It is a good bet that John Gardner enjoys writing his novels far more than the public enjoys reading them. Mickelsson's Ghosts is dreadfully long and padded, and it often degenerates into drivel.

Gardner has striven to become America's Tolstoy, or, perhaps in this new novel, its Dostoevsky. He's failed, but has convinced a lot of critics. In a split of critical sensibilities, the National Book Critics Circle, by a single vote, conferred its 1976 fiction award on Gardner's October Light over Renata Adler's brilliant Speedboat. The majority of one was convinced that Gardner had something deep to say about bicentennial America and fiction-writing, mistaking for profundity his workmanlike ability to describe rural life and characters and his simplistic ruminations about, for example, the evils of television. It is rare to find a review of Gardner's fiction that does not respectfully dub him a "philosophical novelist."

In this new work, Gardner takes this praise literally. His protagonist is a philosophy professor. Readers are required to sit through endless classes during which they are subjected to long sophomoric discourses intended to solve, once and for all, such pressing questions as whether Plato and Aristotle were really fascists. It is a maddeningly talky book; abstractions are bandied about in a sleep-inducing dialectic. As he has done in earlier novels, Gardner ponderously tries to infuse his discussions of basic notions (order vs. freedom, nature vs. art) with originality.

Gardner's confidence that he's an originator of ideas has gotten him into trouble. He was accused of "borrowing passages" from scholars in his The Life and Times of Chaucer; he admitted to "paraphrasing." On the defensive, he writes in this novel's acknowledgments that he has "borrowed ideas and good lines" from Martin Luther, Friedrich Nietzsche, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Norman O. Brown, Martin Heidegger, and—if that's not enough to cover himself—from "acquaintances, friends, and loved ones." He's also effectively hidden them. The ideas in Mickelsson's Ghosts are so muddled that one doubts that anyone would want to claim them.

Gardner's connection with ideas has always been dilettantish. His book On Moral Fiction was, for the most part, a diatribe against those who write more sophisticated—better—novels than he does. An early foray into the cultural conservatives' trendy war on contemporary writing, it was a cut above the kind of literary massacre that the old regime at Harper's perpetrated every other year or so. (p. 70)

[In] Mickelsson's Ghosts, Gardner's efforts to clarify and explore moral truth turn on a muddied, ambivalent relationship between Mickelsson and Gardner himself.

Peter Mickelsson, "on the dark side of fifty," is a philosopher and author whose orderly life disintegrates when his marriage breaks up. He has left Brown University for the lowly State University of New York at Binghamton and a rundown house in nearby rural Pennsylvania. Mickelsson's son has gone underground to pursue terrorist activities against the nuclear-power industry. Mickelsson worries about him a lot. He loves his daughter, too, and wants to pay his ex-wife more in alimony than he earns. The IRS is on his trail. He has affairs with a fellow teacher and a teenage prostitute. He condescends to academic colleagues and students. And Gardner involves him in a neat little murder mystery. (Are the murders the work of local Mormons, or a sinister homosexual conspiracy, or the nuclear-power industry as representative of the evil forces of the Modern World?) This mystery holds the reader's attention; when Gardner gets around to spinning a yarn he can be quite good—at times sensitive and even funny.

And Mickelsson is haunted by ghosts—an incestuous brother and sister who did guess-what to their child. The ghosts are present to scare the bejesus out of Mickelsson and to force him to ruminate—philosophically, of course. Gardner needs the ghosts, you see, to show that although fiction aspires to tell the truth about life, that truth needn't be realistic. The fantastic happens—ghosts exist! The reader, however, might reasonably want to hear more from the ghosts and less from Mickelsson. If there is anything more insufferable than a whiny philosopher, it is a philosopher who whines about Wittgenstein.

As a philosopher about literature, Gardner holds that although fiction should be moral (i.e., that during the creative process the artist affirms what is good for man), a character may do evil. As a result, Gardner distances himself from Mickelsson, hoping his character will "get his just deserts hereafter." But because the distancing applies only to Mickelsson's acts and not to what he thinks, it is not convincing. Too often, Mickelsson is a garrulous spokesman for Gardner. When Mickelsson reflects on his own writings, one is more than a little suspicious that he is expressing Gardner's high opinion of Gardner…. The old claim to originality persists, even though one of the major lessons that Gardner has to offer in Mickelsson's Ghosts is this startling gem: "Women are people too; that was the crushing wisdom of modern love." And it isn't nit-picking to wonder if the admission of occasional carelessness sanctions the moral morass that Gardner gets into when he lets Mickelsson first call some Marxist sociologists Nazis, then later claim that it is those who run the nuclear-power plants who are Nazis. The "moral" artist would have made some distinctions.

When his teenage prostitute becomes pregnant, anti-abortionist Mickelsson robs a man to pay the girl to have the baby. To inject some moral "ambiguity" into the scene, Gardner makes the victim a former bank robber. During the robbery, the man is stricken with a heart attack, and Mickelsson watches him die…. Gardner does not excuse Mickelsson's actions. But he does allow Mickelsson—like Gardner, a self-appointed "ranter against sloganers and simplifiers … indefatigable shamer of the shallow-minded, fulminator against the frivolous and false"—to get away with the arrogant assertion that there exists a "widespread practice of aborting when the foetus is not of the parentally desired sex." Widespread? It is obvious that Gardner enjoys—and mostly approves—Mickelsson's clichéed view of the world, and therefore the novelist never convinces us that he himself believes that Mickelsson has "lost the ability to tell the truth." Gardner may chastise Mickelsson for what he does, but Gardner is so taken with Mickelsson's thought-processes (because they are so much his own) that he fails to make clear just how creepy Mickelsson's ideas are. (pp. 70-1)

Late in the novel, Gardner defines religious fundamentalism as "permission not to think." Some of his own fundamentalist ideas about how to write fiction seem to invite the same definition. He has attempted to equal the great Russians—to write "something obsessive and morose and no doubt philosophical"—but as a philosophical novel, Mickelsson's Ghosts is a sham. Stripped of its excesses, however, it does have enough substance to have made a good Raymond Carver short story. (p. 71)