Shadows Summary
John Gardner

Shadows Summary

Unlike Stillness, his other unfinished novel, Shadows was never really abandoned. Gardner began work on it the mid-1970s, but not long before his death he told his fiancee, Susan Thornton, that he had "figured out how to fix Shadows." Editors and critics agree that he must have meant that he felt he would be able to complete the plot and to resolve the problems the text had created. What he left behind, two fairly complete sections and seven coherent fragments, suggests that this may have been, like his other two variations on the detective genre, another of Gardner's ambitious, "big" novels.

Both The Sunlight Dialogues (1972) and Mickelsson's Ghosts (1982) allude insistently to the conventions of detective romance. Officer Fred Clumly and Professor Peter Mickelsson must employ those ratiocinative skills and the tenacity associated with the detective hero to solve a mystery and thereby bring...

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