Word: sunlights
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...Sunlight Man, therefore, eventually turns out to be Taggert Hodge, a member of one of Batavia's first families. The Hodges are all of them downwardly mobile from the great days of 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...
...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 complete...
...Digest. But with the same acceptance of reality he observes the growling of the mastiff bitch as dark spirits pass, repeals the laws of gravity at will and marks the fall of the dead ("And every soul, it passed me by, like the whizz of my cross-bow"). The Sunlight Dialogues has almost as high a mortality rate as The Ancient Mariner...
...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. Instead, Gardner pits poor old Clumly against the Sunlight Man, a brilliant existential philosopher, French horn player, gadfly, madman, magician, murderer, idealist and Shavian exponent of Babylonian religion and the new consciousness. But when the smoke and the rhetoric and some cadavers have been cleared away, there stands Clumly (much humbled and wiser) as, by God, some kind...
...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...