Freddy's Book is profoundly dissatisfying. I came to it as a great admirer of John Gardner's previous fiction—Grendel, October Light, the tales in The King's Indian—but as a disparager of his unscholarly Chaucer biography and his self-righteous critical tract, On Moral Fiction. In his fiction Gardner has been inventive, witty, and entertaining. In his criticism he has been plagiaristic, self-serving, and sanctimonious. Freddy's Book, a novel, shares more qualities with Gardner's criticism than with his fiction. (p. 36)

In On Moral Fiction Gardner claims that "Art … discovers by its process what it can say" (emphasis his). But in the first part of Freddy's Book there is no discovery by process. Characters are always where Gardner needs them: Winesap goes to Agaard's house for no really interesting reason; heavy snow confines him there for the night, conveniently, so he can be goaded into reading demented Freddy's little book. The very language, which is ordinarily where Gardner is at his best, reeks of lack of attention to the details of the process he claims is essential to good fiction. "His voice cracked out like a trumpet, belligerent and fearful." This is writing off the tip of Gardner's pen: the basic simile is old hat, and the adjectives, confusingly, are antonyms. "Outside the room, wind was howling through the pines" can only be described as a cliché. In the sentence "The gesture embarrassed me as soon as I saw it for what it was, but I had no power to take it back," the phrase "I had no power" is weak, even if Gardner intended it as part of an attempt to create an air of gothic spookiness around Agaard and his son. In the first part of the book the plot is dogged, the atmosphere is hokey, the language isn't especially pleasurable, and the characters are easily forgotten. The whole thing is merely slick, and falls away like a spent rocket booster once we arrive at "King Gustav and the Devil."

And the arrival is no cause for celebration. "King Gustav and the Devil" is a confusing tale…. The plots and counterplots come off as overly manipulated instead of intriguing. The quasi-historical characters, whom I found it difficult to care about, make a lot of pronouncements about God, evil, and language. Some of the pronouncements ring hollow at their core…. Some are merely banal…. In On Moral Fiction Gardner rails against Saul Bellow for being an "essayist disguised as a writer of fiction," for using his characters as personal mouthpieces. He cites as proof Bellow's infrequent use of more than one major character in a book, and claims that "the interaction of characters is everything." But it seems to me that the meaning of Freddy's Book, if there is any, lies more in its characters' exhortations than in their interaction.

In On Moral Fiction Gardner expresses his concern about art and morality, and calls for more "seriousness" from writers of fiction. In Freddy's Book his concern has crystallized into zealousness; it's fiction too much in the service of ideas. Gardner is an extremely talented storyteller. It would be a shame if his new "seriousness" led him to write sermons instead of carefully crafted stories. (pp. 36-7)