[The subjects of the debate between Lars-Goren and Brask in Freddy's Book]—art and language—are an authorial intrusion that spoils this book and points to the weaknesses of Gardner's recent work. A quite natural dialogue of hope and despair turns into an aesthetic argument between the knight of moral fiction and the bishop of empty rhetoric, a debate between communication and performance, substance and elegance, emotional response and dead perception, John Gardner and a "stylist" who might be mistaken for William Gass. The book's self-consciousness—its self-reference and its nervousness—is Gardner's fault, not Freddy's, because the same kind of defensive contentiousness mars October Light and On Moral Fiction.

Gardner wants, he has said, the old storyteller's magic—"a vivid and continuous dream"—but he has so little confidence in his reader and in his own ability to do the trick that he repeatedly breaks into the...