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PARTISAN REVIEW
somewhere behind the continuous sequence of actions , there is a bomb of
meaninglessness waiting to explode the mythic significances just as we are
getting comfy with them.
Still , enduring behind nihilism, meaninglessness, violent disruptions ,
there is Gardner saying yes , winking a bit shyly , and wall-eyed at the
embarassment of saying it under the burden of all that knowledge . And I
think the effort to say yes is the clue to the strange way his apparently very
modern perceptions of narrative-as-lie , of inanity , of inconsecutiveness seem
to be edging backwards , not to parody and rejection , but to affirmation and
acceptance of the narrative-epic-novelistic tradition . The way to come out
smiling (or almost) is, after you ' ve shown that you understand all the limits ,
all the fal sifications and mistaken assumptions , to end by writing your own
crazy narrative , to assimilate without mockery the elements ofsuch traditional
fiction that can survive the curse of professorship and disenchantment .
I confess to liking Gardner best when the play is most overt , not , as in
The Sunlight Dialogues,
where the epic pretensions are too great , too serious ,
and too long . Like the other Gardner novels, it is a virtuoso performance ,
though Gardner pretends in it that the real virtuosity is that of the Sunlight
Man, the tortured and scarred magician-hero . If
Grendel
is parody of epic ,
with the point of view deliberately screwed around , and
Nickel Mountain
is
new pastoral ,
The Sunlight Dialogues
is a late nineteenth century chronicle
novel- a cross between
The Rainbow
and
Buddenbrooks.
It 's about the
decline of a great family, and in opposition to the Sunlight Man , the family's
crazed , brilliant , nihilist black sheep , there is the requisite anti-hero , a
flatulent , apparently ineffectual and aging police chief. The book 's center is a
set of dialogues between the chief and the Sunlight Man . Elaborately and
fancifully staged amidst hocus-pocus , they are filled with classical allusions ,
subversive moralizing , or anti-moralizing, tests of the ordinary man 's
strength . Inarticulate or cliche-ridden, the police chief endures . But it is all
virtuosity ; and within a novel whose structure depends upon a nineteenth–
century personal engagement with characters , it gets rather dull . The
professorial identity is most oppressive where it is most hidden. There 's just a
bit too much myth-making or anti-mythmaking . The farting police chief and
his blind wife don ' t carry the day or sustain our engagement , though the
narrative seems to insist that they must.
But there 's no denying the virtuosity , indeed , the brilliance of much of
that large book . And its audacity in attempting a New York State version of
Faulkner's Mississippi chronicles is at least admirable.
Nickel Mountain
once
again requires the nouns : virtuosity , brilliance , audacity. It reads as though it
had been invented to become an instant classic: short, well-made , ironic ,
gently evocative of a pastoral mode which its own materials would seem to
