internal evidence one might suppose Freddy's Book to be the work of the offspring of an illicit but delightful union between Ingmar Bergman and Isak Dinesen; but it was written by John Gardner (who, characteristically, insists that it was written by Freddy). [The Devil in Freddy's Book] is one of the largest and most convincing devils to be found in modern literature; he is very stupid and very subtle; and his eventual murder at the hands and bone knife of the knight is an ev...

In On Moral Fiction Gardner pronounces virtually all contemporary art defective. To correct the situation he gives us this "attempt to develop a set of instructions, an analysis of what has gone wrong in recent years with the various arts." It's a thoughtful, amusing, and arrogant little book designed to pick fights, and may get more of them than Gardner can handle…. John Gardner is isolated, idealistic, and ever so gently totalitarian. There is more to art than is accounted for ...

[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 "s...

[October Light is a] strange but often beautiful and touching account of two lonely, elderly people, caught up in their memories, their convictions, and their prejudices…. October Light examines American culture and values retrospectively and, at least at the end, prospectively. Some of those values, embodied in these two sturdy Vermonters and their friends, seem in danger of extinction, about to be swept away by a crasser, younger generation that, paradoxically, they themselves have bred. The title ...

[In The Life and Times of Chaucer Gardner] shows both his scholarship and his imaginative talent. Many external facts about Chaucer's life are available; little can be discovered about his inner life, nor about many of the important events of the times. Gardner furnishes what has been learned over the years, and uses his novelist's skill for the rest. Some of this works; some doesn't. Perhaps the chief problem with the book is that Gardner never aims at a specific audience. The general ...

There are 10 pieces in [The Art of Living], in diverse modes—gothic folktale and fantasy, down-home rural comedy, evocative memoirs of childhood and adolescence in western and northern New York state. Many of the stories focus upon some crisis of artistic expression, nearly all catch a crystalline moment and refract it into a spill of glittering images or sharpedged memories. The book is not experimental in any avant-garde manner; Gardner's too much the medievalist for that. Still, it is marke...