Word: gardners
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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EVERYTHING THAT John Gardner has written before does not prepare you for Nickel Mountain. He calls it a pastoral novel, but that only makes you more wary. And the further you read into the book the more anxious you get. You keep telling yourself there has got to be a catch somewhere. Don't let your guard down--it could come any page now--a sudden reversal. The plot isn't supposed to be so straightforward. Surely one of the characters will go mad--this world is just too sane. When is the author going to show his face...
What makes the honesty questionable is Gardner's reputation as an anti-novelist. He is associated with names like John Barth, Donald Barthelme, William Gass and Thomas Pynchon, whose styles often reflect the immense panorama of futility and anarchy they see around them. For these men literary conventions only pose limitations and rules to be broken, and narrative becomes hopelessly narcissistic. In John Barth's story, Lost in the Funhouse, for example, the author interrupts to explain the narrative techniques of the short story while the tale is in progress. Barth then shows contempt for these forms and simultaneously complains...
Myth in the modern novel is reworked into absurd comedy, and plot retreats upon itself. Characters are puppets whose strings lead you to different parts of the author's pysche. John Gardner reveled in all this chaos in his earlier novels. In Grendel, Beowulf is just another ridiculous hero in front of a bunch of snivelling fools when we get the classic epic from the monster's point of view. And in The Sunlight Dialogues, self-parody pops up in thoughts such as "She realized, briefly, that she was merely a character in an endless, meaningless novel, then forgot." Veracity...
Ever-so-slowly, Gardner works his two desperate characters out of their bitterness. Death loses its hold, and the struggle for meaning in life finds its way into Nickel Mountain. Henry reaches out to his neighbors, when their pride prevents them from asking help. Gardner gives Henry a down-home kind of wisdom. Henry realizes that if you just think somebody is being stabbed, you have to jump on the guy with the knife. And even if it was just an illusion, you have to get up, dust yourself off, ignore derision, and be prepared to do it again. Anything...
Most importantly, Henry takes on a life of his own; there are no strings attached here--Gardner stays out of the novel's development. Gardner's style is unhurried, deliberate. He's trying to set out the world as it is, with no clever embellishments, no god-like interference...