THE ART OF LIVING AND OTHER STORIES

Gardner's first short-fiction collection since The King's Indian (1974) offers ten highly polished stories—which, though generally unaffecting, do represent the range of his narrative imperatives. Here, as always, is Gardner-as-artist-philosopher, with clanging, derivative parables on the moral conflicts of the artist: the strained yet seductive title story, about a speech-making restaurant cook ("I'm an artist, you understand that? What's an artist? . . . An artist is a man who makes a covenant with tradition," etc.) whose esthetic need to cook a Vietnamese dog dish repels, then convinces the community; "The Problems of Art," an arch nouveau-Poe fable about a book-surrounded fellow seeing visions in his library ("I saw Ahab. . . who argued with Boswell's Dr. Johnson, boringly") while evading real-life demands (his father in the asylum); and the interminable "Vlemk the Box-Painter"—which stacks up no less than three conflicted artists, along with questions of reality (a painted face so real it talks), artistic honesty ("Is it our business to set down lies, or are we here to tell the Truth. . . ?"), inner and outer beauty. . . plus a fairy-tale format. Rather less numbing, though equally didactic and artist-centered, are Gardner's more realistic moral fables: in "Redemption," a boy, guilt-ridden over the accidental tractor-death of his brother, is drawn to music; in "Nimram," a world-famous conductor's complacency is shaken by an encounter with a terminally ill teenager. And Gardner comes closest to direct emotional appeal with two reminiscence-based stories (though again about art)—a dance school in 1940s St. Louis, a Welsh group-sing in upstate N.Y.—and with "The Joy of the Just": a folksy-comic yarn about the outlandish revenge of old Aunt Ella Reikert, who can't get the preacher to admit that his wife ran Aunt Ella off the road. True, none of these tales is less than skillful: Gardner's prose is smooth, musical, elaborate. But in most of them he seems to be writing far too much for his fellow artists, far too little for the world outside the ivory tower.