How to Read John Gardner: The Novels and the Writing Books

Part of: The Deep Reader

Start with Grendel for the voice of the monster from Beowulf. Choose Nickel Mountain for the quieter company of a roadside diner, where a ride home can change what two people expect of each other. If you want to know how a writer develops, begin with Part I of On Becoming a Novelist.

Which teaching book should you start with?

Each of Gardner’s three books about writing and art answers a different question. The chapter or section in the table is enough to get you started.

Your question	Begin with	What to attend to
Could I develop into a novelist?	On Becoming a Novelist, Part I, “The Writer's Nature”	The varied abilities Gardner considers, and his admissions about the limits of prediction.
How does a sentence or scene produce an experience?	The Art of Fiction, chapter 5, “Common Errors”	A specific problem in the prose and the experience Gardner thinks it damages.
What should art ask of us?	On Moral Fiction, Part I, “Premises on Art and Morality”	The values behind his judgments, including the judgments you resist.

When a beginner asks whether they have the talent to become a novelist, Gardner’s usual answer is “God only knows.” His discussion of Theodore Dreiser gives that uncertainty some substance. A writer may have an imperfect ear for prose and still have a gift for telling a story. As you read Part I of On Becoming a Novelist, notice how many different abilities Gardner has to consider before he can answer the beginner’s question.

In The Art of Fiction, psychic distance is how close a reader feels to the events of a story. The discussion of psychic distance walks through Gardner’s snowstorm example.

Take Grendel at the monster's pace

Grendel gives Beowulf's monster a first-person case to make. Wit, memory, resentment, and an ability to catch himself behaving badly make him attractive company. They also make him adept at converting a need or injury into an explanation of the world. Enjoy the voice while attending to what it asks you to pardon.

The Shaper, the blind singer at Hrothgar’s hall, gives the Danes a more splendid past than the one Grendel remembers. After backing away from the hall, Grendel tries to explain the singer’s power. He imagines the man turning sticks into gold and catches himself reaching for grand language. Listen for the change in the way Grendel talks. He can doubt the singer’s account and still pick up his habits.

Once you’ve read chapters 5 and 6, see the close reading of the dragon and Unferth, which discusses the outcomes of both encounters.

You can start without a course in existentialism. Ask what this speaker is trying to make Grendel accept and what Grendel already wants from the encounter. Mark an opaque passage and continue until that pressure becomes visible. The guide to philosophical scenes through Dostoevsky offers another route into such reading; Gardner's monster supplies his own wit and evasions.

The quieter change of scale in Nickel Mountain

After Grendel's verbal exertions, Nickel Mountain changes the company to Henry Soames's roadside diner. A failing heart, uncertain business, and long winter hours leave him plenty to worry about. His wish to help somebody else develops beside his own need for company and reassurance.

On Callie Wells’s third day at the diner, Henry offers to drive her home in the cold. Callie says that one ride would turn into a ride every night and that her house is only a few steps away. Henry tells her it would be no trouble. She puts on her jacket and he watches her walk up the hill.

Henry is talking about tonight’s walk. Callie is already thinking about the evenings to come. As you read on, notice what each of them thinks accepting a favor would set in motion.

Read the moral argument with fictional people in mind

Come to On Moral Fiction with some fictional people already in mind. Gardner places art among the activities through which people resist destruction and make life worth sustaining. The commitment gives his judgments urgency and also supplies a criterion the novels can help you question.

Part I warns that criticism can harden into immutable doctrine more readily than art. A portable explanation is easier to repeat than the imagined experience it explains. Put the warning beside Gardner's own strong verdicts: return to the work and see whether the judgment has enlarged what you can perceive, or merely made further perception feel unnecessary.

In his Paris Review interview, Gardner describes moral fiction as an inquiry that remains open to persuasion. He also starts from a conviction that art should affirm life. Go back to the diner. Henry has a good reason to offer Callie a ride, and Callie has a reason of her own to refuse it. How much of the scene would we miss if we read it only as a portrait of Henry’s generosity?

Try October Light when you want to follow two kinds of reading

October Light begins with a family quarrel. After her brother James destroys her television, Sally begins reading a paperback about smugglers. Gardner gives us stretches of the book as she reads them.

Whenever the story returns to Sally’s room, recall what was on her mind before she opened the paperback. The craft essay follows Sally’s first returns to the room in detail, including what she remembers about her family.

If Grendel was your first book, try Nickel Mountain next to see what Gardner can do with an ordinary conversation. If you began with On Becoming a Novelist, pick a novel and see which of the abilities he describes you can hear at work.

Questions that tend to arise

Is this the John Gardner who wrote James Bond novels?

This is the American John Gardner, 1933–1982, author of Grendel and the teaching books discussed here. The British novelist who continued the Bond series is another John Gardner. Check the titles when searching catalogs; author records sometimes conflate the two.

Should I read Beowulf before Grendel?

Knowing the outline helps: Grendel attacks Hrothgar's hall, and Beowulf comes to confront him. Read the epic first for the pleasure of hearing speech redistributed, or return to it after Grendel to compare what the monster has made of the story. Avoid a plot-heavy introduction if discovering Gardner's developments is part of the attraction.

Does moral fiction require good characters or a happy ending?

Loss and tragedy are available in Gardner's account. The question concerns how the fiction tests values and which life it makes us take seriously. Grendel can be beguiling while doing harm. A sympathetic hearing is an opportunity for judgment, not an instruction to acquit.

How should I use Gardner’s craft advice?

Test a single claim against a passage. If Gardner says a shift in distance can distract a reader, look at what the shift makes you notice. A sudden change in whose words we seem to hear may be the reason a scene works.

Sources

John Gardner, The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers, Alfred A. Knopf, 1984, chapters 1–2 and 5, especially pp. 111–112.

John Gardner, On Becoming a Novelist, Open Road Media, 2010, Part I, “The Writer's Nature,” introductory paragraphs and section 1; and On Moral Fiction, Open Road Media, 2013, Part I, section 1.

John Gardner, Nickel Mountain, Open Road Media, 2010, opening sections 1, 2, and 4; October Light, Open Road Media, 2010, chapter 1.

John Gardner, Grendel, selections from the 1971 text in Asa Simon Mittman and Marcus Hensel, eds., Primary Sources on Monsters, Arc Humanities Press, 2018, pp. 304–316. The Shaper passage is on p. 309.

John Gardner, “The Art of Fiction No. 73,” interviewed by Paul F. Ferguson, John R. Maier, Sara Matthiessen, and Frank McConnell, The Paris Review, no. 75, Spring 1979.