Synopses & Reviews
The final novel by John Gardner, , originally published in 1982 just months before his untimely death in a motorcycle accident, is a tour de force. The protagonist Peter Mickelsson, a former star philosophy professor at Brown, relocates to Binghamton University. On the verge of bankruptcy, separated from his wife, in questionable mental health, and drinking heavily, Mickelsson decides to buy a country house in northeastern Pennsylvania. What he encounters there are impassioned and shameless love affairs (one of which results in a regrettable pregnancy), a Mormon extremist cult, small town mythologies, the robbery of a robber, multiple murders, the ghosts of an incestuous family, Plato, and our hero's own possible insanity.
Synopsis
The critically acclaimed final masterwork of John Gardner: an American novel haunted with macabre and cerebral elements.
About the Author
John Gardner (1933-1982) was a popular and controversial author. He wrote several best-selling novels, including Grendel, Sunlight Dialogues, Nickel Mountain, and October Light (which won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1976). Gardner was also a prominent essayist and penned both The Art of Fiction, a text now standard in university writing classes, and On Moral Fiction, a book so scandalous it almost destroyed his career.