Gardner, John (Vol. 2) - Gardner, John
Gardner, John
Gardner, an American novelist and critic, is the author of Grendel, The Wreckage of Agathon, The Sunlight Dialogues, and Jason and Medeia.
Think of ["The Wreckage of Agathon"] as Koestler or Solzhenitsyn transposed backward in time, and you won't be far wrong. It delineates the mental motion of the individual as sacred, whether he's a seer or not, whether he's a compulsive scatologer like Agathon or as irascibly pure as Peeker, and it exuberantly calls into question society's categorical insistences—the things brought into being at our own expense to protect us against ourselves, other people and, putatively, other societies.
Law, order, decency, the near-autonomous military, are the things John Gardner's second novel shows recoiling upon themselves, so much so that it's not a far cry from the iron rigidity of Sparta to that, say, of the Soviet bloc, or of a China most of whose books are written by the Chairman,...
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