Word: gardners
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Marijuana Smugglers. In October Light, his best novel to date, Gardner has really got his hyphenated act together. As if to contain his ambitions, he has assigned himself at the start a small, local comedy of apparently modest import. An 80-year-old widow, Sally Abbott, has come home to the family farmhouse to live out her days with her widower brother James in the shadow of Prospect Mountain, near Bennington...
...Smugglers of Lost Souls' Rock, as her paperback is titled, becomes Sally's new consolation and Gardner's new form of hyphen: a novel-within-a-novel. Set in boldface type, this parody-saga of marijuana smugglers-the stuff for which lurid covers on airport paperbacks are designed-runs to almost 150 pages and comes dangerously close to upstaging October Light. Among comic-strip characters in Sally's paperback are the smuggling boat skipper Captain Fist, who gets violently seasick even in San Francisco Bay; Jonathan Nit, an inventor who schemes to solve the energy shortage...
...October Light is a little like reading Terry Southern with a Robert Frost poem as chaser, or vice versa. But Sally (and the reader) gradually sees the connection. The characters of The Smugglers are also locked in demonic contest with their enemies-and themselves. They too know what Gardner seems to regard as the incurable and often suicidal addiction of modern man: a passion for absolute freedom that says, "I will be God or I will...
...Gardner has set himself roles wor thy of Hercules or a one-man band: the hilarious spoofer of pulp fiction, the composer of Kierkegaardian monologues good and evil, the mini-historian of science, progress and civilization, and the pastoral poet. In addition he rounds off his complex work on a note of affirmation that the reader may find more determined than logical, like the highnote climax to a trumpet solo. For the hyphen that Gardner most ardently longs for is the one that might connect night to day, lost to found, chaos to order-all the enemies, all the opposites...
...falls short of his ultimate ambition, Gardner succeeds at many points along the line. He is funny, highly intelligent and touching. How many novelists are any of the three? He has resources, and he uses all of them in pursuit of goals most novelists would not dare attempt. He has had his novel illustrated by not one but two artists. If he could stick an LP by a Vermont fiddler to the jacket and impregnate the binding with the smell of hay and apples-and maybe marijuana-he would do that too. He wants it all. There are writers today...