[The subjects of the debate between Lars-Goren and Brask in Freddy's Book]—art and language—are an authorial intrusion that spoils this book and points to the weaknesses of Gardner's recent work. A quite natural dialogue of hope and despair turns into an aesthetic argument between the knight of moral fiction and the bishop of empty rhetoric, a debate between communication and performance, substance and elegance, emotional response and dead perception, John Gardner and a "stylist" who might be mistaken for William Gass. The book's self-consciousness—its self-reference and its nervousness—is Gardner's fault, not Freddy's, because the same kind of defensive contentiousness mars October Light and On Moral Fiction.

Gardner wants, he has said, the old storyteller's magic—"a vivid and continuous dream"—but he has so little confidence in his reader and in his own ability to do the trick that he repeatedly breaks into the dream he's making to argue that the continuous dream is what art should be….

"Art begins in a wound," Gardner says in On Moral Fiction, "and is an attempt to learn to live with the wound or to heal it." Freddy heals his wound—his difference from others, the country-boy feeling of not being good enough—by composing himself into Lars-Goren, the heroic knight. That Gardner "lives with" an analogous, perhaps quite similar wound—the sense of being a literary misfit—is quite explicitly suggested by the prologue. It could be called an "authobiography," a self-portrait of Gardner as writer and defense of his imagination.

Agaard, like Gardner, is a medieval scholar who knows the worst about the world. As psycho-historian and active disputant, Winesap stands for the mimetic novelist and critic. Freddy is what makes Gardner the author different and what gives his imagination vitality—the youthful and hopeful fantasy, the vivid dream. But Freddy's Book, interesting and entertaining by turns, is no dream. Rather it is an interpretation of a dreamer, another argument for but failure to write the fiction that will ravish us into innocence, make us listening children as we read.

As a novelist and a critic, John Gardner is an energetic talker. His recent books have the anecdotal interest, unpredictability, and earnest force of speech. But talk can be bumptious and careless of fact, quick to judge and slow to credit, satisfied with simplification, proud of volubility. These are the qualities of Gardner's work that make him one of our noisiest writers. (p. 54)