Why John Dufresne Matters More Than John Gardnerby Scott Archer JonesLet us gather together and sit in judgement. You the reader demand the right to judge, to weigh up what fiction works and what fiction doesn't, and of course, all this opinionating piles up. The sum composite of all of our beliefs tallies the verdict of time. Take two cases, and pick a winner.John Gardner, rascal, iconoclast, a popular and an experimental post-modern author strode the landscape like a god from his first book in 1970 to his death by motorcycle in 1982. Gardner wanted to write the perfect mythological revival and the Great American Novel, and got damn close on both counts. His work is so important MFAs and PhDs revolve around it like tiny satellites. John Dufresne, coming much later, shows the trends, the joy of writing, the dedication of one of our writers. He's built a small but rabid following and his work reads laugh-out-loud funny and heartbreaking. He thrives on teaching (as Gardner did), but when you check the sales you can see that the world has changed – Gardner's sales were huge, Dufresne, not so much. I believe I can make the argument that Gardner failed – Dos Passos or Faulkner can lay much better claim to the Great American Novel – and that literature, our literature, is alive and kicking through authors like Dufresne. Let us sit together to hear two stories. We can take a bearing on the two Johns in a contrast between the Sunlight Dialogues (1972) and a story from the Johnny Be Bad collection, “Died and Gone to Heaven” (2005). The first is a sprawling 600-plus-page epic full of Mesopotamic dialogue, parodies of Faulkner, Mallory and Sartre, a heap of gargoyles, capped by the transformation of a mole-like character from death-in-life into a charismatic preacher (bless the good Samaritan and the bad Samaritan alike). The other is a simple short story of Southern white trash who bully a colostomic mother into suicide-by-hygiene only to dump her body in a ditch – and a policeman's visceral reaction to the fundamental banality of stupidity.The Sunlight Dialogues seduced thousands of readers at the time of its debut and hung onto the NYT best-sellers list for a dozen weeks. All this happened in spite of hundreds of pages of layering and blatantly academic motifs – after all, Gardner wrote in the era of Pynchon and Pirsig. The antagonist the Sunlight Man and the protagonist Clumly are Gardner's grotesques, shockingly un-beautiful. Ugly, yet either redeemed or destroyed by Love with a capital L. The first description of the Sunlight Man jars us viscerally – he carries burns like a soldier who has suffered from phosphorus and his forehead is “scarred, wrinkled, drawn, right up into the hairline, and above the arc of his balding, his hair exploded like chaotic sunbeams around an Eastern tomb.” The description of Clumly strikes us as hardly more endearing – “Aside from the whiteness and the hairlessness, his only remarkable features were his large nose, which was like a mole’s, and his teeth, which were strikingly white,” perfect movie-star teeth. The antithesis of the regal King Arthur (Gardner's parody), Clumly has “the look of … a man who has slept three nights in the belly of a whale.” Gardner jerks us along on a wild ride – through a handful of needless deaths, four bizarre settings, eight plot lines and close to a hundred characters. In the end, we pity the Sunlight Man trapped in some anarchistic freedom and deluded into a deadly atonement. Astounded, we wonder open-mouthed at Clumly, somehow redeemed by a vision of light as he blesses a room full of dairy men.Gardner lands himself in an authorial stew. He doesn't know if he is freed by his existentialism or condemned by it, whether he can rationalize any affirmation of humanity and faith, of art and love or if he has to deny all chance because of his own brutal intellectual honesty. Gardner can't even decide if he tells the story's unbroken seamless dream or if he speaks directly to and of the writing as metafiction.For those of you who don't know his work, Dufresne doesn't care if he is post-modern or retro-pre-post-modern revival. He always cares about story, even a story about a woman on a bar stool beside him, as she convinces him to write her sad tale. His work is committed to humor and horror, seasoned up in the same dish. He has fun writing and although he probably sneaks in references to Talmudic texts and Mallory's King Arthur, you need an electron microscope to find them. He enjoys ambiguity and rubs your nose in it. Are his images and phrases, his craft better than Gardener? – possibly not.In Dufresne's story “Died and Gone to Heaven,” we are introduced to Eula, dying from a backed-up colostomy bag and rasslin' with the Lord on the bed as He transmutes into various verminous animals – one of which (I find this too good not to tell) manifests as a realtor selling Paradise cottages. She's the mother of Doyle who lusts after all things tawdry, foremost his slutty wife Gloria and after that, his TV and his mother's house. Dead Eula is bundled into a buzzard-infested ditch that becomes the allegorical search for truth. A shotgun-toting oracle named Tommy Ray takes the scene and brings Officer Gethern Kincaid in from stage left. Gethern, whose own mother was as “crazy as a bedbug” left him with a half-finished clorox milkshake and a thirst for knowing. Unable to shake off Eula's life and death, he pursues them like a reluctant dog on the scent. We are off on a car-crash ride of wife-abuse, morphing into a murder mystery and into a final admission of what happened one night on the tracks behind the Color Tile in New Orleans. In a fully rational act, Gethern kicks the hell out of Doyle's TV, cutting himself deeply. In the bayou out back he falls into an introspection as he soaks away the blood beneath the Milky Way. Gethern is “speeding away from everything else in the universe, speeding away from him, from this place, this earth, this small patch of bottomland where he sat bleeding and remembering, getting smaller and smaller.” Gethern shuts his eyes and, digging his hands into the bayou mud, holds on to something human.Even in this short story Dufresne lets us understand not only Gethern and Tommy Ray, the mother, the abusive father and the murderer, but even Doyle and Gloria as they tilt their “sponge-like faces” at the TV, honing their incredible Jeopardy skills. These most unlikely people populate a perfectly probable universe.What matters most is that John Gardner – in spite of his copious knowledge, his obsession with philosophy, his florid imagination, his sardonic use of cartoon-ism, his shocking choice of hero – in spite of his huge gifts, doesn't care enough to love his characters. What matters most about John Dufresne is that he loves them all, even those that leave you feeling unclean, that start you off in that ditch searching for the truth. We, the jury, ….First Appeared in the Prague Revue
According to the quotations on the back cover of the 1983 Ballantine paperback, The New York Times hailed John Gardner as "a major American writer whose promise...seems unlimited". The work itself, The Sunlight Dialogues has also been praised by Time as "A compassionate portrait of America in the uneasy 60's" and "A novel in the grand line of American fiction...a superb literary achievement" by The Boston Globe. Although it isone of his better known works, Gardner remains best known for Grendel, a retelling of the Beowulf legend from the point of view of the monster.Since his death in 1982 few seem to remember and much less read John Gardner. He died in 1982 near his home in Pensyllvania, in a tragic accident: he lost control over his motorcycle and hit the dirt shoulder. He was just 49 years old, and his novel Mickelsson's Ghosts which was published that year became his last. His fiancee stated that he had been drinking the night before the accident, and the autopsy revealed a a blood alcohol level of 0,075 - just shy of the legal limit for driving at 0,080. Tragedy ended John Gardner's life, but in a way also began it - as a boy he rode a tractor and ploughed the fields, while his younger brother Gilbert sat in the rear on the cultipacker. Gilbert fell, and John turned to see his brother being crushed under the wheels of the cultipacker. Both boys knew that Gilbert should never have been riding in the back, but everybody agreed that John could never have stopped in time to prevent his death. At that time, John was only twelve years old. After this incident he would not work on the tractor again; he would park it in the field, sit under its shade and write novels.The Sunlight Dialogues is a long and meandering work, originally published in 1972. It is set in Batavia, a town in Western New York, a place which the author knows well because he was born and grew up there. The novel features an extensive cast of characters, with a list and family trees provided at the beginning. The novel osciliates around two distinct personalities - chief police officer Fred Clumly, and a nameless vargrant who requests to be called "The Sunlight Man". Batavia police has arrested The Sunlight Man for writing the word "LOVE" across the highway, and suspect him for murder; he escapes from the town jail, but keeps confronting Clumly and talking to him. The men contrasts their views and stances on a variety of issues. Sunlight Man's vargrancy is contrasted with Clumly's traditionalism and prejudices - since he has a beard and looks like a hippy he must be from California, a place which Clumly detests. Sunlight speaks in parables, and shows fluency in almost every field of knowledge, from history to mythology; his presence affects the whole town, which provides for a myriad of side stories and subplots devoted to the characters provided in the beginning.Gardner makes a formidable effort into creating individual characters and a vividly detailed setting as a stage for their interactions, and pursuing the undercurrents which run through the society of Batavia. Still, the novel is very much set in the time it was published - it attempts to reflects the uneasy time the country was going through then. In 2012 it feels dated, and the disturbing effect it once had on its readers is mostly gone; it feels largely provocative, and unnecesarrily so. The writing is obviously polished and well-crafted - yet the novel lacks the aspect of timelesness, something which would detach it from the chain of the period it was written in and allowed to stand on its own. The story is creative enough but takes way too long to get anywhere; the character of The Sunlight Man is compelling, but as a whole it does not quite work. Still, it managed to make me interested in the author's other works, and remember him, his life and work.For those interested, here is the beginning of The Sunlight Dialogues read by John Gardner's son, Joel.http://www.npr.org/templates/story/st...
Do You like book The Sunlight Dialogues (2006)?
Death has not been kind to John Gardner. My high-school English teacher assigned us this book, because I'm sure Gardner was seen at the time as an important American writer. But Gardner's motorcycle ran off the road, literally, and somehow his ascension to the American literary canon veered off track as well.I loved this book as a high-school student. Here's what I wrote about it in my diary in 1975: "The Sunlight Dialogues is turning out to be a very good book. An extremely good book. To think I would never even have heard of it if I weren't taking English 513... The plot is both complex and very intriguing, and it hovers quite effectively between fantasy and shocking reality -- with each blending into the other until it is impossible to distinguish them."Half a lifetime later, I'm not so sure. Here's a synopsis: Mysterious hippie (aka "The Sunlight Man") meets slow-witted small-town cop and gives him long lectures on ... well, I don't know what exactly. The meaning of life, or something. The whole thing sounds rather Unabomber-esque, except that in this case we're supposed to sympathize with the Unabomber. When I was in high school it was easy to be on the side of the counterculture hero. Now, in the light of history, I think it would be a lot harder.Bottom line: This purports to be a Big Honking Book about Big Important Ideas, but really it's just a writer showing off. Might be interesting to read as a period piece. I'm tempted to give it two stars, but I'm giving it three in honor of my high-school self who loved it.
—Dana
Fred Clumly is the chief of police in Batavia, NY, nearing retirement, when a strange bearded man, known only as the Sunlight Man ends up in one of his cells, accused only, for the time being, of painting LOVE across two lanes of traffic. But the Sunlight Man is not the harmless funnyman he appears to be. Who is the Sunlight Man, and what does he have in store for the inhabitants of Batavia, New York? The people of Batavia will never be the same, and an old and storied family, in particular, will be brought down.While the novel is ostensibly about the battle of wills between Chief Clumly and the Sunlight Man, it is much more. It is a tale of clashing cultures, of the clash between "law and order" and anarchy. Is the Sunlight Man mad? He may be that. Is he some sort of mystical guru, capable of performing acts of real magic? Perhaps. This is a huge, expansive book -- in pages, in material, and in characters. And every character is deeply drawn out; no cardboard characters for John Gardner. Though published in 1972, "The Sunlight Dialogues" is as timely in its philosophical observations today as then. It's one of those books not easily digested. It is a must re-read book. "Nobody's life is perfect," he said. But there were reasons for that. Any life a man chooses, Clumly mused, betrays the life he failed to choose. And now it was no longer important, it was enough to know that it was so.I've said it in other reviews of his work, but John Gardner deserves a better posthumous fate than what has befallen him. Nowadays, when I say John Gardner people think of the Gardner who writes pulp spy novels (at least I think that's what he writes, as I've never read them, though they are ubiquitous). John Gardner was a brilliant writer, in the ranks of Thomas Pynchon and Charles Dickens in my own pantheon of favorite authors. He's not an easy read, but you are rarely the same person you were before reading his work.“Yes! Clumly had thought. There it was. Whatever it meant, spiritualistic trash for old ladies or the roaring secret of life and death, for a minute there Clumly had believed he wanted to know.I do not want to reveal any spoilers, so this review is as short as the book is long. Enjoy.
—Michael
Ugh! So glad to be through this. Finally. I've read several books by Gardner that I've really enjoyed, so I had pretty high expectations for this.Reading this was like 700 pages of a William Faulkner whose passion is philosophy, but he's insecure so he's got to demonstrate his IQ throughout the novel. 700 pages of this tedious, dense, convoluted, multi-generational mess. Is Gardner brilliant? Yes. Does this novel demonstrate an ability to engage an audience? Definitely not. (You know, the first part of dulce et utile?)If you're smarter and more patient than I am, and you thoroughly enjoyed this novel: kudos to you!I still have quite a bit that I'm looking forward to with Gardner, so I haven't given up on him. But the few outstanding passages I found littered throughout this work don't justify a recommendation on my part. Look elsewhere.
—DJ Dycus
