Word: elkin
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...STANLEY ELKIN...
...Stanley Elkin is one of the perennial bridesmaids of American fiction. Part of the problem is that the styles Elkin employs are beginning to show their age. His prose is creased by the crow's-feet of '50s black humor, it shows the slight stoop of Jewish realism and the weird droop of the surreal as well. There is no denying, though, that when Elkin puts them together-as he did in Boswell, A Bad Man, The Dick Gibson Show and now The Franchiser-the results are fresh...
...desert of mood." He revels in a power which says, if his clients should jump bail, he can legally hunt them down and kill them. The most attractive element of the story is the hero's own first-person accounts. "My thoughts explode in words," Main exclaims. Elkin's recurring images literally explode off the page: Main sees a "Cincinnati beneath him like a crescent of jawbone, the buildings dental, gray as neglect, the Ohio juicing the town like saliva;" he speaks a "dialogue alive on my teeth like plaque;" and in a natural museum, "It is the teeth that...
...peopled from Burke's Peerage. The 'Making' of Ashenden is actually a make-out: he's raped by a Russian Kamchatka Bear at a jungle-like estate in England. This experience gives him a renewed existential meaning, as he proclaims, "I'm kinky for bears." The bizarre tone of Elkin's humor, and complicated narrative twists, which often expect the reader to believe first-person accounts of thoroughly untrustworthy characters are as rewarding as they are trying. Somehow, it all makes a peculiar sense--there is no reason, everybody is insane...
...Elkin creates his own zany mythic world out of reality. Like a Cyclops, he grabs up all the frail bodies of pathos left to modern man, relying on a single vision of complete and utter absurdity. He chews them and spits them out, showing them to be the pathetic hypocrisies they are. Even Ulysses, the modern interpretation, that is, of "search for meaning," is chewed up and left a mere pile of bones to rattle in an unabashedly hilarious world of mock despair...