Library Journal
Nicholas Delbanco, the late John Gardner's friend and literary executor, introduces Stillness , a short novel that Gardner did not intend to publish, and Shadows , a novel-in-progess. ''Written in haste, and shelved,'' Stillness , which depicts the stormy marriage of Martin Orrick, a famous silver-haired writer of ''dark vision,'' and his musician wife Joan, was ''undertaken . . . as a process of therapy'' by Gardner and his first wife. The unfinished Shadows a text and seven fragmentsis a dense, philosophical detective story set in Carbondale, Illinois. The introduction is informative and the volume as a whole certainly of biographical interest to Gardner scholars; but the general reader who has admired Gardner's inventive fiction may be disappointed in these unpolished works. Janet Wiehe, P.L. of Cincinnati & Hamilton Cty.