Arnold Deller is a practitioner of the most ephemeral of the arts. He is a cook. But because he is an artist, he knows that an artistic response is fitting when his son is killed in Vietnam. Art is love, he says. And because that son had written to him about the joys of eating an ancient Chinese dish called Imperial Dog, Arnold believes that he must prepare that meal in honour of his dead son….

That's a brief summary of the title story in John Gardner's The Art of Living and Other Stories. It is probably the strongest story in the collection, if only because of its central image. But its point is clear: art is first of all an act of love—Arnold cooks the meal as a tribute to his dead son. It is also a continuation and extension of an ancient tradition. By preparing and serving the meal Arnold has put himself in touch with his son and all the ancient Asian traditions epitomized by the meal. And by serving it to a new audience, Arnold is enlarging the art…. And finally, Arnold fulfils the commercial demands of art as well as his identity as an artist. No one is an artist until someone defines him as such by buying his art. When [the motorcycle gang] The Scavengers pay $1.50 a plate they are confirming Arnold's status.

With one exception, every story in the collection is equally concerned with the various relationships between art and life. (p. 9)

These are stories that are written to be discussed. And as such, they are perhaps to serve as a corrective to Gardner's On Moral Fiction…. In that essay Gardner was very perceptive about the creation of art, less so about the intentions of art, and least of all about its function in society. He was in fact sometimes malicious and devious in his arguments. However, he was passionately clear about his feelings. He is an old-fashioned idealist who believes that art should provide models for right human conduct. But by the time he had shoved all the art he admired into the categories of his ideals, the categories had become so all-inclusive that he had become inconclusive.

But because Gardner is first of all a fiction writer and not an essayist, it should not be surprising that his stories are more coherent than his abstract prose. In fact it seems to me that most of these stories contradict entirely one of the chief demands he made for fiction in On Moral Fiction, where he wrote: "moral art holds up models of decent behavior … characters … whose basic goodness and struggle against confusion, error, and evil … give firm intellectual and emotional support to our own struggle."

In The Art of Living and Other Stories he has done something quite different. He has not presented exemplary characters. Instead, he has written stories from which we might draw moral truths. Therefore, although the stories are often instructive, they do not necessarily illustrate good moral character. Quite the opposite. We must see that the ostensibly good old lady, admirably crusty in character, in "The Joy of the Just," is actually guilty of the sin of pride. And if we are to emulate his characters, how far should we go? Arnold Deller, cook, might show the way to metaphysical connections with the dead by means of art: but if you or I should serve up cooked dog we would surely be arrested; if we served up pot roast of cocker spaniel, we would surely be lynched.

I am not being entirely facetious. The story "Nimram" suggests that art is an answer to the fear of death. Perhaps—but not entirely. The image of the musician and the dying girl on the airplane brought to my mind the very similar image in the farcical film Airplane. There the joy of musical performance is such that the passengers delight in it, ignoring the little girl—whose life-support system is disconnected—and they sing blithely on while she croaks. There's a harsh moral truth there, and an apt criticism of Gardner's point.

Many of his stories in fact invite comparisons, and few of them are flattering to Gardner. For example, the old lady of "The Joy of the Just" immediately invokes Flannery O'Connor's masterpiece, "A Good Man Is Hard to Find," and next to it Gardner's story seems thin and contrived—the more so when one realizes that the characters seem to be drawn from Li'l Abner and/or The Beverly Hillbillies. And perhaps the narrator of Arnold Deller's story is in fact The Fonz, from Happy Days. Certainly he is not a biker of the kind we recognize on the streets or in the courts. And Gardner's use of flat popular stereotypes—the absent-minded professor in "The Music Lover," or the bookworm in "The Library Horror"—is almost certainly deliberate.

Although in On Moral Fiction Gardner is very hard on writers who use thin characters to promulgate or examine ideas, he is much more generous when he finds something very similar in medieval literature…. And clearly in these stories he wants to communicate a certain doctrine about art. Not surprisingly, he seems to do this best in the quasi-ancient fairy-tales of "Trumpeter" and "Vlemk the Box-Painter." He is clearly much happier with the metaphoric truths of the fairy-tale form than he is with the factual observations to which he must restrict himself in the stories of the present.

In fact it seems to me that there is a crippling contradiction at the heart of Gardner's most recent writing. On the one hand he believes in writing that illustrates or exemplifies doctrines of right conduct. On the other hand he believes that fiction is an exploration of the imagination and the intuition…. [Each] of the stories in The Art of Living seems scrupulously planned to prove or illustrate a particular theory about art and life.

It is perhaps this contradiction between intention and belief that makes Gardner's stories succeed as theories and fail as art. Because although it is possible to have works of art about art—examples from Keats, Browning, Yeats, and Joyce Cary spring to mind—Gardner's stories do not achieve what they set out to illustrate.

They are, in the end, illustrations of ideas. Their consequent value is therefore not in what they are, but in what they lead us to talk about. They seem to be written for professors and students, and indeed, if one were looking for a text with which to teach a course entitled "Art and Society," one could look a lot farther and do much worse than to choose Gardner's The Art of Living and Other Stories. But if one wanted, like Arnold Deller, to set a work of art before an audience to continue the tradition and enlarge their taste—a real feast of beast, as it were—one would be wise to choose Grendel—by John Gardner. (p. 10)