Customer Reviews

October Light (Arena Books)

5 star:		(7)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

On the surface, nothing much happens in October Light. Crusty Vermont farmer James Page chases his older sister upstairs and locks her in her bedroom. Subsisting on apples and the trashy novel she finds on her nightstand, Sally refuses to come out until their argument gets resolved. Ultimately, it does. Yet within these narrow confines, the novel encompasses the play of nature on the senses, the politics of change, and the ways in which memory, loss and guilt light up the synapses until they wink like fireflies on a soft June evening.

Sally and James are feuding over Sally's autonomy. She's moved into James' house because she's outlived her money and has nowhere to go. It's the mid seventies, and James has holed up in his tumbledown farmhouse to fight a rear guard action against trashy modernity and moral relativism. Sally's more progressive. She watches TV (until James blasts it to smithereens with his shotgun) and seriously believes that Democrats are people too. Sally won't be enslaved by James' rigidity and rages, and won't come down until he agrees to give her breathing room.

The book Sally reads in her room is called Smugglers of Lost Souls' Rock. This novel within a novel takes up about a quarter of October Light. It's a tale of marijuana smugglers off the coast of California; it's chock full of orgies, flying saucers and more barroom philosophizing about man's fate than any novel can bear. Fortunately some pages are missing, so we're spared some of the existential exegeses, but not enough. Gardner uses Sally's reaction to Smugglers of Lost Soul's Rock, to tackle what constitutes truth in a work of fiction; the faux novel also serves as a brilliant, hilarious send up of the seventies' version of truthiness.

October Light builds skillfully towards a quiet but satisfying resolution. We learn why James is so angry, and over time see that the struggle between brother and sister has widened to encompass a universal dilemma: which changes are worth embracing? Resisting? How can we tell the difference? When do we have no choice? James and Sally's struggle perfectly captures the cultural dilemmas of Americans in the mid-seventies. The novel also contains some beautifully written scenes, the best being an old farmer, now dying, talking about the way he experiences the changing of the seasons in Vermont. It's one of the most moving passages I've ever read in a novel.

John Gardner is underrated as a novelist. Part of this is self-inflicted, since he took potshots at many of his peers. Like a master carpenter, what Gardner builds is solid, elegant and clever in its joins. Sometimes curmudgeonly in his opinions, he nevertheless comes to his characters with an open heart. In his post World War II novelist cohort, only Saul Bellow ranks above him, mainly because Bellow was slicker about folding big ideas into the plots of his novels. If you like this book, treat yourself to Nickel Mountain, Grendel, The Sunlight Dialogues, and his last, largely unread book, Mickelsson's Ghosts, which is a great American novel.

I no longer give 5 stars to everything I like, but this is a book I return to again and again. It is a great 5 star book by a great 5 star author and a brilliant teacher (see The Art of Fiction). I hope it will be reissued so that more people can discover a gem of twentieth century writing. Do whatever you can to find a copy. It's a true hoot. Hopefully your local library will still have October Light in the collection.

John Gardner has created two great characters in 72 year old James Page and his older sister Sally Abbot. James, born on the fourth of July, is fiercely independent. His life's work has been caring for "dumb animals: horses, dairy cows, bees, pigs, chickens, and, indirectly, men. " James is truly shocked by Sally's disrespect for his opinions on the state of things in general. "Though he was never a great talker--certainly not in comparison to her, she could lecture your arm off--he knew a signifcant fact or two, knew by thunder, a truth or two--a truth or two that was still worth getting out of bed for."

Sally Page, a widow, has moved in with her brother James, because once the well to do wife of a dentist, she is now destitute. Sally does not adapt well to James' idea of a good life (one without television, nuclear energy, opinionated females, or home improvements.) "She'd preached him a sermon off television about the Equal Rights Amendment. He'd been amazed by all she said--shocked and flabbergasted, though he knew from magazines that there were people who believed such foolishness." They shake each other up, "She'd seemed as astonished by it all as he was, so astonished to discover what he thought that he almost came to doubt it," and ultimately survive themselves and each other.

The pleasure of laughing out loud one minute and then crying quietly in recognition almost in the next moment are among the literary gifts that Gardner bestows. Within the main story of the crises in James and Sally's relationship, precipitated by the murder of Sally's television set, is another lurid, slyly compelling trash novel, a "blockbuser," which Sally reads while locked up in her room subsisting on a diet of apples. Sally's relationship with the book she is reading are some of the most satisfying moments in October Light. "She began to fall in with the book's snappy rhythms, becoming herself more wry, more wearily disgusted with the world..."

As the spat between James and Sally becomes more grave and less of a rollick, Sally's trash novel becomes an hilarious rollercoaster ride. Sally hangs on for dear life. We learn through her musings a little more about the past and why the two siblings have only each other to rely on now. Much occurs to resolve the spat between James and Sally. And it's all perfectly satisfying, like true October light. If this book were a painting, I would imagine a Wyeth interior with a Bosch on the wall. Fasten your seatbelts and prepare to be entertained.

Here, in one of Gardner's finest novels, domestic warfare between two spirited, overly-opinionated senior citizens--brother and sister--brings chaos to their community of friends and family. Gardner's story says much about that vital tension at the heart of American life--the conflict between tradition and progressivism--and about the difficult business of pushing beyond this conflict to find a place where one can stand, secure and untroubled, beneath the haunted, holy light that comes with an autumn in the Land of the Free.

How did the gurus at Modern Library miss October Light in their ranking of the 100 greatest English language books of the 20th Century? The comparison of Russo to Gardner is apt, but Empire Falls -- Pulitzer worthy, yes -- remains October Light Lite.

There's a famous story about how Mark Twain and Charles Dudley Warner ended up writing "The Gilded Age": their wives dared them to write a novel of the sort they were used to reading, but of better quality, and the two writers took up the challenge. I was reminded of that anecdote when I read in Barry Silesky's biography that John Gardner often told friends that his wife Joan teased him at a party about writing a popular novel, "some kind of garbage-philosophy novel that will make a lot of money"; that very night he "hacked out the first chapter of something I called 'The Smugglers of Lost Souls' Rock.'" Although Joan later told people that the story of the novel's beginnings was entirely fanciful, it is true that the Gardners worked on "Smugglers" together (she is credited in the preface), and the result is the trashy pulp fiction that forms the center of "October Light"--which, it so happens, did indeed become Gardner's most popular novel at the time it was published (although "Grendel" has certainly surpassed it in the long term).

Gardner's self-effacing dismissal of the novel-within-the-novel's "garbage-philosophy" masks its subtle genius: what goes on with its characters--a bunch of anarchic drug runners who rebel against the authority of their captain--runs parallel to the lives of James Page and Sally Abbott, the elderly brother and sister at war in the main novel. Sick and tired of the television set, with its "monstrously obscene" game shows and "endless, simpering" soap operas produced by "panderers to lust," cranky James blows the idiot-box to smithereens with his shotgun and then chases Sally up to her bedroom, where he locks her in and where she finds the trashy novel somebody has left behind. Frustrated by its many missing pages, we read the novel along with Sally, who then refuses to come out of the room when mortified family members show up to negotiate a peace and even after James (sort of) relents. Living off the apples in the cellar (which will figure importantly in the plot's climax) and using a chamberpot to toss her slop out the window, Sally hides away from the rigid conservatism of her brother's world and escapes into the chaotic libertinism of a fictitious one.

Most obviously, Gardner builds the tensions of his novel by setting James's timeworn traditionalism against the modern freethinking and permissiveness that so intrigues Sally. (But even Sally has her limits: "that's the kind of thing this world's come to," she mutters when the dime novel's excesses finally transgress her own boundaries.) There is also, throughout, a thematic subtext on nationalism and patriotism; published in 1976 (when I first read it), Gardner meant this book to be his "bicentennial novel"; yet I read it again recently and, if anything, those themes have acquired additional force and relevance three decades later. Often overlooked, however, is the equally incisive examination of the tenaciousness of familial bonds, whether blood ties between brother and sister or the frail loyalties among a gang of drug-addled criminals.

In spite of the lectio interrupta necessitated by the fragmented inner novel, "October Light" is a deceptively easy and satisfying read, with an ending at once melancholic and heartwarming. And the book is morbidly, wickedly, relentlessly funny, both because of the over-the-top nastiness of the battle between James and Sally (not to mention the ineffective meddling of their family members and neighbors) and because of the campy wackiness of the adventures of the stoners who populate "Smugglers," along with the New Age truisms and pop-philosophies that infect their ridiculous conversations and the pot-enhanced "trial" of their ringleader. Beneath its satire and comedy, Gardner has some somber truths he wishes to convey to his reader, but if you take it all too seriously, you're surely missing the point.

Okay, so I'm only half-way through the first chapter right now, but I just have to pipe in because I find it very odd that the man who wrote the great "Art of Fiction" could have so dramatically contradicted his own thesis of storytelling as a "vivid and continuous dream": starting with the second sentence, Gardner immediately delves into exposition and flashback for the next twelve pages!

In this New Directions edition (with a very fine introduction by Tom Bissell; more on that later) Gardner constantly interrupts "the action" by these flashbacks. I didn't even realize the old man was talking to his grandson (or in front of him, more accurately, insofar as the young boy has no idea what's eating gramps) until twelve pages later -- the old man just reminiscences for paragraphs and pages, only occasionally checking back in to the present, and those memories span days and weeks and years. It's all very well-told, as far as the language is concerned: the similes are interesting, funny, and oftentimes philosophically profound; but I do wonder whether it's wise to start things this way. I mean, imagine if you're watching a movie ("vivid and continuous dream") and it starts off with some old guy sitting in a rocking chair for five seconds, and then the camera jumps to another scene, and then another, and yet another, and still another, and it's only half an hour later, after all those flashbacks, when you return to the opening scene of the old guy in his chair and you realize he's been muttering to himself in front of his grandson. While not a sin per se, it seems an awkward way of starting things.

The book opens in the immediate aftermath of James having chased his sister Sally up to her room and locking her in it. Then, apparently, he's settled in front of his fireplace, with his confused but quiet and rather obliging young grandson. But none of this was evident for me until about page twelve, so lost was I in the flashback exposition. Again, the narrative itself is well-told, but in terms of "strategy" I certainly wasn't in the "vivid and continuous" fictional dream Gardner advises in his manual on writing fiction. He is masterful enough in keeping me interested, but that damned flashback technique seems much too cheap. I had the same problem with this in his "Nickel Mountain," but his employment of it is especially bad here, right from the second sentence.

On the other hand, the narrative voice is rather like that of a yarn-spinner out of Mark Twain, almost, so it's charming and amusing and does much to alleviate my annoyance at having to piece together the action myself, as it were, from the few sentences scattered through twelve pages which concern the present situation, as opposed to its exposition.

Anyway, one last thing: the introduction by Tom Bissell was very interesting for me. It didn't just do some silly synopsis of the story (like Charles Johnson shockingly did in his introduction for "The Sunlight Dialogues," another Gardner re-issue from New Directions Publishing, which was mostly a summary of that novel!); no, Bissell actually delved into a bit of "Gardner criticism" ("criticism" in the sense of literary criticism) and even related "the Gardner mystique" to his own life -- something with which I too can identify, having once thought Gardner a god (but he's still a hero to me). I was particularly struck by Bissell's observation that Gardner is essentially "a young person's writer." I wish his introduction had been longer, since there were so many interesting points of Gardner's works and literary theories that were raised, not to mention a bit of "history" of that time in American letters.

Anyway, like Bissell, who's now "over" Gardner (though still very respectful of him), the more I read Gardner the more I also get over him, insofar as he does the annoying constant flashback thing that the cheap dime fiction he deplores also routinely employs. Quite distracting, for all Gardner's otherwise seductive talents.

BTW, New Directions will be issuing his "Nickel Mountain" this fall, and "Mickelsson's Ghosts" next fall. Depending on sales, "The Art of Living" may be next, in 2009. I wonder if New Directions will include the illustrations accompanying "Nickel Mountain" in their edition? (I wonder if there were any in the original "October Light," for that matter -- there aren't any in this edition.) Gardner was famous for insisting on illustrations with many of his works, and though the plates for "Nickel Mountain" didn't seem very interesting to me in an original hardback edition at the local library, I think they should still be included in another reprinting, in keeping with authorial intent.

Anyway, I'm very glad some of Gardner is back in print again! Thank you, New Directions. =)

This is a complex, somewhat clumsy, thick, odd, and eventually wonderful novel. James Page is a crusty old Vermonter who blasts his TV with a shotgun and locks his 80-year old sister, Sally, in her bedroom. While imprisoned there, she finds and reads a cheap paperback thriller about marijuana smugglers in Mexico (actually written by Gardner and his first wife, Joan). The two stories are then woven together with considerable leaps of time and missing pages in the thriller. At times, Gardner wanders around in philosophy la-la land, while at other times he can write the most surreal and beautiful poetic prose about nature, and at still other times he can portray the emotional torture endured by James and eventual redemption of his humane spirit. The introduction, by Tom Bissell, a Gardner admirer, is excellent. We will never know why Gardner had to die at age 49, or whether he willed it; but this novel stands as one of his very best. My own favorite, however, is Nickel Mountain, a much earlier work.

Best novel I've read; and best novelist.

In his penultimate novel, John Gardner finds a mature, more confident voice; the baroque tour-de-force he unleashed in certain earlier novels is supplanted by a simple and straightforward narrative that exibits the estimable writerly trait of knowing what to leave out. The story concerns an elderly brother and sister "living together in profound conflict" (-dustjacket), an uneasy truce that escalates into full-scale war when curmudgeonly James L. Page takes a shotgun and blows Sally Page's TV back to the hell whence it came. This pulpy tripe casts a strange spell over her as fact and fantasy merge. The novel-within-a-novel grows, frankly, tiresome; what Gardner is getting at (ostensibly something about art's relationship to life, a trifle didactic if so), and how her cheap novel relates to the primary narrative, is obscure. It will, however, provide grist for English- and Philosophy-major mills. The main tale, meanwhile, is one of Gardner's most accessible -- funny, with expertly observed characters, and ultimately so moving it astonishes.

John Gardner was such an excellent writer that his artistry, like that of Hemingway, may go unnoticed by many readers. From the epic poem "Jason and Medea" and his translation of the Sumerian "Gilgamesh" to this novel and the later _Mickelson's Ghosts_, every line is eminently readable. In _October Light_ he moves far beyond his most popular work, the bildungsroman "_The Sunlight Dialogues_", to a novel of intense and intimite characterization. Fans of Gardner's student and disciple Richard Russo should be sure to read this book, which is unquestionably one of the greatest modern novels.