Word: elkins
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...position he holds in British life (that of a well-to-do bourgeois with private passions locked firmly in the closet), while rejecting both the gay life or the commitments an observant Judaism would demand. What he loves are culture, (mostly refined) pleasure, and a bisexual named Bob Elkin...
...DICK GIBSON SHOW by Stanley Elkin. 335 pages. Random House...
...Though hypocrisy can take you far, it can only take you so far," says Dick Gibson, the protean-enriched radio personality of Stanley Elkin's third novel. It is one of those ebullient statements that instantly sprouts provocative questions: How far do you want to go? Who will you be when you get there...
...burlesque mythology of mass culture, wants to go all the way. But not vertically (to a network presidency), or even horizontally to become one of those tympanic coast-to-coast voices that always "seem to speak from the frontiers of commitment." Instead, like the wrestler in Elkin's first novel (Boswell) and the department store owner in his second (A Bad Man), Gibson craves the all-points dimension of human need...
...suit geography, he evolves into part of American folklore. As Dick Gibson, the paradox of his truest identity is that he is from Nowhere, U.S.A. "Regionless my placeless vowels, my sourceless consonants," Gibson ululates into the silence and emptiness-the somber and pervasive background of life that is Elkin's real concern. Like Scheherazade, Gibson holds fate off with talk, "life-giving and meaningless and sweet as appetite...