There are 10 pieces in [The Art of Living], in diverse modes—gothic folktale and fantasy, down-home rural comedy, evocative memoirs of childhood and adolescence in western and northern New York state. Many of the stories focus upon some crisis of artistic expression, nearly all catch a crystalline moment and refract it into a spill of glittering images or sharpedged memories. The book is not experimental in any avant-garde manner; Gardner's too much the medievalist for that. Still, it is marked with impressive surprises at every turn. (p. 51)

Gardner is a master of the economical opening; he gives a reader just enough setting and background to slip him effortlessly into the world of each tale. With voices he's equally adept. He never seems to labor as he shifts from the stylized narrative of Vlemk to the quirky ironic recall of a misunderstood ex-hoodlum to laconic Bible Belt patois (in The Joy of the Just) that would do any of Flannery O'Connor's "good country people" proud.

Readers familiar with Gardner's work will recognize his primary images—light and dark, river and valley, travel and flight. There's humor in these stories, and a full measure of graceful, unstudied prose. He is never hard on his characters. In his recent critical book, On Moral Fiction, he speaks approvingly of moral art which "seeks to improve life, not debase it," which "seeks to hold off, at least for a while, the twilight of the gods and us." Gardner meets these standards easily.

What gives these stories their power is Gardner's interest in the connection between the moral and the possible. From first (Nimram, a worldly middle-aged man's perception of life and death in his encounter with a doomed young girl) to last (The Art of Living), Gardner is consistently a romantic moralist. His stories are like the box-painter's vivid pictures of gardens [in Vlemk the Box-Painter]—"accurate in their depiction of both the beauty and the sadness of the world as it is." There's considerable expertise in this book, and courage and joy. (p. 52)