Most of the 10 stories in John Gardner's new collection ["The Art of Living and Other Stories"] develop the common theme of art and its vexed relation to life. This was also the subject of Mr. Gardner's book-length essay, "On Moral Fiction."… There he made substantial use of Tolstoy's argument for a strictly moral art, as developed in the pamphlet "What is Art?" Some of Tolstoy's later fiction is sadly marred by his determination to make his artistic instincts conform to doctrinaire moral and religious views. Certainly it is possible that Mr. Gardner runs a comparable risk in following up his moralizing essay on fiction with stories closely related to it in theme. But before addressing that problem let's recall what "On Moral Fiction" had to say.

In it he argues that all good art, including prose fiction, should be moral. By this he means it should be life-enhancing, protecting human existence from the dark forces of chaos (the "trolls") pressing in from all sides and coming up from below, seeking whom they may devour. In making this argument he is quite hard on many of his fellow writers, issuing such dismissive decrees as "bad art is always basically creepy."… These magisterial judgments are consistent with Gardner's idea that "true art treats ideals, affirming and clarifying the Good, the True and the Beautiful," that "real art creates myths a society can live instead of die by."

While there is something of the Welsh preacher, full of righteousness, in John Gardner, perhaps even something of the upstate New York prophet in a direct line from Joseph Smith, many pages of "On Moral Fiction" make lively reading, and it's a positive pleasure to see various fashionable gloom spreaders and doomsday peddlers get it in the neck. Yet one wishes that Mr. Gardner gave more evidence of having deeply meditated on modern history, and that he would avoid such juvenile terms as "creepy" in assessing mature art and artists. I suppose Giacometti's sculptures are in his sense creepy, yet their contribution to modern art and life is major. On the other hand, Mr. Gardner's title story, "The Art of Living"—about a small-town chef slaughtering and ragouting a small black dog stolen from a pet store—is very creepy, and I believe I could survive the shock of being enjoined never to reread it.

The worst thing about this story is not its central event, or the idea that event may illustrate, but its technical ineptness. The narrator, supposedly a member of an adolescent motorcycle gang during the early years of the Vietnam War, looks back on that period from a time considerably later but never establishes any significant relation between "then" and "now." His and his companions' speech patterns of the earlier period lack flavor and verisimilitude, and the various Italian-American males connected with the restaurant where the canine feast is prepared are hard to tell apart. Also, the story lacks a consistent economy of treatment, so that we are told too much about this or that person or incident, too little about others. The thing reads like a try at a novel that didn't work out, not like a crafted short story.

Rather better is the story "Nimram." The title character is a prominent conductor of late-Romantic symphonic music, much preoccupied with his own success, who finds himself next to a 16-year-old girl on a flight from the West Coast to Chicago. It turns out she is dying of an incurable disease, and this shows Nimram his vulgarity in worrying about being recognized in public or being interviewed by People magazine. In a brief epilogue, the child is brought to Orchestra Hall, where Nimram is conducting a hugely augmented Chicago Symphony in Mahler's Fifth Symphony: "… she had never in her life heard a sound so broad, as if all of humanity, living and dead, had come together for one grand onslaught."

Here no doubt is an instance of art's life-affirming quality, but is it truly what a young girl with an incurable disease, who has had some recent experience playing in the string section of her school orchestra, would hear in the music? I don't think so. This tiresome "humanizing" of music tends to be a vice not of the young, but of fiction writers and second-string critics meeting deadlines. (pp. 27-8)

The best story in "The Art of Living" is "Come on Back." It is a heritage piece about rural and Welsh roots which produces pleasing variations on the theme of art through an informed, affectionate look at the Welsh passion for choral singing. By far the worst and longest story is "Vlemk the Box-Painter," a tedious pseudo-medieval allegory about the painting of a "speaking likeness" of a princess on a rosewood box. There is nothing to be said in its favor, except that Mr. Gardner, in conceiving it, going on with it and publishing it, shows the courage of his moral convictions. (p. 28)