Word: grendels
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Gardner's organization is baffling, at least his style is endearing. The sense of mythic wonder that fills his books Grendel and Jason and Medea is present here in the form of vignettes and metaphors; and even when he rattles on about the good and the true, Gardner never pontificates, never becomes self-righteous. Even when what he says sounds like it would suit a preacher among the unbaptized, his manner remains that of the elderly raconteur, sitting by the fire with a mug of ale and a pipe...
...best when he's telling a story. At one point in On Moral Fictionhe leaves the aesthetic debate for a moment and begins a simple fable, to illustrate a point. The effect startles; we suddenly realize what Gardner could be doing all this time--telling stories, like Grendel...
...that intersection, I romantically dallied with a girlfriend in the small park outside of Grendel's. The magic of that summer moment was somewhat dimmed, however, when we spied a businessman urinating in the bushes not five feet away...
...what is lost - details of Chaucer's personal history, shadings of his personality - Gardner relies on scholarly guesses and novelistic license. After all, he teaches medieval literature at Bennington and, as the author of Grendel, The Sunlight Dialogues and October Light, is one of the most enterprising American novelists...
...contemporaries, John Gardner has made being a novelist a hyphenated art. In The Sunlight Dialogues he did a brilliant turn as philosopher-novelist, debating issues of law and dissent while nimbly stage-managing a family melodrama in upstate New York. In his re-creations of myth, Grendel and Jason and Medeia, he played the novelist-as-epic-poet, perhaps a little consciously; but once again he revealed his consistent longing for Significance, for the Big Theme, for some dimension that extends beyond the modern novel into older, more classical forms...