Word: winesap
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...novel was ever harmed by an irresistible beginning. Freddy's Book, Author John Gardner's eighth novel, is a case in point. While riding the lecture circuit in the Midwest, Professor Jack Winesap meets a strange old historian with a stranger pronouncement: "I have a son who's a monster." Winesap accepts an invitation to the man's house, arrives at an isolated and crumbling old estate during a blizzard, and is promptly snowed in for the night. After some suspenseful dawdling, the host allows his guest to visit Freddy, a young man who stands some...
...that is the end of the irresistible beginning. Freddy's mission is not to tear Winesap limb from limb or to discuss how it feels to be taken for a monster. Rather, he drops a bulky manuscript of his own composition inside the room and stomps off. The rest of Freddy 's Book is just that: Freddy's book. Gardner has used the device of a novel within a novel before, most successfully in his widely praised October Light (1976), but this time he refuses to provide the other half of the framing tale: Winesap, Freddy...