Word: elkin
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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Hell as well as Heaven. Absent is a brooding Satan or a slick Beelzebub to direct the traffic of the damned. Elkin's Hell is an anarchic ghetto, "the ultimate inner city" in perpetual and agonizing meltdown. "Its stinking sulfurous streets were unsafe," he writes. "Pointless, profitless muggings were commonplace; joyless rape that punished its victims and offered no relief to the perpetrator. Everything was contagious, cancer as common as a cold, plague the quotidian. There was stomachache, headache, toothache, earache. There was angina and indigestion and painful third-degree burning itch. Nerves like a hideous body hair grew...
...Elkin's Heaven? A celestial froth of every storybook cliché. It is a theme park of pearly gates, angels with harps, ambrosia, manna, a Heavenly choir that sings, "Oh dem golden slippers" and a St. Peter who answers a would-be club member's wonderment with a snobby "We like it." Peter is not entirely accurate. There are lonely child musicians whom God has untimely plucked because he likes a tune now and then. And there are tensions in the best of families...
...this seems like an eschatological Upstairs, Downstairs, with the damned as underprivileged and God as absentee slumlord, let the reader be assured that Elkin's Heaven and Hell are mainly framework. Unlike his other novels, centrifuges of virtuosity, The Living End is tightly structured, with a beginning, a middle and a sudden, inevitable...
...Elkin fans have never needed persuading, though, naturally, the author would like more customers. He was raised in Chicago, studied at the University of Illinois and joined the faculty of Washing ton University at the end of the '50s. His wife Joan is a painter whose portraits subtly combine elements of primitivism with psychological sophistication...
...works on the top floor of their spacious brick house. Elkin writes in the kitchen to be near the swimming pool and the bathroom. He has some trouble getting around. In 1961 he suffered the first symptoms of multiple sclerosis, a swelling of the optic nerve known as retro-bulbar opticneuritis. "It's a dumb disease," says Elkin. "It kills you by inches but you suffer by yards...