Mickelsson's Ghosts

In this huge, turbulent book we roll and tumble through the consciousness of Peter Mickelsson, a down-at-the-heels philosophy professor whose pursuit of the Good and the True is undermined by lechery, madness, witchcraft and the Internal Revenue Service. As Mickelsson careens through a season of discontent, we follow willingly along in his wake. The book is an overstuffed toy box of ideas and events. Neitzsche and Wittgenstein cast major shadows across Mickelsson's thought processes. He wrestles with the phantasms of his boyhood, the pain of his recent divorce, the "actual" ghosts who inhabit the dilapidated farmhouse he's fixing up in rural Pennsylvania, the higher and lower angels of his sex life, and his blunderings through the complicated, intermittently treacherous worlds of academia and small town America. This novel threatens to fly off in a dozen directions. What holds it together is Gardner's marvelous prose. The book is best read in small sips rather than great gulps, the better to savor Gardner's well-made paragraphs and the sweep of his ideas. The other unifying force is Mickelsson's perverse faith that goodness and order do exist (perhaps beyond reach) above the squalor and chaos of the life he's fallen into. Drowning in randomness and unreason, Mickelsson fights on, and despite his many sins and missteps, his stubbornness comes to seem admirable, heroic even. This is one of the best American novels you'll read. Its power, sweep, ambition and humanity put it right up there with Moby Dick, only the white whale here is the search for life's meaning among the mind games of modern philosophy and the mysteries and dangers that lurk out at the edges of the American experience.

I've read this book seven times since it was published and have over the years hoarded copies because it is so difficult to find (and thus lend to those seeking a good read). It is dense, complex, thought provoking, and even frustrating. Gardner thrusts us immediately into the mind, emotions, and experiences of the protagonist. He creates an idea-filled treatise on modern life and its struggles, a mystery, a psychological ghost story, and a funny excoriation of academia. It deserves more exposure than it got, but perhaps demands more of the reader than most want to give to a book.

It isn't difficult to understand why this novel is out of print. As one of the characters remarks, "(People) don't *want* to think. People want secure, happy families, pleasant barbecue parties, predictable-in-advance nights for bowling and the opera." Well, you're not going to get those kinds of things in this claustrophobic, dense novel about a man's descent into insanity. Peter Mickelsson, separated, with a son on the run and an estranged daughter, is losing control of his life. Or has given up *trying* to control it - he can't face the daily tasks of paying bills, teaching classes, or dealing with the thousand minutia that occupy the rest of us. Instead, he allows himself the luxury of endless introspective episodes, dwelling at length on Nietzsche, Luther, occasionally Wittgenstein, or Kant. His career is failing, the IRS is breathing down his neck, and he can't afford his next meal. So he does what no one else would consider - purchases a rambling farmhouse in the Endless Mountains and sets to restoring it. Mickelsson is by no means a sympathetic character, but in his refusal to face his troubles and the increasingly desperate world that envelops him, he could be a metaphor for society at large, eager for distraction, never actively considering the consequences of his actions in what is not an actual pursuit of pleasure as it is a passive *allowing* things to happen. He concludes, "Action was a problem. What was one to do if he knew every movement of the spirit was poisoned at the source?" Ah, the anguish, the soul-searching! Great, weighty BLOCKS on what it is to be human, what sorrows are ours, "Such was the fruit of all those eons of evolution, from hydrogen to consciousness: galaxies wailing their sorrow. Music of the spheres." Search this one out. Read it on winter nights. It may offer some fuel for your own meditations. Serious books too often seem preachy, or worse, have an all-too-obvious agenda, are shrill, haranguing. What makes Mickelsson so absorbing is that he is UNcertain. That alone is remarkable anymore.

It isn't difficult to understand why this novel is out of print. As one of the characters remarks, "(People) don't *want* to think. People want secure, happy families, pleasant barbecue parties, predictable-in-advance nights for bowling and the opera." Well, you're not going to get those kinds of things in this claustrophobic, dense novel about a man's descent into insanity. Peter Mickelsson, separated, with a son on the run and an estranged daughter, is losing control of his life. Or has given up *trying* to control it - he can't face the daily tasks of paying bills, teaching classes, or dealing with the thousand minutia that occupy the rest of us. Instead, he allows himself the luxury of endless introspective episodes, dwelling at length on Nietzsche, Luther, occasionally Wittgenstein, or Kant. His career is failing, the IRS is breathing down his neck, and he can't afford his next meal. So he does what no one else would consider - purchases a rambling farmhouse in the Endless Mountains and sets to restoring it. Mickelsson is by no means a sympathetic character, but in his refusal to face his troubles and the increasingly desperate world that envelops him, he could be a metaphor for society at large, eager for distraction, never actively considering the consequences of his actions in what is not an actual pursuit of pleasure as it is a passive *allowing* things to happen. He concludes, "Action was a problem. What was one to do if he knew every movement of the spirit was poisoned at the source?" Ah, the anguish, the soul-searching! Great, weighty BLOCKS on what it is to be human, what sorrows are ours, "Such was the fruit of all those eons of evolution, from hydrogen to consciousness: galaxies wailing their sorrow. Music of the spheres."Search this one out. Read it on winter nights. It may offer some fuel for your own meditations. Serious books too often seem preachy, or worse, have an all-too-obvious agenda, are shrill, haranguing. What makes Mickelsson so absorbing is that he is UNcertain. That alone is remarkable anymore.

This was John Gardner's last and best novel. The hero of the story, Peter Mickelsson, is a brilliant professor of philosophy who's fallen on hard times. His marriage has dissolved. The IRS is dunning him. His attorney is giving him bad advice. And he's holding the wrong end of the bottle to boot. In a last-ditch effort to mend his cracked-up life, he buys a farm in Pennsylvania. There he sets about restoring the old farmhouse, only to find that the place is haunted. The ghosts of former occupants just don't want to give the place up--not yet anyway. This wonderful work is sadly out-of-print. Please check your local used bookstore. Or search online for it. This book is a real masterpiece. Don't miss it.