Making Ends Meet

By Melvin Maddocks

OCTOBER LIGHT by JOHN GARDNER 434 pages. Knopf. $10.

More than any of his contemporaries, John Gardner has made being a novelist a hyphenated art. In The Sunlight Dialogues he did a brilliant turn as philosopher-novelist, debating issues of law and dissent while nimbly stage-managing a family melodrama in upstate New York. In his re-creations of myth, Grendel and Jason and Medeia, he played the novelist-as-epic-poet, perhaps a little consciously; but once again he revealed his consistent longing for Significance, for the Big Theme, for some dimension that extends beyond the modern novel into older, more classical forms.

Marijuana Smugglers. In October Light, his best novel to date, Gardner has really got his hyphenated act together. As if to contain his ambitions, he has assigned himself at the start a small, local comedy of apparently modest import. An 80-year-old widow, Sally Abbott, has come home to the family farmhouse to live out her days with her widower brother James in the shadow of Prospect Mountain, near Bennington, Vt.

Sally brings with her one possession, one consolation, one lifeline to the Brave New World she rather wishes she had been born into--her television set. James is a puritan: a beekeeper, a man who splits elm at 20DEG below zero, a myth maker whose hero is Ethan Allen, not the Fonz. James hates Snoopy, Coca-Cola, California, astronauts (they are there to "undo him") and, above all, television. One night James takes out his 12-gauge shotgun and blasts away at Sally's picture tube as if it were the devil's eye; when she objects, he chases her upstairs brandishing a length of stovewood.

James locks Sally in her room. Then, when he unlocks the door, she refuses to come out. The battle of frosty New England worlds is on. Despite the pleas of her niece, old friends and even a Mexican priest who happens around, Sally settles down for a long standoff, comforted by two resources: apples in the attic and a torn old paperback.

The Smugglers of Lost Souls' Rock, as her paperback is titled, becomes Sally's new consolation and Gardner's new form of hyphen: a novel-within-a-novel. Set in boldface type, this parody-saga of marijuana smugglers--the stuff for which lurid covers on airport paperbacks are designed--runs to almost 150 pages and comes dangerously close to upstaging October Light. Among comic-strip characters in Sally's paperback are the smuggling boat skipper Captain Fist, who gets violently seasick even in San Francisco Bay; Jonathan Nit, an inventor who schemes to solve the energy shortage by hooking up electric eels; Wong Chop, a Chinatown connection; and, inevitably, a girl named Jane.

Switching back and forth from The Smugglers of Lost Souls' Rock to the mother tale of October Light is a little like reading Terry Southern with a Robert Frost poem as chaser, or vice versa. But Sally (and the reader) gradually sees the connection. The characters of The Smugglers are also locked in demonic contest with their enemies--and themselves. They too know what Gardner seems to regard as the incurable and often suicidal addiction of modern man: a passion for absolute freedom that says, "I will be God or I will die."

By a curious exchange, The Smugglers becomes almost a theological dialogue while October Light is steeped in melodrama. A trap set for Sally by James nearly kills her peacemaking niece. James almost kills himself in his pickup truck while returning from Merton's Hideaway, full of rage and beer. Retrospective suicides begin falling out of the family tree: James' mad Uncle Ira, James' tormented son Richard.

Gardner has set himself roles wor thy of Hercules or a one-man band: the hilarious spoofer of pulp fiction, the composer of Kierkegaardian monologues good and evil, the mini-historian of science, progress and civilization, and the pastoral poet. In addition he rounds off his complex work on a note of affirmation that the reader may find more determined than logical, like the highnote climax to a trumpet solo. For the hyphen that Gardner most ardently longs for is the one that might connect night to day, lost to found, chaos to order--all the enemies, all the opposites.

If he falls short of his ultimate ambition, Gardner succeeds at many points along the line. He is funny, highly intelligent and touching. How many novelists are any of the three? He has resources, and he uses all of them in pursuit of goals most novelists would not dare attempt. He has had his novel illustrated by not one but two artists. If he could stick an LP by a Vermont fiddler to the jacket and impregnate the binding with the smell of hay and apples--and maybe marijuana--he would do that too. He wants it all. There are writers today who can do one thing as well as Gardner. But with October Light, the question must be asked: Is there another American novelist who can do so many things so well as this master of compounded art?

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so viewer discretion is required.