bookshelf

MICKELSSON'S GHOSTS

Name: MICKELSSON'S GHOSTS
Author: John Gardner
ISBN: 0811216799

by John Gardner ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1982

bookshelf

One of Gardner's longest novels, most personal, most ambitious—and alas, too, the most shambling and ultimately incredible. Peter Mickelsson is a 40-ish philosopher, a famous ethicist now on the faculty of the State U. in Binghamton, N.Y. But he's sore beset at every turn: his divorcing wife is bleeding him dry financially; his son, an anti-nuke commando, is in hiding; the IRS is after Mickelsson for non-payment of years of back taxes; and the Pennsylvania-border farmhouse that he's just bought for a song (and is rehabilitating) is definitely and very scarily haunted. Still, all that is only level one of Mickelsson's woes. He has also become romantically torn between a sociologist named Jessie and a local teenage whore, Donnie; a student of his, meanwhile, is suicidal. And level three: Mickelsson, suffering the Raskolnikovian fumes of ethical relativism, goes out and kills a shadowy fat man in order to steal the man's thousands in order that Donnie will not abort Mickelsson's child. The murder is never pinned on Mickelsson. In fact, it's all but lost in the shuffle of ever-growing farfetchedness which the book slips into next: fanatic Mormon hit-squads (having to do, as well, with the ghosts in the Mickelsson house); illegal chemical dumping; various and constant crises of faith and nervous breakdowns that turn Mickelsson into a walking falling-rock-zone. Thus, the novel is simultaneously a ghost story, a chronicle of dark nights of the soul, an anthology (like Gardner's On Moral Fiction) of an astonishing array of soreheaded-nesses: there are flailing complaints against Wittgenstein, most music, Marxism, Ronald Reagan, industrial polluters, even college kids who don't smoke (). And Mickelsson is such a pathetic wreck that, despite the tremendous amount of water that's tread, there is something compelling here, mostly with his atmospheres: superb landscape pictures of the Southern Tier geography, biting fun made at faculty pretensions in the arts, and deft appearances of Mickelsson's troubles in the metaphorical guise of dogs (no doubt the dogs of Hell). Still, finally, despite its flickering power in engaging us with such a rattletrap character in extremis, this book is more unwieldy than anything else—like mountains and mountains of loose black coal, shifting and sliding but burning no fire and making no light. And Gardner's Tolstoyan intention—massive malediction and benediction at the same time—is gagged by ludicrousness, fatigue, by a plenary sloppiness that even the fiercest pain or philosophy or ghost can't scare into shape. In all: a fascinating, oddly depressing failure.

Pub Date: June 1, 1982

ISBN: 0811216799

Page Count: 612

Publisher: Knopf

Review Posted Online: March 29, 2012

Kirkus Reviews Issue: June 1, 1982

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
ON WRITERS AND WRITING
by John Gardner

- BOOK REVIEW
STILLNESS AND SHADOWS
by John Gardner

- BOOK REVIEW
GILGAMESH
translated by John R. Maier & edited by John Gardner

bookshelf

TO KILL A MOCKINGBIRD

by Harper Lee ‧ RELEASE DATE: July 11, 1960

bookshelf

A first novel, this is also a first person account of Scout's (Jean Louise) recall of the years that led to the ending of a mystery, the breaking of her brother Jem's elbow, the death of her father's enemy — and the close of childhood years. A widower, Atticus raises his children with legal dispassion and paternal intelligence, and is ably abetted by Calpurnia, the colored cook, while the Alabama town of Maycomb, in the 1930's, remains aloof to their divergence from its tribal patterns. Scout and Jem, with their summer-time companion, Dill, find their paths free from interference — but not from dangers; their curiosity about the imprisoned Boo, whose miserable past is incorporated in their play, results in a tentative friendliness; their fears of Atticus' lack of distinction is dissipated when he shoots a mad dog; his defense of a Negro accused of raping a white girl, Mayella Ewell, is followed with avid interest and turns the rabble whites against him. Scout is the means of averting an attack on Atticus but when he loses the case it is Boo who saves Jem and Scout by killing Mayella's father when he attempts to murder them. The shadows of a beginning for black-white understanding, the persistent fight that Scout carries on against school, Jem's emergence into adulthood, Calpurnia's quiet power, and all the incidents touching on the children's "growing outward" have an attractive starchiness that keeps this southern picture pert and provocative. There is much advance interest in this book; it has been selected by the Literary Guild and Reader's Digest; it should win many friends.

Pub Date: July 11, 1960

ISBN: 0060935464

Page Count: 323

Publisher: Lippincott

Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1960

Categories:

GENERAL FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THE LAND OF SWEET FOREVER
by Harper Lee ; edited by Casey Cep

- BOOK REVIEW
GO SET A WATCHMAN
by Harper Lee

- SEEN & HEARD
The Snowy Day Is NYC Library’s Most Popular Book

- SEEN & HEARD
ALA Releases List of 2020’s Most Challenged Books

- SEEN & HEARD
NYT Readers Voting on Best Book of Past 125 Years

bookshelf

LONESOME DOVE

A NOVEL (SIMON & SCHUSTER CLASSICS)

by Larry McMurtry ‧ RELEASE DATE: June 1, 1985

bookshelf

This large, stately, and intensely powerful new novel by the author of Terms of Endearment and The Last Picture Show is constructed around a cattle drive—an epic journey from dry, hard-drinking south Texas, where a band of retired Texas Rangers has been living idly, to the last outpost and the last days of the old, unsettled West in rough Montana. The time is the 1880s. The characters are larger than life and shimmer: Captain Woodrow Call, who leads the drive, is the American type of an unrelentingly righteous man whose values are puritanical and pioneering and whose orders, which his men inevitably follow, lead, toward the end, to their deaths; talkative Gus McCrae, Call's best friend, learned, lenient, almost magically skilled in a crisis, who is one of those who dies; Newt, the unacknowledged 17-year-old son of Captain Call's one period of self-indulgence and the inheritor of what will become a new and kinder West; and whores, drivers, misplaced sheriffs and scattered settlers, all of whom are drawn sharply, engagingly, movingly. As the rag-tag band drives the cattle 3,000 miles northward, only Call fails to learn that his quest to conquer more new territories in the West is futile—it's a quest that perishes as men are killed by natural menaces that soon will be tamed and by half-starved renegades who soon will die at the hands of those less heroic than themselves. McMurtry shows that it is a quest misplaced in history, in a landscape that is bare of buffalo but still mythic; and it is only one of McMurtry's major accomplishments that he does it without forfeiting a grain of the characters' sympathetic power or of the book's considerable suspense. This is a masterly novel. It will appeal to all lovers of fiction of the first order.