EVERYTHING THAT John Gardner has written before does not prepare you for Nickel Mountain. He calls it a pastoral novel, but that only makes you more wary. And the further you read into the book the more anxious you get. You keep telling yourself there has got to be a catch somewhere. Don't let your guard down--it could come any page now--a sudden reversal. The plot isn't supposed to be so straightforward. Surely one of the characters will go mad--this world is just too sane. When is the author going to show his face in a slick self-consciousness of narrative? Where is the burlesque? Be ready now. But when it's all over the realization comes slowly that the only trick played on the reader is the failure of all these expectations. For once Gardner is perfectly honest.

What makes the honesty questionable is Gardner's reputation as an anti-novelist. He is associated with names like John Barth, Donald Barthelme, William Gass and Thomas Pynchon, whose styles often reflect the immense panorama of futility and anarchy they see around them. For these men literary conventions only pose limitations and rules to be broken, and narrative becomes hopelessly narcissistic. In John Barth's story, Lost in the Funhouse, for example, the author interrupts to explain the narrative techniques of the short story while the tale is in progress. Barth then shows contempt for these forms and simultaneously complains that his story is getting nowhere. Like his protagonist and the other anti-novelists, he is lost in the funhouse.

Myth in the modern novel is reworked into absurd comedy, and plot retreats upon itself. Characters are puppets whose strings lead you to different parts of the author's pysche. John Gardner reveled in all this chaos in his earlier novels. In Grendel, Beowulf is just another ridiculous hero in front of a bunch of snivelling fools when we get the classic epic from the monster's point of view. And in The Sunlight Dialogues, self-parody pops up in thoughts such as "She realized, briefly, that she was merely a character in an endless, meaningless novel, then forgot." Veracity has been one of Gardner's lesser concerns; he has made it clear he has been out to make his own little verbal world.

So Nickel Mountain comes as something of a surprise. But it's not as if the corpse of the boy who cried wolf were just found amidst self-righteous moralmongering. The novel's appearance is more triumphant, as if the boy, after playing his little joke once too often, were to return home one day bruised and bloody with the dead wolf's skin slung over his shoulder. Nickel Mountain has just that simple tone of life-enhancing experience.

Its hero, Henry Soames is the fat and lonely middle-aged owner of a roadside diner in the mid-1950s. Henry knows he will die of a heart-attack someday soon and in a way the book is the story of his coming-to-grips with death. Henry feels cheated by a life wasted, listening to the grinding clutches of trucks working their way up Nickel mountain. But he can only express himself by talking to drunks who wander in at three in the morning or by roaring up the mountain in his old pick-up, defying the curves, playing with death. He even loses the diner (his last touchstone) to a new helper. Henry is good, almost too good, so when his teen-age waitress, Callie, gets pregnant, he marries her.

Ever-so-slowly, Gardner works his two desperate characters out of their bitterness. Death loses its hold, and the struggle for meaning in life finds its way into Nickel Mountain. Henry reaches out to his neighbors, when their pride prevents them from asking help. Gardner gives Henry a down-home kind of wisdom. Henry realizes that if you just think somebody is being stabbed, you have to jump on the guy with the knife. And even if it was just an illusion, you have to get up, dust yourself off, ignore derision, and be prepared to do it again. Anything is better than apathy or fear.

Most importantly, Henry takes on a life of his own; there are no strings attached here--Gardner stays out of the novel's development. Gardner's style is unhurried, deliberate. He's trying to set out the world as it is, with no clever embellishments, no god-like interference.

Maybe it's too corny for the cosmopolitan frame of mind, or the confirmed cynic who demands perfection from himself, but Nickel Mountain leaves you feeling that there is an order to life. At the end of the book an old couple watch their son's coffin winched out of a grave. The woman shouts "I believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ." The man yells, "Shut up." In the solemn eyes of Henry Soames, where everything has some value, and you "don't shoot at everything that moves on the theory it might be a rattler," even this scene loses its farcical element.

Nickel Mountain is as powerful and stately as an old green Hudson. Worthless perhaps on the superhighways of the modern novel, impressive in its solid inflexibility.