Stillness and Shadows

This volume includes "Stillness," a short novel undertaken by the author and his first wife as an exploration of their pasts as individuals and as a couple, and "Shadows," an unfinished long novel about a drunk, amnesiac detective's search for authentic identity

Nicholas Delbanco, the late John Gardner's friend and literary executor, introduces Stillness , a short novel that Gardner did not intend to publish, and Shadows , a novel-in-progess. "Written in haste, and shelved," Stillness , which depicts the stormy marriage of Martin Orrick, a famous silver-haired writer of "dark vision," and his musician wife Joan, was "undertaken . . . as a process of therapy" by Gardner and his first wife. The unfinished Shadows a text and seven fragmentsis a dense, philosophical detective story set in Carbondale, Illinois. The introduction is informative and the volume as a whole certainly of biographical interest to Gardner scholars; but the general reader who has admired Gardner's inventive fiction may be disappointed in these unpolished works. Janet Wiehe, P.L. of Cincinnati & Hamilton Cty.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.