Mickelsson's ghosts
Subtitle: a novel
By: John Gardner ; illustrated with photographs by Joel Gardner.
Edition: 1st ed.
Publisher: Knopf : Distributed by Random House
Published: 1982
Place of publication: New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 590
Description: The critically acclaimed final masterwork of John Gardner: an American novel haunted with macabre and cerebral elements. The final novel by Gardner, Mickelsson's Ghosts, originally published in 1982 just months before his untimely death in a motorcycle accident, is a tour de force. The protagonist Peter Mickelsson, a former star philosophy professor at Brown, relocates to Binghamton University. On the verge of bankruptcy, separated from his wife, in questionable mental health, and drinking heavily, Mickelsson decides to buy a country house in northeastern Pennsylvania. What he encounters there are impassioned and shameless love affairs (one of which results in a regrettable pregnancy), a Mormon extremist cult, small town mythologies, the robbery of a robber, multiple murders, the ghosts of an incestuous family, Plato, and our hero's own possible insanity.