On Writers and Writing (First Edition)

A first-time collection of the essays and reviews of the late artist and critic, presenting his views on Bellow, Nabokov, Updike, and others, explores subjects ranging from religion to fairy tales, and from King Arthur to Walt Disney.

Popular novelist, critic, teacher and classics scholar, Gardner, who died in a motorcycle accident in 1982, insisted that fiction should be moral and life-affirming. These 29 essays and reviews, gathered from the New York Times Book Review , Antaeus , Saturday Review and elsewhere, are sprinkled with sharp put-downs. For example, Gardner calls John Updike's characters "hypersensitive whiners," deems Walker Percy's novel Lancelot "typical bad art . . . pompous" and labels Graham Greene's The Comedians as entertainment that "makes a casual pass at art." Gardner is refreshingly unpredictable, admiring such writers as John Cheever, Italo Calvino, Larry Woiwode, William Gass and Lewis Carroll. His high critical standards and gimlet insights shine through. Included are a prickly autobiographical sketch ("Cartoons"), the marvelous essay "What Writers Do" and a short story "Julius Caesar and the Werewolf."
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

By the time he died in a motorcycle crash in 1982, novelist John Gardner had distinguished himself as a candid, thoughtful critic of his fellow fiction writers who wasn't embarrassed to write a manifesto, On Moral Fiction (1978), that argued against purely aesthetic, formal judgments of literature. In this collection of essays and reviews, he addresses specific writers and books--e.g., John Cheever's Falconer, William Styron's Sophie's Choice, even Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland--as well as the generic problems, joys, and issues involved in the writing of fiction. Even when critical, Gardner gives his objections a contrarian twist, finding that William Gaddis' JR is not, as the common wisdom has it, an ``awesomely unreadable'' but intellectually majestic novel. Instead, he argues that JR is ``wonderfully and easily readable,'' but that in the end it is intellectually and morally lazy, concluding: ``It pays, of course, that scornful sneer; people love to be told everything stinks. It sounds so intelligent.'' -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

These 28 pieces, dating from 1964 to Gardner's death in 1982, are mostly reviews. There are also a few longer essays or omnibus reviews, some thoughts on patriotism and the bicentennial, and posthumous pieces: "Cartoons," perhaps the best short statement of his thinking on literature and the influences on his work, a short story on Julius Caesar, and, most interesting for fans and students, a "general plan" for The Sunlight Dialogues . The reviews--of Cheever, Gaddis, Calvino, Roth, Tolkien, Malamud, Oates, Fowles, etc.--are mostly literary journalism that, however thoughtful, tends to veer off into Gardner's standard pitch for absolutes and "moral fiction" and against whining, false, stupid, trivial, limited trash and "self-congratulatory self-doubt and alienated positivistic pessimism." There is little depth or growth in Gardner's thinking, and a little bit of it is probably enough for most readers.
- Richard Kuczkowski, Dominican Coll., Blauvelt, N.Y.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.