It is the interesting fate of "Freddy's Book" to follow John Gardner's critical essay "On Moral Fiction" on the ever-longer shelf of his books. Interesting because the new novel is a very enjoyable one, an entertainment high and bright, in every sense; and yet it can't expect to escape the dead-earnest question, is it moral? Its very structure—a novel within a novel, or rather, a fairytale-historical novella with a long fictional preface explaining how the subsequent narrative fell into the editor's hands—suggests the kind of literary game-playing against which the Gardner of "On Moral Fiction" has so much to say: it is a structure worthy of that "unmoral" novelist John Barth. "On Moral Fiction" itself is very enjoyable too—meaning brightly readable, which critical essays generally aren't. But underneath it is a sermon as solemn as the little word "on" in its title, shot through with that dread of pleasure we associate with early Protestantism. It leads one to inspect all the pleasure Gardner himself has given—he gave most in "Grendel," and he's giving it again now—in order to find those improvements that were secretly worked upon the reader as he sat there, unsuspecting, and more or less enthralled.

Most of the enthralling in "Freddy's Book" is done in the long fictional preface….

One has the distinct feeling of being invited to "do something" with the relationship of the preface to the narrative [which follows it, "King Gustav and the Devil"]. There are textual hints of a kind that smart undergraduates are trained to find and better graduate students are discouraged from cherishing. (p. 1)

Moreover, the events of Freddy's life as told by Professor Agaard are subtly transmogrified into the events of Lars-Goren's. For instance, Winesap is shown a deserted room that had been wrecked and allowed to stay wrecked: "Pieces of wallpaper hung down like stalactites, the windows were partly boarded up with plywood, and in the walls there were holes, as if someone had stood in the center of the room firing cannonballs." Agaard explains that it was the scene of a tantrum that Freddy had when he was 10. Now Lars-Goren is by no means given to such irrational outbursts, but he has a memory that transforms Freddy's, by placing the violence outside himself:

"Nor had he thought about death at night when he returned to his tent—except once. Once in the middle of the night a cannonball had crashed through his tent and knocked his cot out from under him—it seemed the same instant, though it couldn't have been, that he had heard the muffled thud of the cannon's exploding black powder."… (pp. 1, 26)

The Nabokovian dimension—the trace of late modernist gameplaying, as in "Pale Fire"—is discernible here: the cannonballs tht wrecked young Freddy's room were only in Winesap's imagination—they were a figure of speech; yet they show up literally in the narrative that Freddy is supposed to have written. So are we to begin playing with the notion that Winesap is "really" the author of "King Gustav and the Devil"? Or is "Freddy's Book," the title, to be taken at its word, and is Winesap, therefore, an invention of Freddy himself?…

The story of "King Gustav and the Devil" freely mixes history with folklore and invention…. The final scene, in which the Devil is scaled like a mountain, is a marvelously virtuosic piece of narrative, with juxtapositions and counterpoints smacking as much of the screenwriter's art as the novelist's. Gardner is a masterful storyteller, even when, as in "Freddy's Book," he is curiously lacking in tone.

Both Gustav and Brask are persuasive portraits. Ultimately Brask is moving; even though here, as so often in Gardner, the flow of sympathy between author and character and reader is unsteady. Gardner seems to have a moralist's way of loving only the good guys. He (and Freddy) certainly does (or do) love Lars-Goren, but it doesn't do the handsome family man of the manslaying giant the least good. Like the hero of Gardner's children's book "In the Suicide Mountains," he remains a stick figure. Not that he hasn' this share of psychic innards. He begins by being puzzled over his fear of the Devil, given that heretofore he's been afraid of nothing, not even death. He learns in time (what surely the reader could have told him) that the Devil is especially to be feared, because he is inherent in us or in our situation. The Devil is impervious to slaughter, because slaughter is itself one of his manifestations. That, as I make out, is the moral.

Granted it's slippery, as morals go. It is saved from platitudinous simplicity by its way of defining evil in terms of its own ineradicability. In context, it affords a spectacle that is, in the abstract, very striking: Lars-Goren, understanding in a flash why the Devil cannot be killed, acts in spite of what he knows, because, one gathers, the gesture itself is worth something, is perhaps worth everything. The philosopher-bishop, at his heels, barks reasons why the act, however "good," is yet not practical, not theoretically viable, not finally possible, in any way that the human, ethical intelligence can fathom…. And yet Brask, too, is over-come with joy. Though he's a "bursting star of intellectual energy," he is struck euphoric by the sight of the man of action, proceeding beyond the margin of reasonably defensible method, striking at evil, senselessly, for the sake of good….

Now what we have in Brask's exhilaration at Lars-Goren's act is not a moment of moral conviction but rather an epiphany of Macht—strength, power. Brask is the intellectual marveling at the freedom of those whom intellect does not hamper: brains gawking at brawn. It would be pompous to dwell on the darker implications of such rapture: they've marched too many to the slaughter, off and on throughout the centuries, to need words from me. Moral fiction, I'll simply say, "Freddy's Book" is not. (p. 26)

Gardner himself, by training and inclination, is a writer deeply enamored of the fabulous, the enchanted; he is also, consciously, philosophically, committed to a moral scheme that he thinks literature should expound. He tries in "Freddy's Book" for an art that will satisfy both these yearnings, as he tried in "The King's Indian," notably, and in "In the Suicide Mountains."

But it happens that, on the page, they are somehow incommensurate. This is not an argument in esthetics; it isn't that storytelling and moralism are necessarily incommensurate in novels. But Gardner's particular brand of morality, with its characteristic stress on strength of will, turns out to be incompatible in practice with the softer charms of storytelling.

Gardner's problem, then, is that he is unwilling, on principle, to indulge the fabulistic for its own sake. In just the same way, he won't allow himself simply to revel in those Chinese-box structures that so strongly attract him. In "October Light," a novel within a novel, he makes it clear that he thinks the framed novel is offensive, as though to distance or deny his obvious pleasure in the artifice. (pp. 26-7)

John Gardner is a better modernist than he knows. It is fascinating and a little droll to see him struggling against his own gifts. "Freddy's Book" has a certain kinship with the self-mirroring works of Barth and Nabokov; but that kinship is not necessarily a sign that the Devil has had a hand in it. What Gardner has wrought isn't trivial, for us, even if he feels he must wrap it in sententious moral parables to hide its essential good fun. The art of "Freddy's Book," whatever its artist may say between other covers, is finally representative of a time when something has worn down the borders between game and earnest, as Chaucer would say. And that something is not necessarily the Devil: unless one is intent on saying that all human activity betrays the Devil's hand. (p. 27)