October Light by John Gardner

First published: 1976

Type of plot: Domestic realism

Time of work: One week in October in the early 1970’s

Locale: A farm outside Bennington, Vermont

Principal Characters:

• James L. Page, a farmer and widower in his early seventies
• Sally Page Abbott, his older sister, a widow living on James’s farm
• Virginia (Ginny) Page Hicks, James’s one surviving child, who is in her forties
• Lewis Hicks, Ginny’s husband, a carpenter

The Novel

An early section in Gardner’s novel describes the annual cycle of backbreaking labor for rural Vermonters. The passage concludes, “Now, in October, the farmwork was slackening, the drudgery had paid off. . . .” This is, however, an ironic observation: For seventy-two-year-old James Page and his eighty-year-old sister, Sally Page Abbott, the “harvest years” have brought no payoff. James, though honest, hardworking, and fiercely patriotic, can barely wrest a living from the family farm—where he has lost one son to a fall from the barn roof and another to suicide by hanging, and where cancer has claimed his wife. Sally, the widow of a prosperous dentist, may enjoy happier memories, but she is no better off than James. Her insurance money depleted, she has been forced to give up her town home and accept her brother’s grudging hospitality.

Between two persons who feel so cheated by life, and who harbor such strong and conflicting opinions (Sally is a “progressive” compared with James), life is at best an uneasy truce which is easily broken. One night, a blast from James’s shotgun destroys Sally’s television, with its “endless simpering advertising.” Soon after, furious because she defends “corrupt” government programs, James chases Sally upstairs with a fireplace log and locks her in her room “like a prisoner.”

So begins a domestic cold war that eventually involves the entire community. James’s daughter, Ginny, remonstrates with him, and for a time he is ready to relent, but it is too late; Sally has bolted her door from within and gone “on strike,” as determined as one of the Green Mountain Boys whom her brother so admires or one of the radical feminists he loathes. James repents of his momentary softening, and, thinking to starve Sally into submission, he relocks her door; unknown to him, she is subsisting on apples found in the attic above her room. She finds mental sustenance, too—in a “trashy” paperback novel that she reads when she is not reminiscing.

Even while she apologizes to her dead husband’s spirit for reading such a book, Sally draws from it moral support for her own “cause.” This tale, The Smugglers of Lost Souls’ Rock, is a quasi-metaphysical satire full of overeducated marijuana smugglers. Its machine-gun-toting characters philosophize endlessly on social issues and protest against a mechanistic universe. To the liberal-minded Sally, the rivalry between smuggling gangs—one black, one white—resolves into a struggle for racial justice. When the white doperunners appear to have killed the blacks (to escape being machine-gunned themselves), she fumes that it is “wrong for books to make fun of the oppressed, or to show them being beaten without a struggle. . . .”

Sally soon comes to identify the “oppressors” in the novel with James, and James with all oppressors: “It’s no use making peace with tyranny. If the enemy won’t compromise, he gives you no choice; you simply have to take your stand, let come what may. . . . Let James be reasonable. . . . It’s always up to the one in power to be reasonable.” She likens James’s actions to the military and diplomatic blunders of the United States during and after the Vietnam War. Yet, muddled, melodramatic, and exaggerated as her pronouncements may be, Sally is nevertheless fighting for her right to make her own choices in life and to express her own beliefs, despite her brother’s categorical rejection of them. As “revolutionary” as James is patriotic, Sally is prepared to kill or be killed for that which she considers her inalienable rights.

Meanwhile, James, buoyed by remembered legends of the patriot Ethan Allen, is busy escalating his side of the dispute. To him, the issue is the death of decency and the increase in the “sickness and filth” embodied, among other places, in Sally’s television: “. . . murderers and rapists, drug addicts, long-hairs, hosses and policemen . . . half-naked women . . . sober conversations about the failure of America and religion and the family, as if there want no question about the jig bein up. . . .” He is determined to punish Sally for bringing this “filth” into his house via her television, determined to make her see the error of her ways. To make sure that she cannot sneak down to the kitchen for food at night, he rigs up a shotgun outside her room, to be triggered by strings if she opens her door.

Horrified when they learn of this, several friends rush to the farm to talk the two into ending their feud. Offended by what he considers their meddling, James stalks out, gets drunk in town, crashes his truck, storms back into his house, and blasts his kitchen walls with the shotgun. In the melee, a dear friend of the family suffers a near-fatal heart attack, and the now-sober James is filled with remorse. Meanwhile, Ginny accidentally walks into a trap that Sally, desperately frightened by the shotgun incident, has laid for James—an apple crate set to fall on his head if he enters her room. Ginny and the cardiac patient are rushed to a hospital in town, and the feud ends with Sally emerging from her room, believing that she has triumphed.

The Characters

Most of the characters in October Light are made to stand for clear-cut, uncompromising political or philosophical positions—positions which they feel driven to expound even when their lives are in danger. Between them, for example, the two main characters exhibit all the conflicting aspects of New England Puritan virtue: Sally, the relentless optimist with a strong drive for progress; James, the relentlessly plodding worker with a seeming incapacity to express any deep emotion other than anger or suspicion of “liberals.” Gardner’s characterizations thus bring to life the “polarization” that was much discussed in the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, though his narrative suggests that this polarization has deep historical roots. The fact that the two antagonists also are brother and sister underscores this tragedy of irreconcilables.

Some characters are aware of contradictions within themselves but are not able to reconcile them. One such figure is Lewis Hicks, Ginny’s husband, who emerges as an improbable hero:

Right and wrong were as elusive as odors in an old abandoned barn. Lewis knew no certainties. . . . He had no patience with people’s complexities . . . not because people were foolish, in Lewis Hicks’ opinion, or because they got through life on gross and bigoted oversimplifications, though they did, he knew, but because . . . he could too easily see all sides and, more often than not, no hint of a solution.

It is ironic that Lewis can see all sides of a question and still feel intolerant of other people’s complexities.

Paradoxically, it is the minor characters—memorable far beyond their importance in the story—who are most fully rounded through their own conscious effort. The librarian Ruth Thomas literally embodies contradiction: Weighing three hundred pounds, she is the soul of gracefulness. Her voice is at once clear ringing and seductive, “like an unsubmergeably strong piano with the soft pedal pressed to the carpet.” Gardner suggests that the comic sense is a key to controlling oneself and reconciling inner contradictions: The impish Ruth has “learned to limit herself for hours at a time to nothing more outlandish than a clever, perhaps slightly overstated mimicry of primness.”

Even when Gardner’s major characters insist on acting like “flat” characters, he has a genius for showing them as fully rounded people with deep integrity and with rich inner lives. This is accomplished partly through interior monologue, partly through the portrayal of one character’s awakening sympathy for another. Sally is able to imagine Richard (James’s son who committed suicide) “inside his life.” Seeing her father, Ginny can sense “from inside him what it was like to be old, uncomfortable, cheated, ground down by life and sick to death of it. . . . Dad, I’m sorry,’ she said.”

Although this novel amply portrays the tragedy of polarization, there are repeated strong suggestions that it is the sum of individual extremes that leads to balance in the world. After all, if Sally and James together embody the contradictions of the New England character, then both are required to present the gamut of its virtues. If one looks closely at the individual character, one observes flaws and imperfections. Stepping back, however, one observes a harmonious “symphony” of characters.

Perhaps it is this implied notion of balance in the whole, rather than in its parts, that accounts for the seemingly flawed characterization of Sally. As a party to the central conflict of the story, she is the most fully realized of the female characters, and yet, unlike any other character, she fails to outgrow her limitations. She learns little from the desperate conflict with her brother; indeed, despite her “humanitarian” pretensions, she never develops true compassion for him. She simply comes out of the room thinking she has won a moral victory. Yet, smug as she remains, she has proved an effective catalyst for James’s growth, which gives the novel a satisfying denouement.

Critical Context

During a short career—which was ended by a motorcycle accident when he was forty-nine—John Gardner distinguished himself in a wide range of pursuits. While working in many literary genres, including fiction, poetry, children’s tales, and even operatic librettos, he remained a university professor of medieval literature and creative writing. Gardner’s imaginative use of scholarly learning is typified by the first of his novels to achieve marked critical and popular success: Grendel (1971), a retelling of the Beowulf legend from the monster’s point of view. Both Time and Newsweek named Grendel one of 1971’s best fiction books.

Other triumphs followed, culminating in October Light, which won the National Book Critics’ Circle award for fiction in 1977. Like Grendel and other works by Gardner, October Light is full of erudite allusions, prompting a few critics to attack it as excessively theme-ridden. Most critics, however, regard it as his finest novel, an ambitious but lively treatment of ultimately insoluble mysteries, and the most successful of Gardner’s attempts to bring past learning to bear on present dilemmas.

After October Light, Gardner’s reputation declined somewhat, perhaps in part because of his attacks on most contemporary writers for failing to affirm life and inspire readers. His On Moral Fiction (1978), a work of critical theory containing these charges, was highly controversial. Some critics said that Gardner’s last works of fiction—The Art of Living and Other Stories (1981) and Mickelsson’s Ghosts (1982)— fell short of the standard he himself set in On Moral Fiction. Even after his death, Gardner and his work remain controversial, but no one disputes that he was one of America’s most important contemporary authors, or that October Light is his masterpiece in fiction.

Bibliography

Butts, Leonard. The Novels of John Gardner: Making Life Art as a Moral Process. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1988. Butts draws his argument from Gardner himself, specifically On Moral Fiction (that art is a moral process), and discusses the ten novels in pairs, focusing on the main characters as either artists or artist figures who to varying degrees succeed or fail in transforming themselves into Gardner’s “true artist.” As Butts defines it, moral fiction is not didactic but instead a matter of aesthetic wholeness.

Chavkin, Allan, ed. Conversations with John Gardner. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1990. Reprints nineteen of the most important interviews (the majority from the crucial On Moral Fiction period) and adds one never-before-published interview. Chavkin’s introduction, which focuses on Gardner as he appears in these and his other numerous interviews, is especially noteworthy. The chronology updates the one in Howell (below).

Cowart, David. Arches and Light: The Fiction of John Gardner. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983. Discusses the published novels through Mickelsson’s Ghosts, the two story collections, and the tales for children. As good as Cowart’s intelligent and certainly readable chapters are, they suffer (as does so much Gardner criticism) insofar as they are concerned with validating Gardner’s position on moral fiction as a justifiable alternative to existential despair.

Henderson, Jeff. John Gardner: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne, 1990. Part 1 concentrates on Gardner’s short fiction, including his stories for children; part 2 contains excerpts from essays and letters in which Gardner defines his role as a writer; part 3 provides excerpts from important Gardner critics. Includes chronology and bibliography.

Henderson, Jeff, ed. Thor’s Hammer: Essays on John Gardner. Conway: University of Central Arkansas Press, 1985. Presents fifteen original essays of varying quality, including three on Grendel. The most important are John M. Howell’s biographical essay, Robert A. Morace’s on Gardner and his reviewers, Gregory Morris’s discussion of Gardner and “plagiarism,” Samuel Coale’s on dreams, Leonard Butts’s on Mickelsson’s Ghosts, and Charles Johnson’s “A Phenomenology of On Moral Fiction.”

Howell, John M. John Gardner: A Bibliographical Profile. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1980. Howell’s detailed chronology and enumerative listing of works by Gardner (down to separate editions, printings, issues, and translations), as well as the afterword written by Gardner, make this an indispensable work for any Gardner student.

McWilliams, Dean. John Gardner. Boston: Twayne, 1990. McWilliams includes little biographical material, does not try to be at all comprehensive, yet has an interesting and certainly original thesis: that Gardner’s fiction may be more fruitfully approached via Mikhail Bakhtin’s theory of dialogism than via On Moral Fiction. Unfortunately, the chapters (on the novels and Jason and Medeia) tend to be rather introductory in approach and only rarely dialogical in focus.

Morace, Robert A. John Gardner: An Annotated Secondary Bibliography. New York: Garland, 1984. An especially thorough annotated listing of all known items (reviews, articles, significant mentions) about Gardner through 1983. The annotations of speeches and interviews are especially full (a particularly useful fact given the number of interviews and speeches the loquacious as well as prolific Gardner gave). A concluding section updates Howell’s John Gardner: A Bibliographical Profile.

Morace, Robert A., and Kathryn VanSpanckeren, eds. John Gardner: Critical Perspectives. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1982. This first critical book on Gardner’s work covers the full range of his literary endeavors, from his dissertation-novel “The Old Men” through his then most recent fictions, “Vlemk, The Box Painter” and Freddy’s Book, with separate essays on his “epic poem” Jason and Medeia; The King’s Indian: Stories and Tales; his children’s stories; libretti; pastoral novels; use of sources, parody, and embedding; and theory of moral fiction. The volume concludes with Gardner’s afterword.

Morris, Gregory L. A World of Order and Light: The Fiction of John Gardner. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1984. Like Butts and Cowart, Morris works well within the moral fiction framework which Gardner himself established. Unlike Cowart, however, Morris emphasizes moral art as a process by which order is discovered rather than (as Cowart contends) made. More specifically the novels (including Gardner’s dissertation novel “The Old Men”) and two collections of short fiction are discussed in terms of Gardner’s “luminous vision” and “magical landscapes.”