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PARTISAN REVIEW
Bur the novella , "The King 's Indian, " may be the best thing Gardner
has done so far .
It
is so dazzlingly literary, so promiscuously allusive and
parodic , that it would seem impossible to take the narrative seriously . But
Gardner 's ultimate virtuosity is that while making fun of some of the central
narratives of the last two hundred years, he has to bring us up short at the end
ofevery section in order to disengage us from the mere story , to force us to face
the fact that there are other larger issues.
It
is the work of an effective Sunlight
Man , of a real trickster whose tricks are his real subject .
Of course , the ostensible narrator of the story , Jonathan Upchurch , a
nineteenth century American mariner out of Nantucket (oh!), is really John
Gardner, though
he
isn't really . We know too much to associate a narrator
with the real author-or to dissociate him. Anyway , there's a fine and quietly
funny illustration (at last , in •'The King 's Indian ," Gardner has got himself a
first-rate illustrator, as all nineteenth century novelists should) , a drawing of a
wall-eyed young man, surely Jonathan Upchurch, dressed like a young
ancient mariner , surelyJohn Gardner, as any dust jacket picture will confirm.
He stoppeth two of three . And sure enough, near the end , John Gardner,
happily loose and seriously unserious , having played almost- as many tricks as
one hundred fifty pages will sustain , enters to talk : ,.And you
are
real , reader ,
and so am I, John Gardner the man that , with the help of Poe and Melville
and many another man , wrote this book. And this book, this book is no
child 's top either-though I write , more than usual , filled with doubts . Not a
toy but a queer cranky monument, a collage: a celebration ofall literature and
life ; an environmental sculpture , a crypt . "
I honor the words , though they teeter on
em
barassment : a queer and
cranky monument- to Poe and Melville , to Coleridge and Conrad ,
to
Dickens, to Whitman and Mark Twain , to Mary Shelley and Wilde's
Dorian
Gray ,
to the traditions of narrative and the possibilities of belief. This strange
retelling of the ancient mariner 's story is
the
record of a hoax , and of hoaxes
within hoaxes, of enormous and gratuitous lies ; and it is a celebration of
hoaxing . The question remains- and it will , I think , be the test of Gardner's
art as he develops and faces the doubts with which he says he is now
writing-whether, while a celebration of literature , it is a celebration of life
as well.
The story is full of the staple elements of Gardner 's fictions :
the
magician , the materialist cynic , the redemptive power of love . Particularly, it
is a desperately funny and simply desperate struggle to make narrative work
beyond all embarassment ; and it is built on the faith that narrative is the way
to say yes to life . No matter how far Upchurch pushes , he can't quite get to
the
center of the hoax . Each villain fades into another , while the price of the game
