John C. Gardner (1933–1982)

In Nickel Mountain, published in 1973 when John Gardner was forty but written much earlier, the author's genius is on full display. This is the story of Henry Soames, 42, who runs the Stop-Off, a diner situated along a highway in the mountainous Catskills in southeastern New York State. Henry—obese, timid, thoughtful, unambitious—waits for whatever life brings his way, much as he waits for customers to darken the door of the Stop-Off. Grossly overweight (a trait inherited from his gentle show more father) and with a bad heart, he is living on borrowed time and knows it, but is content to let things continue on as they are because he is simply unable to envision how his life might be different. When a neighbour asks if Henry will let his daughter work at the diner, though he fears and resents changes to his routine, he relents rather than annoy the man. Thus teenage Callie Wells enters Henry’s life, and though neither of them have any reason to think this is anything but a temporary arrangement, she stays. Henry’s passive and accepting approach to being alive means that he is little more than a spectator to his own fate, and yet we come to care deeply for him. Callie is a wisp of a girl who speaks her mind, makes mistakes and often acts rashly and ill-advisedly, and yet we grieve for her when her lover takes off and she is forced to a decision that changes her life. Gardner populates the community around the diner with a clutch of grotesques, misfits and eccentrics who—be they narrow-minded, pigheaded, brain-addled, misanthropic or some combination of the four—are always interesting. The action and setting are vividly rendered. The natural world, especially the forest, with its suggestion of things beyond our knowing and its threat of chaos, is a pervasive if murky and mysterious presence that informs the narrative at all levels. Nickel Mountain, remarkable for these reasons and more, demonstrates that even for someone like Henry Soames, life is an adventure that can lead anywhere. A major novel by one of America’s best writers. show less

Oh this is good fun. John Gardner subverts and reinvents the Beowulf saga. Gardner tells the tale from the monster Grendel's perspective. Mostly it is in the first person, but in typical modernist tradition this can change, for example an extract from a drama will suddenly appear:

I resolved, absolutely and finally, to kill myself, for love of the baby Grendel that used to be. But the next instant, for no particular reason, I changed my mind.
Balance is everything, sliding down show more slime........

Cut B

After the murder of Halga the Good
dear younger brother of bold king Hrothgar
(helm of the Scyldings, sword-hilt handler,
bribe-gold bender.......

Grendel is a nihilist monster, sort of stumbling towards some idea of why he exists, realising that there is no one in the world like him. Gardner does not evoke our sympathies for Grendel, but then the humans in the story hardly fare any better as we see them through Grendel's eyes: their pointless fighting, their pride and their lust for power. All of this means nothing to the monster but his frustration with them leads him to go on his killing spree.

There are many highlights as Gardner continues to play around, having fun with the genres of the modernist novel and the saga.There is Grendel's philosophical discussion with the dragon, where he is in fear of his life because he cannot grasp the dragon's thoughts. The dragon expounds his wisdom ie:

Limited to a finite individual occasion, importance ceases to be important. In some sense or other-we can skip the details-importance is derived from the immanence of infinitude in the finite

Of course Grendel fails to understand and the dragon keeps trying to simplify his ideas until finally he says:

My advice to you, my violent friend, is to seek out gold and sit on it

There are witty asides on religion and the power of the story teller: the person who tells the story shapes the history and Gardner also gets on with the story in hand, telling of the arrival of Beowulf and the fight with Grendel. It is as bloodthirsty and as exciting as the original.

There is much to enjoy here and particularly if you have read the Beowulf saga, this is sure to amuse and delight show less

I adored Beowulf from the first time I read it as a little girl. My mother (I was homeschooled for a good chunk of my school years) assigned me this book as required reading (fairly rare, but then, I rarely needed to be told to read, even ‘classics’ or what my mother called 'nutritional' books) when I was about fifteen.

Possibly the worst part about this book was the utter betrayal it represented. I was actually really excited about this! And then. Oh and then. Then I . . . started show more actually reading.

I was so enchanted by the pitch – Beowulf told from the point of view of the ‘monster’? Grendel’s story? A familiar tale told from a new angle? That’s one of my favourite things! And one of my favourite stories!

This book is actually very short. 174 pages in a quite small volume. I wish I could say that was a blessing, but it took me roughly six weeks to read. (In that time I read about three dozen fantasy novels and about four other classics, including rereading some Wilde.) I dragged myself through every page, feeling like I was slogging on my knees through sand dunes. I even begged my mother to let me off reading this and replace it with literally any other classic she could name. I had never done that before – and never did after – so let it stand as a marker of how much I felt tortured by this book.

(I read classic Russian literature recreationally as a teenager. Depressing, dragging, dark literature was clearly not a deal-breaker for me even then. That was and is not my problem with this book.)

Grendel is depressing, and dark, and . . . well, it is ludicrously self-indulgent over those things.

The kind of ‘I am miserable’ where it feels as though the person complaining to one – which the book, in first person, reads as a kind of stream of consciousness internal monologue of revelling in despair and gore – is delighting in how miserable and awful they are. I’m a monster, you couldn’t possibly understand, everyone hates me and there’s nothing I can do but respond by becoming ever more monstrous feel my pathos while I howl dramatically and go kill and devour more people because what is the point.

I didn’t feel like I was reading the despair of a creature the humans refuse to – or can’t – understand, one who is forced into a corner and fights, kills, because it is all he can do against these creatures to whom he cannot make himself understood, nor understand in turn – which is how it was pitched. Instead I felt like I was hearing the joyously delighted, self-centred manifesto of a psychopath whose psyche’s only ‘torture’ is in the rare occasions he faces a consequence for his actions.

I was told that this book is about confronting the monsters within ourselves, and I see it listed that way in many lesson modules. I want to personally track down the person(s) who thought this book could teach this lesson well and shake them. Hard.

Grendel has no interest in confronting the monster within himself – he is that monster, and there is nothing else but the delight in blood and death, and the self-righteous anger and disbelief when he is forced to face a consequence – like a human that fights back rather than be shredded and eaten in large chunks. How dare they.

(Oh, and it’s also more grotesque and grisly than the original Beowulf, which is . . . delightful.)

I’ve read that Gardner wrote the book intending to ‘examine the main ideas of Western Civilisation in the voice of a monster’ from an already-written story rather than creating a new one, and ‘use the various philosophical attitudes, though Sartre in particular’. (Don’t ask me what ‘use the various philosophical attitudes’ means, I have no idea what he intended with that.) He also has said Grendel represented Sartre’s philosophical position, and that he borrowed much of the book from ‘Being and Nothingness’.

I won’t lie to you, when I read those claims from Gardner my first reaction was ‘oh, so the book was terrible because you were trying to be pretentious?’ and it really, really is – pretentious, that is, not reminiscent of Sartre.

After reading that it was supposed to be, I can see (sort of) the way that Gardner wound the theories of Being and Nothingness into Grendel. But it’s hardly recognisable and in Grendel’s mind comes off as yet another self-centred backdrop of ‘here is why I am such a miserable being, and why it is not my fault’.

I’m glad I was familiar with Sartre before finding out this work was supposed to represent his philosophies, and that it was not presented to me thus in high school, or I might very well have been soured on an entire school of philosophical thought by this ridiculously drab, entitled, self-aggrandising drivel.

For another perspective on Beowulf, I recommend staying to the fascinating essays many very interesting people have written, and away from John Gardner. show less

I’m pretty sure the answer to life, the universe, and everything is somewhere in this book. A more philosophical monster than the nihilistic Grendel you would have trouble finding, even including Frankenstein’s creature. Good vs. evil, politics, religion, art, the power of language to construct reality, you name it, this book’s got it. I’m also motivated to finally get around to Beowulf, since it will be all the more interesting with Grendel’s view to contrast it with.

“The dragon

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tipped up his great tusked head, stretched his neck, sighed fire. ‘Ah, Grendel!’ he said. He seemed that instant almost to rise to pity. ‘You improve them, my boy! Can’t you see that yourself? You stimulate them! You make them think and scheme. You drive them to poetry, science, religion, all that makes them what they are for as long as they last. You are, so to speak, the brute existent by which they learn to define themselves.’”

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