In On Moral Fiction Gardner pronounces virtually all contemporary art defective. To correct the situation he gives us this "attempt to develop a set of instructions, an analysis of what has gone wrong in recent years with the various arts." It's a thoughtful, amusing, and arrogant little book designed to pick fights, and may get more of them than Gardner can handle….

John Gardner is isolated, idealistic, and ever so gently totalitarian. There is more to art than is accounted for in his philosophy.

Gardner doesn't like what contemporary art does because it's not uplifting. It doesn't inspire. It doesn't celebrate….

Gardner operates a closed system of art. No darkness….

Gardner's attacks on dozens of writers, a particular sculptor, Rauschenburg, and one composer, John Cage, are pertinent chiefly because they show us why Gardner can't win his case.

Partly it's because he is uninformed. He knows a lot...