by John Gardner
Even given Gardner's normal tendency toward prodigiously complex fiction, this ninth novel is the verbal equivalent of a maze full of culs-de-sac, distractions and asides. It is also strangely rewarding. Mickelsson is a middle-aged college philosophy professor who thinks students are "a necessary evil" and is, while in the midst of a divorce, torn romantically between a 17-year-old girl and a woman faculty colleague. He buys a house in the Pennsylvania mountains and begins having visions of ghosts and rattlesnakes in the cellar. A mysterious cat shows up; there are murder, sex, digressions into Nietzsche, a bizarre Mormon subcult. Gardner's genius lies partly in his ability to blend such disparate elements into whole plots; for all the confusion, the point here is Mickelsson's attempt to give some philosophical integrity to his own life. The writing is clean, fast and often funny. Thinking about his love life, the at times unapologetically sexist professor muses on a lesson learned: "Women were people too; that was the crushing wisdom of modern love." (Knopf, $16.95)
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