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goes up in the cost of lives . Yet Upchurch ends with the holy ghost sitting on
his shoulder in the form of a sea-boobie . As the ship tacks alee (what a
marvelous set of pages parodying technical sea talk we get here from the boy
who dreamed of living in Southern Ill inois) he cries to the bird, "You better
hang on there , bird ," to which the Holy Ghost replies , "Hang on yourself,
thou fucking lunatic. "
The ultimate redemption here, as in most ofGardner's work , may not be
of souls, but of narrative . The raped and disfigured Miranda (woops!
Shakespeare) " blesses him unawares" by loving him; but neither Upchurch
nor Gardner concludes by throwing his story into the sea and living without
magic. Neither can survive without stories, without lies, without hoaxes.
With all this extraordinary inventiveness , Gardner is faced with the
problems of many of the best writers of our time : how to work in a medium
for which their imaginations thirst-in a ki nd of dead sea-but which
everything they know makes them distrust . In allowing himself to play these
wi ld games out in the open , to temper his half-embarassed solemnities with
arch professorial and
obscene
jokes , Gardner may be getting close to honoring
his own best instincts as a writer. Still healthily afraid of making
sense
of
appearances , myths of his stories , it's certain Gardner wants to do it . Even if
the Holy Ghost is
obscene,
he is
some
kind of spirit. As the hero of the
Browningesque story earlier in the book suggests , "It's nerve-wracking
business , knight-errantry ." Still, Gardner is doing his knight-errant 's trick
almost everywhere in this volume . Now if
he
can only continue being open
about
the
games
he
plays ...
OR MORE
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