Word: gardners
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...Congressman Hodge, an upright late 19th century liberal with a smile that could make the corn grow and the voters turn out at the polls. Taggert Hodge's search for vengeance triggers the series of jailbreaks, murders and accidents that pass for plot and which, like Faulkner, Gardner feeds his public in small chunks to keep them turning pages. What matters, of course, are the Hodges themselves, whose various minds and lives Gardner inhabits for hours, days and years until, when the book is at its best, the reader breathes in their world, feels their heartbeats and through them...
When last seen in a fine short novel called Grendel, John Gardner was busy turning monsters into men-and vice versa. His highly compressed story sang and winced and gibbered in its metaphysical chains, but it said a good deal about the dark origins and necessary delusions of society. The Sunlight Dialogues, by contrast, is an enormous trick circus trunk out of which the author keeps taking new literary treasures as if they were so many fake bananas. A philosophical disquisition upon religion and justice? Yes. A compassionate portrait of America in the uneasy '60s? Yes. A Faulknerian melodrama...
...Gardner has gone to some pains to have his book illustrated, something he says hasn't been done to a serious novel since Henry James' time. Like a 19th century novelist, too, he begins with a detailed list of characters. He pokes fun at 20th century realism by attaching a death certificate at the end of the book. No one should be fooled-or disappointed. For what we have here is not realism, but natural supernaturalism turned loose on middle America. Imagine Winesburg, Ohio or Faulkner's Sartor is as they might have been written by Samuel...
...Gardner's landlocked mariner is named Fred Clumly. Clumly is the police chief of Batavia, a small (and real) town in the western tip of New York. Clumly glumly delivers speeches on the topic Law and Order. He uses words like cognizant a lot and figures hippies are feckless or degenerate, or both. The state of California he considers a plague area likely to infect the rest of America. In short, given the temper of the times, Clumly seems bound for a caricature pig-of-the-week award, or else a New Centurion's badge for meritorious service...
...Gardner's book consisted mainly of the Sunlight Dialogues he would simply get his A for ingenuity as well as a few "Ahs" for cleverness and learning. A few people would marvel (as they will anyway, and justly) at the great skill he shows in blending resonances from such things as the Divine Comedy, the Revelations of St. John and the Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh with a story whose surfaces occasionally resemble All in the Family. Happily Gardner is on record as believing that a novelist should tolerate, even affirm the banal and the ordinary. "When Dickens wept over...