Volume 29, Number 11 · June 24, 1982
So Big
By Robert Towers
Mickelsson's Ghosts
by John Gardner
Knopf, 590 pp., $16.95
I carry with me several fanciful images of John Gardner as a writer. One of them is of a backwoods preacher, a bit wild-eyed, a bit long-winded, contemptuous of city slickers, and proud of a pulpit voice that can shiver the timbers at the back of the church. This is the fellow who grew up in western New York not far from that 'burnt-over ground' on which so many offshoots of the Puritan decadence flourished weedily in the nineteenth century—Mormons, Spiritualists, Shakers, and the Perfectionists of the Oneida Community. He is the author of generally uplifting books full of rural wisdom and small-town folkways—The Sunlight Dialogues, Nickel Mountain, and the authentic parts of October Light; he is also known for that scalding tract against contemporary triflers and sinners, On Moral Fiction. Another image is of a pipe-smoking academic, a medievalist with a Frodo haircut and a weakness for monsters, the creator of Grendel, the popularizer of Chaucer, the enthusiast of myth and epic and things gothic. Still another is of a hip philosopher, a classroom spellbinder eager to argue all night on the subject of the Good, the True, and the Beautiful.
Review, 2048 words
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