Word: elkin
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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DIED. STANLEY ELKIN, 65, darkly witty, language-obsessed novelist; of a heart attack; in St. Louis, Missouri. Author of 17 books, Elkin won the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1983 for George Mills, which-in a plot typical of his absurdist bent-follows a thousand-year lineage of losers with the same name, from a misguided medieval crusader to a furniture mover in present-day St. Louis. Elkin remained a prolific writer despite suffering from multiple sclerosis...
...MACGUFFIN by Stanley Elkin (Simon & Schuster; 283 pages; $19.95). Bobbo Druff, 58, is a washed-up pol serving time as city commissioner of streets in a minor-league U.S. metropolis. His wife of 36 years is going deaf; his son Mikey, 30, still lives at home; and his health -- after a heart bypass, four instances of a collapsed lung and extensive circulatory problems in his legs -- is not robust. Understandably he concludes that the "world is getting away from me, I think...
Within 48 hours or so, Elkin puts his hero through permutations of paranoia. No matter how his language prattles, jokes, howls, sings, the commissioner cannot quite divert himself from the knowledge that "life goes on." Whatever his other failings, Bobbo, like the best of Elkin's past characters, triumphs in the end as a world-class monologist...