Word: gardners
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...depth of The Sunlight Dialogues alone merits Gardner's ranking among the top novelists of this century. It is not merely a recitation of unrealistic '60s ideology, but an inquiry into the causes of that ideology and why it didn't and couldn't work. And, after all, a decade as chaotic and confused as the 1960s demands a man on a motorcycle as its chonicler...
WITH THEIR recent reissue of--among other Gardner books--The Sunlight Dialogues, his lengthiest and best work, Vintage Books is helping to resolve that controversy. There was always the suspicion that because Gardner's books were set in the 1960's and reflected the turbulence of that period so well, they were somehow limited to that time. Yet even though we are now in the latter half of the the supposedly calm and reflective '80s, The Sunlight Dialogues, first published in 1972, is as fresh and pertinent as ever...
What makes this overt dichotomy interesting is the critical light Gardner casts upon our traditional concepts of law, order, justice, protest, and individual rights. Representing the law, Clumly suggests that the essence of the law-abiding citizen is a capacity to overlook the obvious injustices--let alone the small annoyances--of daily life...
...Gardner is not so naive that he holds up the chaotic protest of The Sunlight Man as an ideal to be striven for. It is clear by the end of The Sunlight Dialogues that it is the Clumlys of the world who have real impact, while Sunlight Men tend to burn out from their own fiery natures. We see this in the scene in which one of Clumly's officers finally apprehends The Sunlight...
...this paradox that gives The Sunlight Dialogues its depth. Whereas law and order are fundamentally unjust, but able to survive, protest and chaos are incapable of enduring. Although The Sunlight Dialogues is set in the 1960s and uses the lingo of that decade, Gardner's book is far closer to the nightmare pessimism of Kafka's The Trial or Canetti's Auto-Da-Fe than to the hippie philosophizing of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance...