Word: elkin
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...LIVING END by Stanley Elkin; Dutton; 148 pages...
...first-rate comic art, the funnier the surfaces the sadder the depths. Nowhere is that clearer than in the novels and short stories of Stanley Elkin, whose improvisations on the American way and the English language make him our foremost literary jazz band. His most exuberant characters-a department store owner, a bail bondsman, an itinerant radio announcer-combine the energy and appetites of the Middle West with the legendary qualities of Sholom Aleichem's villagers. Elkin makes much joyful noise unto the Lord, but there is also banter to deflect the wrath, and complaining because it might...
Hell as well as Heaven. Absent is a brooding Satan or a slick Beelzebub to direct the traffic of the damned. Elkin's Hell is an anarchic ghetto, "the ultimate inner city" in perpetual and agonizing meltdown. "Its stinking sulfurous streets were unsafe," he writes. "Pointless, profitless muggings were commonplace; joyless rape that punished its victims and offered no relief to the perpetrator. Everything was contagious, cancer as common as a cold, plague the quotidian. There was stomachache, headache, toothache, earache. There was angina and indigestion and painful third-degree burning itch. Nerves like a hideous body hair grew...
...Elkin's Heaven? A celestial froth of every storybook cliché. It is a theme park of pearly gates, angels with harps, ambrosia, manna, a Heavenly choir that sings, "Oh dem golden slippers" and a St. Peter who answers a would-be club member's wonderment with a snobby "We like it." Peter is not entirely accurate. There are lonely child musicians whom God has untimely plucked because he likes a tune now and then. And there are tensions in the best of families...
...Baylor Elkin...