On Moral Fiction

See, it's not just you. Others, too, have long believed much of the world's culture to be shoe-scrapingly disgusting, at best. In On Moral Fiction, Gardner explicates the rationale for your judgment. Gardner commands our respect for another reason: He openly heaped contempt upon the literary gods and other poseurs of his time. A man who truly lived. (Why couldn't I have had teachers like him while at university?)

Serious musicians should listen to Beethoven. Serious thinkers should study Kant. Serious writers should read this book. If creative writers read only this book and Aristotle's Poetics, the uneven morass that comprises most literature sections of even good bookstores would be cleared. If literary editors and agents read this book instead of trying to shallowly anticipate the market trends, the entire world would be better. Thank you, John Gardner, may you rest in peace, and please Random House, please do not stop publishing this book. And for everyone paying attention at home, buy it or order it from your local independent bookstore.

Gardner defines the mission of the visionary novelist in a way that underlines the essential importance of storytellers to humanity's hopes and dreams--an approach as relevant in today's global village as it was when he first wrote it.

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).

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.