Word: elkins
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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GEORGE MILLS by Stanley Elkin; Dutton; 508 pages...
From his home in suburban St. Louis, not far from Mark Twain's Mississippi River, Stanley Elkin once remarked that "the consummate salesman also needs a customer who doesn't want to buy." He was talking about inspiration and performance, the challenge of turning accessory into necessity. He was also offering a fragment of autobiography...
...Elkin is America's master literary pitchman. No fiction writer sells ideas and myths with more elan and imagination. His fantasies about popular culture and allegorical burlesques have been set in places as disparate as a department-store basement (A Bad Man), an all-night radio station (The Dick Gibson Show) and heaven and hell (The Living...
...heart of Elkin's work, one usually finds longing and pain as old acquaintances, pleasure as an embarrassing surprise, the inevitability of risk and the mysteries of power and chance. Says Ben Flesh in The Franchiser: "The world is a miracle, history's and the universe's long shot. It runs uphill...
This is the direction of George Mills, Elkin's longest, most complex novel. The burdens of the author's previous fictions are given full weight. The narrative path is steep, circuitous and mined with disease and humiliations. The voices of third and first persons mingle, and time runs in either direction. In the present, a terminal patient named Judith Glazer beleaguers family and friends with hostile honesty and acrid humor: "Neither will I be wired to any of those medical busy-boxes to extend for one damned minute what only a fool would call my life. If Jesus...