JASON AND MEDEIA

John Gardner is a writer of great energy and intellectual inventiveness, saturated in an imagination addicted to myth, mostly the existential sort, man creating his own myths about the self, about order, about love, as the world surrounding him falls to pieces, becomes increasingly chaotic or mindless or threatening. This preoccupation with modern man doggedly affirming his humanity as History goes awry was strikingly effective in The Sunlight Dialogues, a large, roomy, emotion-charged allegory, a kaleidoscope of the changing features of small-town American life in the mid-'60's, a redoubtable work notable for its philosophical debates and the canny verisimilitude with which Gardner can endow characters and events. Not surprisingly, this novel has suddenly made everyone aware of the young author's powerful talents. Jason and Medeia, a retelling of this gory legend of destiny and defiance, of man as a cunning upstart and woman as a vengeful sorceress, of dragons' teeth and fire-breathing bulls, is impressive too in its bookish, pseudo-Homeric way, but, finally, seems rather overblown, unwisely incantatory, synthetic. The familiar actors tend to speak like those toplofty Victorian translations from the Greek dramatists; the descriptive passages evoke the kind of stage directions Ibsen was wont to mock, and the spangled adventures on and off the Argo — scenes of "evil deeds," scenes "seismic in love and wrath" — project, in the end, little cumulative force. The concluding moments of betrayal and carnage, which we remember from Ovid or Euripedes, send a few classic shivers down the reader's spine. But in all of Gardner's fancy talk there's really not one phrase that matches "Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned," nor anything, in his unwieldy pageants, approaching, say, the shapely sophistication Andre Gide brought to Theseus. Perhaps, after all, encounters with antiquity are better left to Europeans.