Stillness & Shadows by John Gardner (accelerated reader books TXT) 📕

as if to herself. “There’s a professor in my department, lives right next door to us, he carries a clothespin in his pockets so he can always touch wood. He’s fat and little. Jewish. Black suits. Brilliant mind, very famous—but let me tell you, he’s a swamp. Walks down the sidewalk with an umbrella on his arm and his nose in a book, and when he comes to a corner where he has to turn right, he turns in a circle three times to the left. Never stops reading. I’m as sane as that.”

Craine nodded, noncommittal. Her words weren’t really loud enough to hear, though mysteriously he’d heard them. Again she stood silent, jittering and smoking. Then abruptly she came back, taking quick little steps. “How come the Bible?” She spoke loudly now, as if she thought he might be deaf. “Are you a minister?”

Craine tipped his head and shrugged, almost cringing, apologetic. “I was a detective,” he said.

“You’ve shifted to higher criticism?” She shouted it, flashing a smile like a razor.

Again he shrank from her. She turned, somehow offended, and walked in rage to the window. She stayed there a long time, smoking and whispering, with her back to him. He leaned forward, thinking of leaving, but he hesitated too long, and she edged back toward him, keeping her eyes from him till the last minute. Then she looked at him, frowned angrily, smiled again. “They put you here to watch me.” Her index finger—the hand that held the cigarette—jabbed at him. Ashes struck his knees.

Craine shook his head. Now, for some reason, he could see her features clearly—petulant, like a child’s; beautiful even in their wrong-headed fury, or so it seemed to him. Her cheeks were very pale, as if powdered. In spite of his distress, he was tempted to smile, as at a child’s performance of a tantrum. Her eyes were narrowed, her shoulders pushed forward. When he failed to speak, she was checked a little, and darted her eyes away. He leaned back. She remembered the cigarette and drew it to her mouth, trembling violently again, and sucked at it. Craine said, “I’m in no condition to watch anybody. They put me here because I pretty near blew a man’s head off.” It was not, strictly speaking, the truth, but it expressed Craine’s feeling.

“Maybe he deserved it.” She liked the idea. Scent of blood.

Craine nodded thoughtfully, avoiding her eyes, and clasped his hands together. “It’s a mystery.”

She sucked at the cigarette again, then let out smoke through her nose and mouth in a way that showed practice, maybe practice long ago with a mirror. “Bullshit,” she said, cold as ice. “Mystery.” She laughed. She turned away but did not leave, stood instead staring out the window, elbows stiffly at her sides except when she remembered to take a pull at the cigarette. Craine watched her, squeezing his hands together, straining to make her form come clear; but the sunlight and snow and the whiteness of the room were, if anything, brighter than earlier. Something made him think all at once that she was crying—standing there, hands at her sides, letting tears run down her face. His mouth opened, and he thought, for a fleeting instant, of Elaine Glass. “Crying,” he said to himself, a kind of whimper, thinking simultaneously of the professor and Elaine. It was like seeing the stars from the perspective of a new geometry.

A Biography of John Gardner

John Gardner (1933–1982) was a bestselling and award-winning novelist and essayist, and one of the twentieth century’s most controversial literary authors. Gardner produced more than thirty works of fiction and nonfiction, consisting of novels, children’s stories, literary criticism, and a book of poetry. His books, which include the celebrated novels Grendel, The Sunlight Dialogues, and October Light, are noted for their intellectual depth and penetrating insight into human nature.

Gardner was born in Batavia, New York. His father, a preacher and dairy farmer, and mother, an English teacher, both possessed a love of literature and often recited Shakespeare during his childhood. When he was eleven years old, Gardner was involved in a tractor accident that resulted in the death of his younger brother, Gilbert. He carried the guilt from this accident with him for the rest of his life, and would incorporate this theme into a number of his works, among them the short story “Redemption” (1977). After graduating from high school, Gardner earned his undergraduate degree from Washington University in St. Louis, and he married his first wife, Joan Louise Patterson, in 1953. He earned his Master’s and Ph.D. in English from the University of Iowa in 1958, after which he entered into a career in academia that would last for the remainder of his life, including a period at Chico State College, where he taught writing to a young Raymond Carver.

Following the births of his son, Joel, in 1959 and daughter, Lucy, in 1962, Gardner published his first novel, The Resurrection (1966), followed by The Wreckage of Agathon (1970). It wasn’t until the release of Grendel (1971), however, that Gardner’s work began attracting significant attention. Critical praise for Grendel was universal and the book won Gardner a devoted following. His reputation as a preeminent figure in modern American literature was cemented upon the release of his New York Times bestselling novel The Sunlight Dialogues (1972). Throughout the 1970s, Gardner completed about two books per year, including October Light (1976), which won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and the controversial On Moral Fiction (1978), in which he argued that “true art is by its nature moral” and criticized such contemporaries as John Updike and John Barth. Backlash over On Moral Fiction continued for years after the book’s publication, though his subsequent books, including Freddy’s Book (1980) and Mickelsson’s Ghosts (1982), were largely praised by critics. He also wrote four successful children’s books, among them Dragon, Dragon and Other Tales (1975), which was named Outstanding Book of the Year by the New York Times.

In 1980, Gardner