In a recent essay, [John Gardner] deplores the "shoddy morality of much of our fiction" and insists that "instruction is art's most basic function, whether or not it ought to be." Hence, a great responsibility rests on the artist to "seek positive moral values, provide models of goodness." "Fiction," Gardner says, "should spellbind and inspire, though it should not lie."

Unlike Flannery O'Connor who was trying mainly to convince a hard-headed audience that the redemption of Jesus Christ is real, John Gardner prefers to seek out human models of goodness and suggest that they too have redemptive powers…. It is as if Gardner believes that by writing about redemption he can somehow make it real because whatever values we celebrate in our arts will be celebrated in society. And he argues that because "art doesn't imitate life, art makes people do things,… if we celebrate bad values in our arts, we're going to have a bad society."

Given his theory about the teaching function of literature, Nickel Mountain has to be John Gardner's personal testimony that goodness is real and that faith need not succumb to despair. He cannot be unaware that he is teaching redemption. Although Gardner tends to hedge on religious questions and prefers to concentrate on human rather than divine redemption, he nevertheless infuses the book with a sense of heaven-inspired mystery. Gardner does, after all, choose a theme replete with religious overtones; it is perhaps only appropriate that he himself should fall under its spell. What happens, finally, is that the book finds its thematic structure through the juxtaposition of the common and the mysterious, the real and the unreal, the crass and the sublime, the human and the divine, until we conclude that this imperfect mortal clay is also divinely beautiful, that the transitoriness of human life makes it terribly valuable, that suffering and pain as well as joy affirm the holiness of life, and that salvation is real, even for the lost.

At times, as with the chapter titles and certain characters who are always oddly out of place, the term "juxtaposition" describes the relationships adequately; but Gardner regularly moves beyond juxtaposition to a union of opposites, particularly of spirit and matter, as he works toward an understanding of the redemptive miracle. The book builds cumulatively to this revelation with the final chapter becoming something of a fictional essay which harmonizes and reconciles the dualities of the novel just as redemption harmonizes and reconciles the painful ambiguities of human experience. By structurally and thematically infusing the divine into common things, or the metaphysical into the physical, Gardner has unequivocally defined redemption. That is what redemption is—the working of the divine in our lives to effect our salvation.

Nickel Mountain, the book's dominant image, clearly symbolizes the juxtaposition or even fusion of the mysterious and the mundane. The very first page of the novel hints at the mountain's dual function as both an inert piece of earth and a thing of mystery and even terror. (pp. 59-60)

If Nickel Mountain is a threat, or if it is only a huge slab of insentient clay, it is also a place for touching the mystery, for reaching beyond the real…. Nickel Mountain, then is a fitting backdrop for a book which explores, to use Hawthorne's expression, the mingling of the ordinary with the marvelous, and concludes that the miracle of redemption is real.

Henry Soames, the book's central character, represents the fusion of dual characteristics just as the mountain does, and is even described as being "huge and old as the mountains and as patient."… It is chiefly through Henry that the mystery silently affirmed by Nickel Mountain finds a ready outlet in human life. Henry is a living symbol of the union of the gross and the godlike. His spirit housed in a mountain of fat kept barely alive by a weakening heart, and steadily undermined by compulsive eating, Henry knows he is "rolling steadily downward to the grave."… Aging and physically grotesque, he repulses people still more because his heart sometimes has important things to say which his lips cannot articulate. In desperation he shouts or bangs the countertop in the diner, his rant quickly turning to shame and apology. The most unlikely of creatures to be assigned the role of hero, Henry nevertheless practices a brand of unconscious heroism that etches the lives he touches with celestial light.

Henry is always susceptible to divine impulses, never questioning the reality of heaven, wishing that it could somehow be an extension of earth. (p. 61)

Religious imagery and Henry's habit of seeing in terms of religious metaphor reinforce the redemption theme throughout Nickel Mountain. It even occurs to Henry that his diner light is something of an altar lamp to night-traveling truckers. The human and divine motifs come together powerfully when Henry tries to explain to Willard Freund that a sense of life purpose is all tied up with the concept of love. "Finding out what you are" and doing what you have to do is "like every kind of love you ever felt and the sum total of every love you ever felt…. It's finding something to be crucified for. That's what a man has to have. I mean it. Crucifixion." Henry senses his hearer's repulsion to his "stupid, sentimental, Soames voice," but he blunders on, all the time thinking that he "was a fat blubbering Holy Jesus, or anyone one half of him was, loving hell out of truckers and drunks and Willards and Callies—ready to be nailed for them. Eager. More hearts than he knew how to spend."… George Loomis, the one-armed lame young cynic, even half seriously accuses Henry of thinking he is God.

In religious terms, the crucifixion is an act of love, a selfless sacrifice to redeem mankind. In human terms, Henry's self-sacrificing acts of kindness and acceptance of every person without qualification are also redemptive acts of love. Gardner is saying, then, that every human act or gesture of love has redemptive capabilities and participates somehow in the ultimate mystery of Christ's redemption. It is through expressions of love that human beings make contact with whatever heaven exists. (p. 62)

In the midst of tears, sorrows, and even ugliness, Gardner keeps the fact of redemption and renewal constantly before us. Callie, common as she is, by her presence or by a gesture, can call down heaven to grace Henry's life, to assure him that the dead can be born again. In the first section of chapter one, Henry is a man hellbent for the grave. But the closing sentence in that section reads, "Then came spring." The next section begins, with no paragraph indentation, "The girl appeared as if by magic, like a crocus where yesterday there'd been snow."… She is simply the sixteen-year-old daughter of Frank and Eleanor Wells who comes seeking work at the diner, but she works a miracle in the life of a man locked in a downhill pattern, a man beset with heaviness, streaks of violence, crazy talk and weeping. (p. 63)

Even in a life-affirming book like Nickel Mountain, the dark is never very far away. Henry lives for a time on "The Edge of the Woods," as one chapter title puts it, expecting Willard to appear out of those woods at any moment to claim his wife and child. Simon Bale, half devil, half angel, haunts Henry's home both before and after his death. And Henry's guilt over Simon's death is a spectre that never departs. The Goat Lady, a first-class witch straight out of Disney seems to leave the curse of a drouth on the land and the curse of her death in George Loomis' guilty heart. Death stalks page after page as both a threat and a reality, and the final chapter is titled "The Grave." But in the midst of death and fear, Callie gives birth to a child, and we again come face to face with the redemptive miracle. (p. 64)

Pondering in the final chapter the meaning of Callie in his life, Henry can only speak of it in redemptive terms: "The world had changed for Henry Soames because little by little he had come to see it less as a yarn told after dinner … and more as a kind of church service—communion, say, or a wedding." He considers with no small amount of awe "what his wife had done to him, scooping up his old life like wet clay and making it over into her own image…. He felt like a man who'd been born again, made into something entirely new," but still without a meaning he could define: "It was all a-shimmer and vague, like a dream."… Gardner could scarcely have said it more plainly: in this world of sorrows, redemption is real. And while he stresses the human aspect of redemption, the saving influence of human beings in one another's lives, he never lets us forget redemption's foundation in religious mystery.

With the possible exception of Doc Cathey, even the most crabbed characters in the novel are susceptible to intrusions of grace. (p. 65)

And so the book finds its form in the to and fro movement between the light and the dark, with each movement in one direction countered by a movement the other way. For Gardner the fact of death adds meaning and value to life and to the mortals who are struggling on time's treadmill. Confessing that he consciously places his characters "in the shadow of death," Gardner explains why he prefers to set them "against the tragic backdrop";

… values have meaning only insofar as they're mutable, we're mutable. If we lived forever, all these values that I keep exploring … would be unimportant. Like Homer's gods—they slap each other, kick each other, throw each other out of heaven, they make each other crippled, but they live forever, so it's always comic. But once you've got people that die, once that threat of death is there, as it always is,… life becomes much more intense, much more serious,… and the value of exploration becomes much more important.

Faced with the mutability of life, the destructibility of all things, as George Loomis says, and the reality of death, some people are inclined to hold that life is therefore meaningless and that despair is the only attitude possible. To others, the very transitory nature of life makes it all the more precious and significant, and redemption all the more necessary and marvelous. In Gardner's mind, one aspect of redemption may actually be the conscious (or miraculous) shift from the former philosophical position to the latter, from despair to faith.

Just as all mortal creatures move steadily and inexorably toward the grave, so Nickel Mountain also concludes at a graveside where Henry and Jimmy have interrupted a target-shooting expedition to observe some grave diggers at work. Death draws even closer when a small rabbit wanders into their path and Henry reflexively shoots it. Touching the still creature wonderingly, Jimmy begins asking questions about it. Henry knows, of course, that Jimmy's questions are less about rabbit life than about the meaning of death in the vast scheme of things. What Jimmy is asking is "how a thing so unreasonable [as death] could be tamed, made to fit in a world of waterbugs, trees, mountains, customers at the restaurant."… (Gardner is perhaps a bit heavy-handed in conducting this conversation in the vicinity of the old Riddle place.) As Henry ponders the inevitability of death and change, recognizing that "everything passes," Jimmy makes a significant observation. His attention turned back to the gravediggers, he asks what they are doing. Henry replies, "They're digging a grave." But Jimmy says, "No they're not, they're digging somebody up."… And he is right. Gardner has given us a death and a symbolic resurrection in the climactic chapter of his book. A body is actually being lifted from the grave to accommodate a set of elderly parents long since moved from that area, a quarreling, weeping, divided old couple who have come to get their dead son and take him home. (pp. 66-7)

The book ends with the old couple at the grave, unified only in their love for their son, engaged in an ancient argument—he insisting that their son is now "dead and rotten," never to rise, she looking to the time "when we meet him in Glory" with "the resurrected Lord."… And while Henry may not be entirely resolved on that question, he nevertheless knows that every life, no matter how gnarled and hard, is enriched by "the idea of holiness."…

Thus John Gardner writes a "moral" novel as a witness to the redemptive power of human goodness, but at the same time he cannot escape the metaphysical implications of having borrowed his metaphor from the realms of the miraculous. Nor does he try to escape those implications. Rather, he suggests that the two realms ultimately coincide if we but have eyes to see and ears to hear the flutterings of angels which may well be about us always. (pp. 67-8)