BOOKS
29 1
THE NAME OF THE GAME
THE KING'S INDIAN.
By
John Gardner. Alfred A. Knopf.
$8 .95.
John Gardner tells stories. A hundred years ago he might have
been a great popular novelist, serious in the way popular novelists then could
be. As it is , his story-telling is mixed with a good deal of philosophizing ,
solemn and playful , and with a lot of modern post-narrative self–
consciousness. In a very few years he has tried an astonishing number of
fictional modes , each time working from a strong narrative tradition, each
time questioning it, each time returning .
I began by thinking, in late 1973 , that I would try to talk about his greatly
ambitious
The Sunlight Dialogues
and the wonderful shorter parody ,
Grendel.
Then his long narrative,
Jason and Medea,
arrived . Shortly
afterwards
Nickel Mountain
was published . And as I tried to work out my
thoughts about at least three novels ,
The King 's Indian
turned up . Gardner
writes faster than I can read ; faster , I'm beginning to believe, than anyone
but the early Dickens , who managed to write three novels at the same time
and edit a monthly journal on the side .
No doubt Gardner has Dickensian ambitions, but where Dickens was a
genuinely popular writer, Gardner is a professor. No doubt also , on the
evidence of the novels , he is a remarkably learned and good one; but as a
writer he not only earns the rewards , he pays the price of professing . Dickens
could unselfconsciously make myths out of the materials of a popular culture
in which he participated. Gardner makes, or rather unmakes, myths out of
the materials of a very high culture playing about the pop ; almost every word
he writes seems to bear upon it the scar of the past ofWestern literary culture.
He is cursed, or blessed, by a characteristic modern literary consciousness .
What writer we might care about these days isn't? Barth , Borges,
Nabokov , Pynchon , Coover. But with Gardner it is a little different. Though
literary virtuosity is almost a condition of serious writing these days , though
literary games are both part of the sport and part of what really counts,
Gardner plays the game most of the time with a straight-forwardness that
makes me feel-happily and uneasily at once-that the real name of his game
is narrative . Even as he includes (in all of the stories I have read) elements to
undercut the traditions of narrative he uses , each story depends for its strength
and energy on the suspect narrative itself. So he gives us a gallery of nihilistic
philosophers , of magicians and sleight-of-hand people . And always,
