Lies! Lies! Lies! a College Journal of John Gardner

This early text might be his masterpiece or, if that's too grand, the key to the rest of the work. You could probably retitle everything Garder wrote LIES! LIES! LIES! From the novels to the children's books, from the handbooks to the book on Chaucer. It has the properly shrill tone. It suggests what you'll find beneath the cover. A sham, a masquerade.And it's probably his most postmodern: fragmentary, obsessed with the local, involved in pastiche, in appraisals of Mickey Spillane, in assaulting the icons of high culture (Thackeray and others), full of parody and play. Play. Play in a book by Gardner.I have to tell you that I've taught his silly book for young writers to college students and they really can't stand it. It has the effect of shutting them up completely. It is about the poorest book on writing I have ever encountered. I'm now considering giving them this instead. They might relate to it more.It charts the continuing development of a young writer who is urgently looking for something to believe. Desperately looking, really. Young writers might find a mirror in this. It might have the effect of comforting them.I'm not sure how to recommend this, or to whom I should recommend it. Gardner scholars, certainly. Anyone interested in writing. Especially when that writer is, well, psychically troubled. There's a peculiarly voyeuristic angle (angel?) to this, or a psychoanalytic one, since Gardner is a very knotty, ambivalent subject.

This is a fascinating facsimile edition (with printed transcription) of a journal Gardner kept as a sophomore at Depauw University in Indiana. Well-known as the author of Grendel, The Sunlight Dialogues, Nickel Mountain, and many other books, Gardner was killed in a motorcycle accident in 1982. Even for readers who have never heard of John Gardner, the journal will be a pleasant, interesting read. In a style that is at once self conscious and sophisticated, Gardner talks about school life, his reading preferences, the options open to writers of fiction, his opinion of various writers of the tradition. Early in the journal, he recounts some of the pranks and escapades that he and his dorm-mates staged at a small college in the 1950s, a sunnier time than now to be a sophomore. The humor in Lies! Lies! Lies! is, in fact, sunny and sophomoric: "Roger Getty is a sweet fella who never did anything more malicious than blow up a dietition's (sic) automobile (in 1951). Said Harold A. Peterson to Roger Getty in the hearing of John Robert (Goose) Berry, 'This place is too quiet.' Said Roger Getty, 'Uh-huh.' Said Pete, "Somebody should short-sheet some beds, or take screws out of doorknobs, or something.'" Already, along with the youthful tone, one notes the budding novelist's instinctively right sense of dialogue. Lies! Lies! Lies! does not confine itself to college humor, fraternity capers, and day-to-day personal events; these are in fact in the minority. Throughout the journal Gardner experiments, sometimes explicitly ("Just for fun I think I'll burlesque the passage I just quoted."), with literary forms, conventions, language, techniques. While I doubt that anyone reading the journal in 1952 would have predicted the birth of The Sunlight Dialogues twenty years later, one would certainly have observed rumblings and stirrings that moved Gardner in the direction of that major and amazing novel.Especially in the early pages, where he writes about his college life, Gardner's journal has a characteristically moral cast, a light-hearted but notable tendency to see life in terms of rights and wrongs. His fraternity pranks are "crimes," the perpetrators of which can't be held accountable as long as Gardner can claim he was "just telling a story." Remarks such as "Somebody's naughty, I'd say" are common. Even the title page of his journal is a comically moral display, and what are his (or anyone's) novels but elaborate, extended lies? A shrewd critic might see in the journal's moral tone the foreshadowings of On Moral Fiction, the book that got Gardner into so much trouble with his fellow novelists.The journal offers interesting, sometimes extended critical commentary on such authors of the tradition as Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Jonathan Swift, and William Makepeace Thackeray, whom Gardner "hates with a beautiful, blood-dripping hate." "Reading Fielding," on the other hand, "is like going to a good pl