Cheap NICKEL MOUNTAIN (Book) (JOHN GARDNER) Price

Related Products

Customer Reviews of NICKEL MOUNTAIN

Like another reviewer, my worthy reading experience with Art of Fiction led me to read Gardner's earlier works. In some places he fulfills his own advice by writing NOT in an absolute vacuum of "novel rules" but by writing a piece to be judged by its own structure and prose inventions. Nickel Mountain achieves his assertion that "art has no universal rules because each true artist melts down and reforges all past aesthetic law." Of course, the artist must live up to his promises. In Nickel Mountain, Gardner delivers.

I'm Most Likely Missing a Bunch, but....
Most likely I'm missing a bunch of what's here in this novel, but I gotta say that it's not as impressive at first glance. This is my first Gardner novel, and it's on account of his great "Art of Fiction" tome that I've turned to checking out this book. I was hoping to be entertained, of course, and maybe learn something "moral" (as per his often-documented concern with "uplifiting" or "moral" fiction), as well as see how the author of a handbook on writing fiction would apply his own advice in his own fiction.

Well, like I said, surely I'm missing something...but as it is right now, with this particular title of his, I have to say that I'm a bit underwhelmed. The "moral lesson" here seems to be "merely", "more or less", something along the lines of "life is strange" and "life goes on". Eight vignettes tied together as much by their geographic locale (the Catskills in New York) as anything...interesting premise -- grotesquely obese man 25 years an out-of-wedlock-pregnant teen's senior marries her and they start a life in his roadside diner...but all the interesting enough drama and "action" throughout these connected-tales keep getting punctuated with extended reminiscences -- ANNOYING!

He keeps stopping what appears to be the flow of the plot with constant reference to something else or other, almost a kind of stream-of-consciousness (almost, I say, almost)...I guess he had in mind what we might recognize today as some kind of a "Merchant Ivory" or "European arthouse" effect, where the camera lingers on some still life scene, say...I dunno, the flow of it all just seems to bog down quite often, as every damned thing every damned character sees reminds him or her of some other damned thing or event...that's how it seems...I suppose there's a certain kind of "folksy", "grandfatherly" charm to such a style riddled by apparent digression, but I really wonder whether there wasn't some other way of working in exposition and atmosphere, without interrupting the flow of drama.

Anyway, I'm still looking to read his other books (as well as re-read this one some day) -- I'm just a bit surprised that Gardner seems to have contradicted his own dicta in his "how-to" book (written, admittedly, many many years after Nickel Mountain's publication) about not interrupting the fictional dream, about maintaining a sense of profluence and pacing and all that....

Okay -- now, having gotten that off my chest, let me conclude by noting that I did enjoy the novel all the same, really...there's a lot of charm in the language, and a lot of depth in its evocative quality, a world of ideas moving underneath the surface -- if you like chewing over subtext, this novel provides ample opportunities. My rant was certainly my own, but my praise is sung in common with those others who have found this book a welcome poolside or bedside or coffee-side companion. Not the most life-changing novel I've read, but it did contain stuff that made me pause and think, nonetheless.

Neglected Masterpiece
... He was brash and loud and came off a bit like Ig. Reilly in his critical writings. As a result, his fiction has been ignored and forgotten by many academics and that's unfortunate, because Garnder was probably the most gifted prose stylist of his generation.
Nickel Mountain is a relatively simple pastoral tale, without most of the magical metafictionist hoo-haw of some of Gardner's better known work. It is, however, his best novel. Too often the term regional fiction is used dismissively to indicate that a work is of limited local interest. This is regional fiction in the best sense, as it uses a profound understanding of Upstate New York and its people to tell a universal and deeply felt story. The writing is profoundly elegant, the characters precisely and respectfully drawn.
That the same area produced Fred Exley and Richard Russo seems remarkable. Something in the water.