Gardner's Last Novel
RODMAN, SELDEN
Gardner's Last Novel Mickelsson's Ghosts By John Gardner Knopf. 590 pp. $16.95. Reviewed by Selden Rodman Author, "Tongues of Fallen Angels," "Artists in Tune with Their World" To judge from...
...When this true object of adoration is in danger of losing her job, he does not raise a finger to help her...
...his burglary, in fact, is undertaken to help the young woman...
...In a collection of essays, On Moral Fiction, he wrote...
...The author thus seemed to indicate that he indeed thought them real...
...Nevertheless, he is a survivor...
...Rather, he is sustained by his courage to take action, to accept the absurd, and to dare the unspeakable in the face of insuperable odds...
...He worries a lot...
...This is a novel that asks the question: Can a man who is being sued for alimony in excess of his earnings and pursued by IRS agents, criminals and spirits, a man who impregnates a teenage prostitute, harbors a terrorist son and inadvertently commits a murder, still find happiness with the woman he loves...
...The first thing we see him do is kill a dog...
...He becomes obsessed by his visits to the adolescent call girl, yet continues to proclaim his love for another woman...
...He swallows gin and Di-Gel, robs a robber's lair, renovates a haunted house, and somehow muddles through...
...Also in witches, hex signs and divergent spectral assemblies, such as a government-supported group of Mafia landfillers and a Mormon-affiliated SS troop called the Sons of Dan...
...We recognize true art by its careful, thoroughly honest search for an analysis of values...
...He is ready to give his ex-wife anything and everything????Making concessions far beyond his means that she hardly seems to deserve...
...Mickelsson sums up his sense of human fallibility and the need for forgiveness in the advice he gives an undergraduate whose boyfriend has been unfaithful: "Listen, don't put up with anything you don't want to...
...Mickelsson obligates himself to seeing the prostitute through her pregnancy, even though the baby may not be his, and if it is, its conception was not his fault...
...We wonder what horrors he must have perpetrated to feel so much guilt...
...At the same time, he does feel responsible for the lives he touches...
...A number of moody photographs by the author's son, Joel, illustrate Mickelsson's Ghosts...
...true art is moral...
...This is a serious work by a serious intellectual, right...
...Yousee????alan'sagood,generous boy...
...After the protagonist buys a new place in the country, not far from campus, the tale moves beyond the boundaries of academe...
...But the spooks are only used to set the scene...
...Gardner's own curriculum vitae was quite impressive...
...He deliberately snubs a suicide-prone student by not inviting him to a party...
...Author of 15 books and recipient of abundant critical acclaim, he had even sought to define art...
...It is definitely not his intellect that keeps him afloat for nearly 600 pages...
...Men too...
...Anyone who gets through so much misery, Gardner seems to be saying, is entitled to whatever he can salvage...
...moral art tests values and rouses trustworthy feelings about the better and the worse in human action...
...Although Peter Mickelsson, Gardner's primary witness to these questionable incarnations, is a philosophy instructor who might well be cast as "the nutty professor," the weird phenomena are visible to more responsible friends and colleagues as well...
...He worries about the suicidal young man, he worries about his children...
...Mickelsson's moral stature is, at best, dubious...
...What, if anything, they have to do with the plot is impossible to deduce...
...It is not didactic because, instead of teaching by authority and force it explores, open-mindedly, to learn what it should teach...
...He ignores his children...
...The book begins with all the campus cliches????faculty cocktail parties, problem students, interdepartmental politics...
...The suggestion is that concern equals morality...
...People hardly ever intend real harm...
...Reviewed by Selden Rodman Author, "Tongues of Fallen Angels," "Artists in Tune with Their World" To judge from John Gardner's 10th novel, published shortly before his death last month in a motorcycle accident at age 49, he believed in ghosts...
...They capture the book's lonely, desolate quality...
...Using Gardner's criteria to assess his last work, one must ask: Is Peter Mickelsson a moral man...
...Mickelsson is full of ruminations on Life, Death, Truth, Beauty, Meaning, and Suicide, punctuated with quotations from Plato, Kant, Aristotle, Wittgenstein, and especially Nietzsche...
...It's true that, like all of us, he's prone to error...
...it seeks to improve life, not debase it...
...On the other hand, don't be too hurt by betrayals, don't be too final...
...Mickelsson is middle aged and going to flab, an admitted failure both personally and professionally...
...Retribution through suffering is his strongest claim to a happy ending...
...Well, the nutty professor certainly displays his credentials...
...By conventional standards, absolutely not...
...The author never tells us...
...It seeks to hold off, at least for a while, the twilight of the gods and us...
...They're just weak and stupid, or attached to bad ideas, and then embarrassed and defensive...
...Women do that too much...
...Later, he callously watches the man he is about to rob die of a heart attack, searching the apartment for money as the victim writhes on the floor...
Vol. 65 • October 1982 • No. 18
