Customer Reviews

MICKELSSON'S GHOSTS

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

It isn't difficult to understand why this novel is out of print. As one of the characters remarks, "(People) don't *want* to think. People want secure, happy families, pleasant barbecue parties, predictable-in-advance nights for bowling and the opera." Well, you're not going to get those kinds of things in this claustrophobic, dense novel about a man's descent into insanity. Peter Mickelsson, separated, with a son on the run and an estranged daughter, is losing control of his life. Or has given up *trying* to control it - he can't face the daily tasks of paying bills, teaching classes, or dealing with the thousand minutia that occupy the rest of us. Instead, he allows himself the luxury of endless introspective episodes, dwelling at length on Nietzsche, Luther, occasionally Wittgenstein, or Kant. His career is failing, the IRS is breathing down his neck, and he can't afford his next meal. So he does what no one else would consider - purchases a rambling farmhouse in the Endless Mountains and sets to restoring it.

Mickelsson is by no means a sympathetic character, but in his refusal to face his troubles and the increasingly desperate world that envelops him, he could be a metaphor for society at large, eager for distraction, never actively considering the consequences of his actions in what is not an actual pursuit of pleasure as it is a passive *allowing* things to happen. He concludes, "Action was a problem. What was one to do if he knew every movement of the spirit was poisoned at the source?" Ah, the anguish, the soul-searching! Great, weighty BLOCKS on what it is to be human, what sorrows are ours, "Such was the fruit of all those eons of evolution, from hydrogen to consciousness: galaxies wailing their sorrow. Music of the spheres."

Search this one out. Read it on winter nights. It may offer some fuel for your own meditations. Serious books too often seem preachy, or worse, have an all-too-obvious agenda, are shrill, haranguing. What makes Mickelsson so absorbing is that he is UNcertain. That alone is remarkable anymore.

This was John Gardner's last and best novel. The hero of the story, Peter Mickelsson, is a brilliant professor of philosophy who's fallen on hard times. His marriage has dissolved. The IRS is dunning him. His attorney is giving him bad advice. And he's holding the wrong end of the bottle to boot. In a last-ditch effort to mend his cracked-up life, he buys a farm in Pennsylvania. There he sets about restoring the old farmhouse, only to find that the place is haunted. The ghosts of former occupants just don't want to give the place up--not yet anyway.

This wonderful work is sadly out-of-print. Please check your local used bookstore. Or search online for it. This book is a real masterpiece. Don't miss it.

In this huge, turbulent book we roll and tumble through the consciousness of Peter Mickelsson, a down-at-the-heels philosophy professor whose pursuit of the Good and the True is undermined by lechery, madness, witchcraft and the Internal Revenue Service.

As Mickelsson careens through a season of discontent, we follow willingly along in his wake. The book is an overstuffed toy box of ideas and events. Neitzsche and Wittgenstein cast major shadows across Mickelsson's thought processes. He wrestles with the phantasms of his boyhood, the pain of his recent divorce, the "actual" ghosts who inhabit the dilapidated farmhouse he's fixing up in rural Pennsylvania, the higher and lower angels of his sex life, and his blunderings through the complicated, intermittently treacherous worlds of academia and small town America.

This novel threatens to fly off in a dozen directions. What holds it together is Gardner's marvelous prose. The book is best read in small sips rather than great gulps, the better to savor Gardner's well-made paragraphs and the sweep of his ideas. The other unifying force is Mickelsson's perverse faith that goodness and order do exist (perhaps beyond reach) above the squalor and chaos of the life he's fallen into. Drowning in randomness and unreason, Mickelsson fights on, and despite his many sins and missteps, his stubbornness comes to seem admirable, heroic even.

This is one of the best American novels you'll read. Its power, sweep, ambition and humanity put it right up there with Moby Dick, only the white whale here is the search for life's meaning among the mind games of modern philosophy and the mysteries and dangers that lurk out at the edges of the American experience.

I've read this book seven times since it was published and have over the years hoarded copies because it is so difficult to find (and thus lend to those seeking a good read). It is dense, complex, thought provoking, and even frustrating. Gardner thrusts us immediately into the mind, emotions, and experiences of the protagonist. He creates an idea-filled treatise on modern life and its struggles, a mystery, a psychological ghost story, and a funny excoriation of academia. It deserves more exposure than it got, but perhaps demands more of the reader than most want to give to a book.

I can think of no book read over my 40 years of adult reading as deeply moving and thought-provoking as this book. The way I gauge the effect a book is having on me is the speed at which I am reading it - the slower I read it the more I am being affected, and the duration and frequency of times the book is remembered. I have never read a book as slowly as this one, and many years after reading the book I still think of it. I will admit that Mickelsson and his philosophic musings may not be for everyone. I would recommend him only to those who are unafraid of intense self-examination. Mickelsson's quest brings to mind the ancient dictum "Know thyself". The only books that have affected me nearly this deeply include the deeply brooding Moby Dick and the elegiac To the Lighthouse.

So many readers minds are in concert regarding the reviews for this book and yet I found an original New York Times review from 1982 that was most unfavorable. It's instructive to keep in mind that there was a notable amount of unfair criticism targeted toward Mr. Gardner at the time this book came out, mainly because of `On Moral Fiction'. Bad mistake for Mr. Gardner. I can only imagine that he was looking forward to a spirited fight for the cause of higher art. Instead he found himself surrounded by resentful contemporaries with stinging tentacles. And so perhaps a critic or two approached this work with filtered glasses. Mickelsson's Ghosts is not only a `loose and baggy monster' like any good novel should be but is also a very visceral one that transcends the categorizations or genres it comes closest to. I don't think Gardner was working toward a mystery or a sci-fi or gothic necessarily and any solutions found here are not presented in a standard Mystery plot-driven format. etc. Most anyone that has approached this novel with a open mind (look at the customer's comments) knows its in a class of it's own. It succeeds at the highest level, pulling you in deep and leaving you in awe.

It isn't difficult to understand why this novel is out of print. As one of the characters remarks, "(People) don't *want* to think. People want secure, happy families, pleasant barbecue parties, predictable-in-advance nights for bowling and the opera." Well, you're not going to get those kinds of things in this claustrophobic, dense novel about a man's descent into insanity. Peter Mickelsson, separated, with a son on the run and an estranged daughter, is losing control of his life. Or has given up *trying* to control it - he can't face the daily tasks of paying bills, teaching classes, or dealing with the thousand minutia that occupy the rest of us. Instead, he allows himself the luxury of endless introspective episodes, dwelling at length on Nietzsche, Luther, occasionally Wittgenstein, or Kant. His career is failing, the IRS is breathing down his neck, and he can't afford his next meal. So he does what no one else would consider - purchases a rambling farmhouse in the Endless Mountains and sets to restoring it.

Mickelsson is by no means a sympathetic character, but in his refusal to face his troubles and the increasingly desperate world that envelops him, he could be a metaphor for society at large, eager for distraction, never actively considering the consequences of his actions in what is not an actual pursuit of pleasure as it is a passive *allowing* things to happen. He concludes, "Action was a problem. What was one to do if he knew every movement of the spirit was poisoned at the source?" Ah, the anguish, the soul-searching! Great, weighty BLOCKS on what it is to be human, what sorrows are ours, "Such was the fruit of all those eons of evolution, from hydrogen to consciousness: galaxies wailing their sorrow. Music of the spheres."

Search this one out. Read it on winter nights. It may offer some fuel for your own meditations. Serious books too often seem preachy, or worse, have an all-too-obvious agenda, are shrill, haranguing. What makes Mickelsson so absorbing is that he is UNcertain. That alone is remarkable anymore.

I've read most of John Gardner's novels, and Mickelsson's Ghosts is certainly my favorite, yet as with all other Gardner novels it's fraught with problems, particularly when it comes to Gardner's arrogance. For this was a man who was the self-proclaimed "greatest living author," who aimed to be remembered through the ages alongside literary giants like Proust and Chaucer, who razed and scolded his fellow authors without mercy. But now here we are twenty-six years after his unexpected death; John Gardner is forgotten, even unknown amongst what few true "readers" exist in this day and age; the majority of his novels have been out of print for decades, and when they ARE brought back into print the publishers must struggle to keep them so. Indeed, the authors Gardner railed against in his career-killing 1976 diatribe "On Moral Fiction" are the ones who are remembered today; I foresee Thomas Pynchon one day being considered alongside say Dante rather than Gardner. (Who knows, though: perhaps John Gardner could turn out to be the Herman Melville of the 20th Century, forgotten by his immediate generation, resurrected by the following. Maybe in thirty or forty years Mickelsson's Ghosts will be the Moby Dick of a new age. But I doubt it.)

Mickelsson's Ghosts has a simple set-up, with a metaphor any Serious Writer could dig into: a down-on-his-luck college professor buys a ramshackle house in the New York woods and sets about repairing it - the metaphor being, of course, that as he repairs the home he repairs his soul. Only Gardner jams a multitude of divergent threads, plots, characters, and digressions into this elephantine novel. Male witches who divine water holes in the thick woods, black trucks driven sans headlights in the dead of night, a houseful of redneck ghosts, true-blue undergrads who fret over mundane philosophical questions, rumored goings-on of puritanical Mormons afoot in the unwelcoming forest, the spirits of Martin Luther and Frederick Nietzsche, talk of UFOs and crop circles, radical photographers who keep the dying dream of the sixties alive, smarmy professors who sit around and endlessly discuss Big Issues. It's all here and more. And our guide through the dense bric-a-brac is Peter Mickelson, former college football star and current philosophy professor, gone to seed both physically and mentally - gone to seed, in fact, morally, spiritually, financially, and professionally. In his forties, freshly divorced, two adult children whom he no longer sees (one of them being the radical photographer, who's running from the government, it seems), his once-vaunted career in ruins. Author of a popular book on philosophy which at one point guaranteed him a long-standing career in the sun, but due to his own issues Mickelsson blew it, and now he withers away teaching introductory philosophy to undergrads at SUNY. This is our hero, a man who lives predominately in his memories, allowing his present troubles to accumulate and topple over like an overstuffed trash bin. In nearly thirty years of reading I've never come across as ineffectual a lead character as Peter Mickelsson, the first character who ever made me want to magically transport myself into the world of the novel so that I could punch him in his face.

We meet Mickelsson as he's buying the house which gradually (a few hundred pages in) he determines is haunted by ghosts. We know from the start that he's had a bad past few years. The first hundred pages of the novel promise a redemption for Mickelsson; he's bought this house, he's realized the mistakes he's made both professionally and emotionally, and he finds a new love with the fantastically-realized character Jessie Stark. A fellow professor, gorgeous, widowed at only thirty-five, Jessie is a living, breathing character whom Gardner created out of thin air (I pretty much fell in love with her myself); if ever one were to make a case that John Gardner WAS a literary giant, then his characters would be the first exhibit in the argument. Despite the long-winded digressions, the boorish philosophical discussions, the lack of forward momentum, despite all of those things which makes Gardner an acquired (yet still difficult) taste for the modern reader, his characters were nearly flesh and blood, three-dimensional, human beings with their own individual wants and needs and beliefs. This is particularly true of his main characters. Until brain-transplant science is perfected there will never be a better method of inhabiting another person's persona than through the novels of John Gardner. At any rate, Jessie basically throws herself at Mickelsson, and though he (and more importantly, WE) realizes that she is all he needs - she's gorgeous, smart, funny, and willing to help him navigate through the riotous mess he's made of his life - Mickelsson instead botches the promise and retreats into the insanity of his own mind. This is a book dense with inner turmoil, of thoughts growing from thoughts, of soliloquies delivered to the self, and we, the lucky readers, are there for it all. When action DOES arise it's over too quick, arising and culminating in a few pages - then fretted over for twice or three times the length. Or, worse yet, it's seemingly jammed into the narrative, an action sequence from an unrelated novel, as in the B-Movie denouement.

Only three relationships matter for Mickelsson as the novel proceeds: the one with the house, the one with Donnie (a local prostitute who falls in love with him), and the one with the ghosts. Gardner claimed in "On Becoming A Writer" (I think) that he enjoyed Stephen King's writing; King's influence is felt throughout the macabre sections in Mickelsson's haunted house. Many scenes are downright creepy, as Mickelsson, alone in his bedroom in the dead of night, hears voices chattering just outside his door. Yet Mickelsson, so ensnared in the ennui which consumes him in every other situation, just continues to lie there; even when the ghosts begin to actually appear to him (and touch him!), he remains as impassive as a Zen monk facing a loaded pistol. Only in Mickelsson's case the impassivity is not due to a studied indifference to life's passing troubles; it's due to his rapidly fading hold on sanity. And when Mickelsson recaptures his hold (to an extent) in the very final pages of the novel, the achievement comes so late that it doesn't harbor much of an emphatic thrill for the reader - instead, this wearying novel serves to leave you in your own ennui, glazed over at the wanton disregard Mickelsson harbors for everyone and everything outside of himself and his precious memories.

And the memories. Gardner was infamous for digressions, and Mickelsson's Ghost is mired with them, moreso than any other Gardner novel, even "Sunlight Dialogues." A case in point: halfway through the novel we have a scene where Mickelsson drives his newly-purchased (yet used and abused) Jeep to his morning classes. Along the way he reminisces (for several pages) about his one and only date with Jessie. Within this reminiscence Mickelsson recalls his troubled marriage - pages and pages about his wife Ellen and her early days at his side, followed by her disenchantment with life in the 1960s, followed by her rebirth as an "underground" chick, throwing performance pieces on the streets with her younger hippie friends, providing safe houses for poets on the run (Alan Ginsberg in a pseudonymous cameo). This in turn leads to a long essay on the sixties, on the movements and the dreams and the failures. From this back to the crushing and sad end of Mickelsson's marriage, and from there back to his date with Jessie; and from there, finally, back to Mickelsson in his jeep. About fifty pages have elapsed, and he's still in that Jeep; everything has occurred internally, forward movement of the plot has been nil. This is the case for most of the novel.

Death is close throughout. Thoughts of it, fears of it, acceptance of it. Mickelsson thinks about death constantly (what with ghosts hanging around, who could blame him?), and Gardner writes at length about the memories one hopes to leave behind when he or she is taken from this world. This morbidity is compounded by the irony that Gardner himself was dead within a year of the novel's publication, killed in a motorcycle wreck on a desolate country road. Mickelsson is a man at the end of his career, his salad days long past, any chance for a redemptive success crushed by his own bitterness and lashing tongue. It's not difficult to replace Mickelsson with Gardner; like his hero he had come to the end of his brief taste with fame, also due to his own actions. Gardner had been feted throughout the seventies, with critics praising his every release. The New York Times in particular graced him with positive reviews, even going so far as to proclaim him a "master." But then came "On Moral Fiction," where Gardner lambasted fellow writers for what he claimed was a lack of morality in their tales. The reaction was fast and harsh. Seek out critical reviews of Gardner's post-1976 novels and you will find a much different tone. The trophy horse had become the village mule. Also around this time nasty allegations arose concerning Gardner's nonfiction work, particularly his treatise on Chaucer, which it turns out had been plagiarized from other sources. All told, Gardner was now a man cast outside, a has-been. Much like Peter Mickelsson. And once you consider that Mickelsson's Ghost was received poorly both by critics and by readers (it barely sold its tiny first run), Gardner's death months later seems even more tragic...yet fated.

I've found that the reading of Gardner novels, for me at least, proceeds in the same fashion every time. The first several pages, as you get cozy with the blocks of prose and the relaxed pace, you realize you really are in the hands of a master, a man who not only knew how to teach writing but also knew how to write Literary Fiction With Lasting Merit, and you wonder, why doesn't anyone remember this guy? Then the rot sets in. As the pages progress and the digressions increase, the main plot vanishing in the horizon, you start flipping ahead a bit, checking if you'd miss anything important if you, say, maybe skipped a few pages. (But of course as a True Reader you ignore this impulse.) Halfway through you begin to hate this hoary-headed John Gardner, this man described by one hater as "a Hell's Angel grandmother," this man who, as one critic of Mickelsson's Ghost put it, "enjoys writing his novels more than we enjoy reading them." But you press on, and sometimes the end justifies the means. Mickelsson's Ghosts is a case where it does, "October Light," for example, is a case where it does not. As other reviewers have mentioned, Mickelsson's Ghost does indeed have a memorable ending, a bizarre one at that (which some Gardner-supporters have claimed turned original readers off from the novel, ruining their appreciation of it; something I find hard to believe, as it's my bet most of those original readers didn't even make it to the end). You'll be scratching your head over it for days, but it's my opinion (tiny spoiler alert), that one must look to the story of Mickelsson's grandfather, buried within the narrative, to understand what's happened to Mickelsson himself.

But make no mistake: this is a massive, enfolding novel which you can wrap yourself in like some tattered blanket. You can easily find yourself living within it, thinking of its characters as real people. You could easily find yourself moved by the genuine human pathos on each and every page. It all just depends on what kind of a reader you are, and what you demand from the fiction you read. If you don't mind a slow narrative, more internal action than external action, and pages and pages of speculation on the nature of death, then Mickelsson's Ghost will make for fine reading on a winter's night (though, despite the reviewer's claim below that this isn't "beach reading," I actually read Mickelsson's Ghost during a cruise in the Bahamas).

I have read most of Gardner's novels and was briefly a student of his in the 1970s. He was a larger than life character, and I have enjoyed many, though not all, of the Gardner novels I have read. Without question, this is my favorite. I put it off for many years but was inspired to pick it up after reading the Silesky biography. This book is a gem. The main character is a troubled philosophy professor who is sometimes difficult to like, but the book itself is one to love. It is philosophical work, but it is also part ghost story, part mystery, and part romance. The pages just keep turning, and the ending does not disappoint. I am hoping New Directions will choose to reissue this novel, along with the other Gardner books they are bringing back into print. To overlook it would be a big mistake.

Peter Mickelsson is a professor of Philosophy who has recently sufferred from insanity, is just divorced, and just purchased a house that may be haunted in a strange town.

While Professor Mickelsson is trying to get along with life as best he can, he falls in love with a prostitute, accidentially kills an old, decrepit bank robber, and struggles with his philosophy.

John Gardner is a wonderful writer (too bad he is no longer alive). I found this book to be beautifully written and deeply moving.

It is one of my favourites.

The ending is unforgettable.