THE RESURRECTION

John Gardner is a thoughtful, indeed ruminative, but straightforward writer, rather like George P. Elliott; ideas rather than people concern him. James Chandler is a young philosopher (a wife, three children) when he learns that he has about a month to live, leukemia. But then as he comments later, "philosophical wonder" is also "a dread disease" and throughout this book which worries a great many abstruse, abstract concepts he tries to reach some affirmation. As a philosopher he is perhaps not better prepared to meet death (he will only "evade" it in a "slightly different way") but he will try to approach it logically, systematically. He returns to his home town in upstate New York where his past and present converge. The literal, prosaic texture of life in a small town such as this is very well done. Here his speculations alternate with nightmares, increasingly disturbed, with an apparition, and with a contact with another marked man. He withdraws more and more, except at the close for a final contact with a young girl who too has been living in almost a semi-interred state (an old house, with old ladies). This is part of the "resurrection" but then there is also the idea that we only have our being through "that great spirit in whom we live and move." Gardner's book articulates a great many arguments— all the way down from Descartes to Sartre, and one of its drawbacks is that it does not permit the reader in the word of the latter's philosophy to be "engage." It is all thinking, and very little feeling (except for a few pages focusing on the dying man's wife). But if it fails, it is perhaps because it has been doomed to begin with by the very nature of its attempt.