It is a good bet that John Gardner enjoys writing his novels far more than the public enjoys reading them. Mickelsson's Ghosts is dreadfully long and padded, and it often degenerates into drivel.

Gardner has striven to become America's Tolstoy, or, perhaps in this new novel, its Dostoevsky. He's failed, but has convinced a lot of critics. In a split of critical sensibilities, the National Book Critics Circle, by a single vote, conferred its 1976 fiction award on Gardner's October Light over Renata Adler's brilliant Speedboat. The majority of one was convinced that Gardner had something deep to say about bicentennial America and fiction-writing, mistaking for profundity his workmanlike ability to describe rural life and characters and his simplistic ruminations about, for example, the evils of television. It is rare to find a review of Gardner's fiction that does not respectfully dub him a "philosophical novelist."

In this new...