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Title: On Moral Fiction (Basic Books Classics) by John C. Gardner ISBN: 0-465-05226-6 Publisher: HarperCollins Pub. Date: March, 2000 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $18.50 |
Average Customer Rating: 4 (5 reviews)
Rating: 5
Summary: A most wonderful conversation
Comment: I first read this book in the 1970's when it was new. I've owned a copy ever since, and I've given so many away as gifts that I've lost count.
It is easily my favorite book. From the moment I first read it, until today; I open its pages and feel as if I'm having a literary conversation with an old friend.
The "moral" in the title puts off some folks, but don't be deterred. Gardner uses the term "moral" as you or I would use the word "truth." All Gardner is imploring is that authors seek the truth when writing fiction and avoid cheap tricks and cheap effects. That is all.
Yes, Gardner did feel that writing comes with a responsibility. He also felt it was nothing less than a privilege, and thus comes the responsibility that goes with privilege.
Buy it, enjoy it. If you share Gardner's view (as illustrated in the paragraph above, I promise you -- you will cherish this volume).
Rating: 2
Summary: Postmodern novelist tells all!
Comment: I have to tell you, I don't get Gardner. To start with, he writes this book mainly as a gag to rile folks up. And some buy his confidence game, forgetting, as they do, that one of Gardner's favorite novelists was Melville. Because, if you're paying attention, he then goes on to write one postmodern novel after another. Grendel. October Light. The King's Indian. Mickelsson's Ghosts. Each more metafictional than the last. So what if his name's not Barth, or Barthelme, or Barthes, it might have been Barthgardner, for all the Barthing going on. He's as postmodern as they come. Don't let him fool you. Pynchon is his only rival as a writer of apocalyptic fantasy.
You might put it this way. And this is the nice way to put it. Gardner's theories and his practice don't match. Of course the gulf between them isn't the same as the one between Wordsworth's ideas and their reality. His injunction to write in the language truly spoken by men runs counter to the bookish and allusive poetry. But where Wordsworth was harmlessly mouthing Coleridge's Kant-addled dream dictums, what Gardner is doing seems much more deliberate and foul. Or funny, depending on the way you look at it. I mean, the fact that people actually FELL for this ruse is astonishing.
Rating: 5
Summary: Fresh Air
Comment: Gardner's work certainly won't appeal to postmodernists or other avant-garde scribblers who believe form takes precedence over content. His thesis is simple: all art purports to better the world, not hinder it; all art essentially believes in a form of goodness, truth, beauty, whatever you want to call it, in the sense that it affirms that there is an inherent value in life and no value in "valuelessness." He comes down strongly on writers who write like "writers," and where style becomes more important than the timeless art of storytelling. All this probably won't be very compelling to many of the readers who cling to the works of 60s writers like Pynchon, Gass, Coover, et al., who write thinly disguised treatises, not novels, and who people their books not with characters but mannequins. There is something old fashioned about Gardner's point of view, which won't win him many hipster fans, but his argument, this reader feels, stands up even stronger in today's climate where the main literary trends seem to consist of endless irony, facile references to pop culture and television. Furthermore, his book is lucid, trenchant, passionate, engaging, and of course, confrontational.
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Title: The Art of Fiction : Notes on Craft for Young Writers by John Gardner ISBN: 0679734031 Publisher: Vintage Pub. Date: 04 June, 1991 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: On Becoming a Novelist by John Gardner, Raymond Carver ISBN: 0393320030 Publisher: W.W. Norton & Company Pub. Date: October, 1999 List Price(USD): $12.95 |
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Title: Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande, John Gardner ISBN: 0874771641 Publisher: J. P. Tarcher Pub. Date: March, 1981 List Price(USD): $9.95 |
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Title: Aspects of the Novel by E. M. Forster ISBN: 0156091801 Publisher: Harvest Books Pub. Date: September, 1956 List Price(USD): $12.00 |
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Title: Critical Fictions: The Politics of Imaginative Writing (Discussions in Contemporary Culture , No 7) by Philomena Mariani ISBN: 1565844971 Publisher: New Press Pub. Date: March, 1999 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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