Word: elkin
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...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...
...Does Elkin feel privileged...
Class conflict makes for good fiction, and in Elkin's novels the great social leveler is death. "Of course I'm obsessed with death," he admits. "The first words of my first book were 'Everybody dies.' But I'm also obsessed with death's alternative, which is life...