American Gothic

By Paul Gray

THE KING'S INDIAN by JOHN GARDNER Illustrations by HERBERT L FINK 323 page

With seven books published in the past five years, Novelist John Gardner, has confounded the theory that quality can only come slowly, and in small doses. Gardner is a professor of English who has managed to lob serious, stylistically adventuresome fiction over the barricades of academic coteries and onto the middle levels of America's bestseller lists. He is also a fabulist with a heart, capable of making the arcane both accessible and emotionally stirring. Near the end of The King's Indian, Gardner briefly introduces himself as a man who, "with the help of Poe and Melville and many another man, wrote this book." The attributions are graceful but hardly necessary, for Poe and Melville rattle around in this book like a couple of dybbuks. Gardner seems possessed by their eagerness to stare into the black holes of transcendental optimism, and two of his nine tales flatter the 19th century authors with unabashed imitation.

In The Ravages of Spring a middle-aged country doctor on a round of house calls finds himself threatened by a string of tornadoes. He seeks shelter in a clap-board-gothic house and lands in the middle of a Vincent Price movie. It includes a mad scientist, a demented, beautiful woman and a terrible secret: through genetic tinkering, the scientist claims to have discovered how to populate the world with exact duplicates of himself and his companion. Solipsism teeters toward the edge of reality. The storm explodes the house like an inflated hypothesis, but the doctor survives --and so, in a way, does the scientist.

The King's Indian, the title story, is a much longer and more complex pastiche. Shanghaied aboard a whaling ship, young Jonathan Upchurch is forced to play Ishmael to a crazed Ahab of a captain. The ship's quest is not for a white whale but, as Upchurch slowly learns, for the mysterious duplicate of itself, reported sunk on its last voyage. Is he surrounded, then, by ghosts? Or is the captain out to smash determinism by carrying his ship safely past a meeting with its foreshadowed self? As adventures and mysteries multiply, a third possibility begins to appear: a hoax, launched by a vaudeville magician, swelling out of control, may be engulfing both perpetrators and dupes alike.

Tour Guide. Gardner does not restrict himself to century-old American settings. He is also at home in classical antiquity (Jason and Medea) and the late Dark Ages (Grendel). He fills pages with royalty and serfs, knights, monks, prisoners and jailers. Magic is taken for granted; humble facts are made to seem miraculous. A lesser writer might stretch the profligate inventiveness of this single book into a long career.

Gardner uses exuberant creations in the service of a stern task: to sneak up on truth without startling it into sham abstractions. As one of his characters says: "The part [of life] we understand is irrelevant." So Gardner sets conflicting metaphysics whirling, then records the patterns thrown out by their lines of force. One situation constantly recurs, as it did in Gardner's ambitious The Sunlight Dialogues: traditionalist meets anarchist; an inherited past must defend itself against a plotless future. In Pastoral Care, a young minister tries to remind his complacent congregation of Christianity's revolutionary roots. A bomb-tossing student takes him at his word, graphically reminding his appalled mentor of the etymology of the word radical.

Gardner knows that such bedrock dualities never change and are never resolved. He also shows that they can crop up anywhere, in the most mundane or marvelous of forms, and that stories can preserve more of their truths than battle reports from competing ideologies. His stories--fanciful, allusive, studded with archaisms ("erumpent," "zacotic," "flambuginous")--are diverting jaunts around central mysteries. With Gardner as tour guide, getting there is all the fun. sbPaul Gray

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