[Freddy's Book] is a well-written, persuasive, philosophically dramatic, and concise work in which Gardner brings into explicit, exciting battle the debilitating forces of the late 20th century existentialism and the right, or the will, to be happy, secure, and productive in life….

An admirably good, peaceful hero like Lars-Goring would be fictionally weak if the novelist considered his goodness as a Leavisian moral absolute; hence the battery of existential "tests" Gardner subjects him to. Such tests are the moral transcriptions of Gardner's intuition of real-life pressures. The qualities of endless conflict and dread, verifiable to the reader's own experience, renders the entire novel (and in particular the goodness of Lars-Goring) more mature, more poignant, more meaningful. It is the imagination's freedom from deterministic moral principles (Gardner's initial definition) that permits the kind of enlarging contrast Gardner presents so successfully in Freddy's Book.

Working from one's intuition of real experience rather than from an abstract code of dos and don'ts, the novelist is able to encompass and therefore put in perspective any number of narrower dogmas that other writers might (Gardner would think incorrectly) use as the principal concern of their fictions. Such a dogma might be anything too narrow to make for an accurate, edifying, "moral" fiction by itself—e.g., the self-reflexive word games of debating partner William Gass.

In On Moral Fiction, Gardner describes the relationship between narrow art and broader, more "serious" art this way: "trivial art has no meaning or value except in the shadow of more serious art, the kind of art that beats back monsters and, if you will, makes the world safe for triviality." In Freddy's Book, he offers two striking paradigms of this idea. One is the relationship between the city and the country, the former being the free but morally lax place ("the Devil keeps house there") that allows, paradoxically, by virtue of its wealth and power, the moral purity of the country. The other is the free Sweden ruled by Gustav Vasa and Lars-Goring that at least for a while permits dissent to exist alongside the national and religious orthodoxies, thereby securing the rare privilege to assess both. The freedom to see both sides (something Leavis tended to dismiss) is crucial for Gardner, in real life as in fiction, because without one term illuminating the other, one is doomed to a partial view, which fosters the ignorance that is the root of repression.

So Freddy's Book is moral in that the fight is fair; it heeds what the reader (the "gentle reader" of a previous era) acknowledges as complete and accurate; and our sense that the book is complete and accurate emerges from the text and is not found in any code the author professes….

In our culture there have been writers who felt it was right to be overly prescriptive, but they are, thankfully, mostly forgotten (I am thinking in particular of the propagandizing American writers of the 1930s), for intransigent opinions get stale very quickly. An opposite extreme is pursued by writers who shuttle between the utopias of form and formlessness, assuring themselves and us that a purely technical point of view is a sufficient substitute for moral writing. John Gardner admirably chooses a middle ground in his fiction by modulating between palpable moral figures (like Lars-Goring and the Devil) and the freedom to explore, question, and expose what those figures represent.

If this requires the slightly awkward juxtaposition of the medieval and the modern mind, it is only because the exploration of moral ideas is so foreign to the contemporary cultural landscape—as odd, in fact, as Freddy, whose father keeps him locked in his room. "You've no idea what it's like out there." Agaard says to Winesap, "for a boy like mine—the nastiness, the torment, not to mention the danger." We should thank John Gardner for taking the risk and letting the monster out, for in so doing he gives us a good handle on our sense of possibility and constraint—a central concern of a free, unprescriptive society.