Word: elkin
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...STANLEY ELKIN...
...Flesh may be corruptible, and Author Elkin's spendthrift talent some times threatens to knock the bottom out of the word market entirely. But The Franchiser has what few novels have any more: the ability to astonish and delight and a totally conscious hero who proves that the unaudited life is not worth living...
...Stanley Elkin is one of the perennial bridesmaids of American fiction. Part of the problem is that the styles Elkin employs are beginning to show their age. His prose is creased by the crow's-feet of '50s black humor, it shows the slight stoop of Jewish realism and the weird droop of the surreal as well. There is no denying, though, that when Elkin puts them together-as he did in Boswell, A Bad Man, The Dick Gibson Show and now The Franchiser-the results are fresh...
...Elkin is a professor of English literature at Washington University in St. Louis. He writes about people caught in the heavy traffic of American life. Many of his heroes are businessmen whose urges go beyond a Cash McCall drive for power and money. They see business as part of a cosmic magic show, an exuberant prestidigitation of goods and services. Emotions, like capital, can be risked for big gains or hoarded at little or no interest. The world, for all its misery and flyspeck existence in a galaxy of countless dead stars, is something very special. Here, for example...
...Elkin creates his own zany mythic world out of reality. Like a Cyclops, he grabs up all the frail bodies of pathos left to modern man, relying on a single vision of complete and utter absurdity. He chews them and spits them out, showing them to be the pathetic hypocrisies they are. Even Ulysses, the modern interpretation, that is, of "search for meaning," is chewed up and left a mere pile of bones to rattle in an unabashedly hilarious world of mock despair...