Word: elkins
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...Even if that accusation is true, this powerful collection of three short novels deserves every bit of attention it can get. The title does, after all, describe the book perfectly; the three novellas are linked thematically by it. More precisely, it is the breaking of search and seizure laws. Elkin's heros are badmen, who justify their acts through mixed-up metaphysical rules reflecting all of the saturnalian immediacy of today's politics. At the same time, they express deeper strains of human nature which will ensure Elkin's place among the best of modern novelists...
...desert of mood." He revels in a power which says, if his clients should jump bail, he can legally hunt them down and kill them. The most attractive element of the story is the hero's own first-person accounts. "My thoughts explode in words," Main exclaims. Elkin's recurring images literally explode off the page: Main sees a "Cincinnati beneath him like a crescent of jawbone, the buildings dental, gray as neglect, the Ohio juicing the town like saliva;" he speaks a "dialogue alive on my teeth like plaque;" and in a natural museum, "It is the teeth that...
...peopled from Burke's Peerage. The 'Making' of Ashenden is actually a make-out: he's raped by a Russian Kamchatka Bear at a jungle-like estate in England. This experience gives him a renewed existential meaning, as he proclaims, "I'm kinky for bears." The bizarre tone of Elkin's humor, and complicated narrative twists, which often expect the reader to believe first-person accounts of thoroughly untrustworthy characters are as rewarding as they are trying. Somehow, it all makes a peculiar sense--there is no reason, everybody is insane...
...Searches & Seizures, a collection of three novellas, each Elkin hero obeys his needs with results that vary from the bitterly funny to the preposterous and pathetic. Alexander Main of The Bail-bondsman is a kind of clawlike extension of the law's arm-a bondsman who pursues his work with outrageous devotion. A typical Elkin creation, Main promotes himself to legendary status, invoking history, philosophy and myth until he seems like a burlesque Mephistopheles to petty criminals...
...When his father dies, he seems driven by some homing instinct to move into the dead man's condominium apartment in Chicago. It is a terrible mistake. The young man finds himself disastrously enmeshed in the crotchets and suffocating propriety of the older residents. The story proves that Elkin, one of America's most inventive comic writers, is also adept at old-fashioned realism...