"Some of his most praised contemporaries were, thus, "minor" writers because their fiction either was trivial entertainment (Barthelme and Vonnegut) or it succumbed to philosophical argument (Bellow). Though such fiction might be very good at what it did, its failure to engage real issues with lifelike characters ignores what only good art can address. Charged Gardner: "Teaching people to look at themselves...reminding them what they believe, takes pictures, takes painting, and the most powerful implement in the world for that is art.... When art begins to be only entertaining, only cynical, only ironic [as it has] ... you get in trouble...in civilization, right down to the roots."
...
In a spring 1978 interview for the Paris Review, he was once again at pains to distinguish between "moralistic" writing, which he said didactically espouses traditionally conservative positions, and fiction that is "moral". "I'm talking mainly," he said "...about works of fiction that are moral in their process....Good works of fiction study values by testing them in imagined / real situations, testing them hard, being absolutely fair to both sides. The real moral writer is the opposite of the minister....The writer's job is to be radically open to persuasion....not be committed to one side more than to the other -- which is to say that he wants to affirm life, not sneer at it. But he has to be absolutely fair.""

-- "John Gardner: Literary Outlaw", Barry Silesky, pp 255-256