It is hard to be too disparaging about this novel, seeing Stanley Elkin wrote it in the last few years of his life, probably in the fleeting moments when his crippling multiple sclerosis let up long enough so he could type or handwrite. It is an heroic act that in his last years he chose to power...
This is a collection of three short stories, and I have provided both reviews and excerpts of each.Book One—Her Sense of TimingThis book begins with the protagonist’s wife leaving him—literally in the opening lines. We learn of her calm demeanor (she kisses his cheek and cheerfully says goodbye o...
Every novel of reputed worth, no matter how much I may or may not like it, has something of merit to recommend it. The pleasures I derived from this one, however, were woefully out of proportion to the time I spent with it.Thirty years ago I had read "The Dick Gibson Show", and nothing except dis...
The MacGuffin started off strong, but somewhere along the way either he or I, or maybe both of us, got a little tired of the story and lost interest. I thought this might be a failing of the book, but I'm thinking now that it might have been an (un)intentional literary device. I won't explain t...
The best satire is beautifully written (thus, consign almost all 'satire' to the garbage can); it can be enjoyed by people who disagree with the author on large matters (a religious person should enjoy The Living End, because they will agree on the smaller absurdities that Elkin deals with so wel...