Word: elkin
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...edited by John Gardner George Mills, Stanley Elkin...
...Elkin, who suffers from a form of multiple sclerosis, has not received the recognition or income of lesser colleagues, desipite his overflow of talent and energy. So it is not difficult to see Glazer's trials and Messenger's messages as a form of special pleading. Fortunately, these episodes are not the whole story, merely parts of an epic that embraces 1,000 years of second-string citizenship. The novel's heroes are all named George Mills, from the Greatest Grandfather, an 11th century Northumbrian stableboy, to a furniture mover in East St. Louis...
...trash of kings and sultans, knights and janissaries. The last George graduates from shoving around middle-class furniture; now he repossesses the tables and chairs of ghetto blacks who default on their payments. In his off time, he accompanies the dying Mrs. Glazer to a Mexican Laetrile clinic where Elkin's patented mixture of slapstick and " strong emotions is administered...
Along the way, Elkin displays his unique gift for surreal parody. In a sultan's harem, the chief eunuch gives a sex lecture in the tone of a call-in therapist: "You could fault tonight, you could die. In any event, I trust a review can do no harm, and I enjoy our chalk talks." A crusading George speaks with Joycean extravagance: " 'We were friends,' he says again of the man he has just mutilated. . .'He was wily. I frisked his shift and groped his robes. I did his duds like a dowser. . .And it came...
...People, Yes? No. Elkin is reaching for something bigger, a Fiddler on the Roof of Western civilization with self-deprecating navvies suffering every slight of outrageous fate, from wars to plagues and back again. Elkin's overview is encapsulated early on when the first George tarries too long before a glorious tapestry. The owner stays the blow of an impatient courtier, allows the stableboy an additional moment of art appreciation and then adds, "When you've done, go out quietly." That, implies the author, is the history of the commoner before his betters. But in Elian...