Word: elkin
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...should anyone buy books filled with fiction that has already appeared in other books? As any number of Philip Roth or Stanley Elkin characters might say, why not? Even those who happen to own all the 18 volumes that Roth and Elkin have written over the past 20 years are likely to find these two collections of golden oldies a sound investment, a way of consolidating large past pleasures into compact present ones. New readers have a different and equally worthwhile treat in store: the happy discovery of two serious comic writers...
...breed is rare. Aside from Roth, Elkin and Thomas Pynchon, it is hard to think of many other contemporaries who consistently qualify. Humorists go strictly for laughs, and more power to them. Roth and Elkin take a different direction; they pretend that they would gladly stick to brass tacks and the big issues if only the world were not so loony. The hero of Portnoy's Complaint (1969), Roth's most celebrated novel, cries out to his psychiatrist: "Doctor Spielvogel, this is my life, my only life, and I'm living it in the middle...
Similarly, Elkin squeezes out comedy from lost causes, the tickling sensation that comes when backs rub against the wall. An old peddler named Isidore Feldman fetches up in Illinois. He tells his new neighbors that he is "in the last phase of the Diaspora. I have come to the end of the trail in your cornfields." And he gives his son some good advice: "Travel light. Because there will come catastrophe. Every night expect the flood, the earthquake, the fire, and think of the stock...
Some variation of this philosophy rests behind most of Roth's and Elkin's best work: The worst is yet to be, so watch out. The disasters that befall Roth heroes are chiefly sexual; well-educated, pampered men, they try to be moral and high-minded while writhing as passion's play things. Expecting life to resemble "high art," they are constantly outraged to find themselves crawling through "low actuality." A scene from the marriage of Maureen and Peter Tarnopol in My Life as a Man is screamingly typical: "Then, on hands and knees, she crawled into...
...Elkin characters have sexual problems too. One, for example, must cope with a large female Kamchatkan brown bear, in heat. In The Dick Gib son Show (1971) a druggist tells how knowing the secret medical problems of his women customers gradually unhinged him: "My mind was like the waiting room of a brothel." More often, though, passion is the least Elkin's people have to worry about. Ben Flesh, the hero of The Franchiser (1976), learns in Rapid City, S. Dak., that he has multiple sclerosis. He worries about this and the effect of a current heat wave...