BOOKS
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belie . Here is the pastoral of the truck stop , with large diesels always roaring
dangerously in the background , with massive tractors for plowing and reaping
and tearing their passengers to pieces , with wars in the not too remote distance
sending home their maimed . But Gardner incorporates all the violence and
industrial destruction into the mock pastoral retreat in order to reaffirm the
values of the pastoral and to tell a story- really-of redemption through love.
And it's not even embarassing.
Its hero, Henry Soames , is a further simplification of the farting police
chief. Gardner seems to have said to himself that he had made a lot of
wickedly articulate characters before; now he was going to develop the goodly
inarticulate ones. So Soames achieves the dignity of cliche against a
wickedness that has no articulate spokesman except violence itself. He wrestles
with passionate , explosive Billy Buddian feelings ; marries the knocked-up
teen-ager who comes to work for him ; befriends the lonely, fragmented ,
harvester-maimed veteran ; and accepts the selfish lover of his child-wife. And
he does all this while struggling with his own mortality, having just
recuperated from a heart attack , and while eating like a horse . It ought to be
deeply moving, and unquestionably it has its moments : particularly the last
scene , in which Soames and his legitimized son watch an old couple bring
their dead son's coffin out of its grave. But like most other big moments in the
novel , it feels like a set piece . Ah! what a way to finish a novel : with a
resurrection. But Gardner's too smart for us and sets it in the context of a
skeptical grave-digger and bickering old parents, and Soames' child ending
by saying to Soames , " I don't love you." But fat Soames-and pastoral
Gardner-have the last word : "Poor dreamer ," he says to the boy , implying ,
among other things , the inescapability of love through all this muck of
mortality and bitterness . It is the characteristic movement of Gardner's work:
the convention asserted , the convention tested and apparently found
wanting , the convention reasserted. The problem is that it is all so clever (or
even better than clever) that it is the convention only , rather than the
particular experience of the fiction , that comes through alive .
It may be a merely modern prejudice, but Gardner 's art seems to work
much better when the play is less disguised in the trappings of the realistic
fiction of
The Sunlight Dialogues
and
Nickel Mountain
and more on the
surface of the language itself, as in
Grendel
and in the extraordinary long title
story of the new volume ,
The King 's Indian .
Serious playfulness is Gardner's
real talent.
Grendel
seems to have achieved the stature ofa modern classic-at
least in so far as it represents a commitment to parody and dark comedy and
something like nihilism in a short , fully achieved form. Anyway,
Grendel
is
very funny and curiously moving ; maybe because Gardner is bound there by
the terms of his parody to be unselfconsciously engaged with its hero . Grendel
