About book Van Gogh's Room At Arles: Three Novellas (1994)
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 on the way out), his outrage and disbelief, his severe physical debilities, and quickly thereafter, of his challenging personality! At first, I found his running, self-absorbed commentary, (or non-stop whining, if you prefer) to be difficult. I nearly stopped reading the book, but pushed through the first dozen or so pages, and by then was fully hooked. What was going to happen to this poor man who had the character of burning tires (acrid, unpleasant, and unfortunate)? As I pushed through, I almost began to enjoy his philosophical, self-absorbed, deeply dependent and alternate-personality style fierce independence. What happens in this book occurs over a period of hours—probably a full day, if counted accurately—but it gives you a fully developed glimpse into his life. What you’re left with is a funny, if not altogether fun story. While you cannot help but feel sorry for this man who goes through his own sort of hell, you also feel that he deserves every bit of lesson that his wife and students teach him. Schiff (the protagonist) is a college professor of political geography whose wife has unexpectedly left him just before his annual party; a party that he started a couple of years ago in an egotistical effort to force his students to somehow remember him fondly in the future. He is jealous that some of his contemporaries have students who call, write, and visit yearsafter graduation and he has slowly become aware that none of his students either contact him or ever seem to go into the field of political geography, which is both his specialty and his passion. This is his desperate attempt to change his fate before time runs out. It is an interesting, fun, and challenging story. I particularly enjoyed the philosophical ruminating and have included an example below in the excerpt! It blends very nicely with beer swilling, smoking, and an “Animal House” type of party. EXCERPT: Schiff, a stiff and somewhat formal grown-up better than twice their age who called them “Miss,” who called them “Mister,” supposed them in on their professor’s domestic secrets, supposed himself (one of those—he supposed they supposed—hotshot, crisis celebs, a consultant in times of national stress to movers and shakers with means at their disposal—their bombs and high-tech devices—quite literally to move and shake the very political geography that had hitherto been merest contingency, simple textbook, blackboard example, his finger—their professor’s—on the planet’s pulses, its variously scant or bumper crops, its stores of mineral, vegetable, animal, and marine wealth—currents where the advantageous fish hung—an advisor—he supposed they supposed—to presidents, kings, and others of the ilk, who could determine a vital interest simply by naming it, pronouncing it, pointing to it chalktalk fashion on a map, virtually talking the hotspots into being) fallen in their youthful, fickle estimation, emotional, skittish as a stock exchange. So no wonder they seemed so nervous around him. His wife had left him, he stood as exposed as a flasher. His wife had left him, and now they perceived Professor S. as one who evidently—and oh so feebly—pulled his pants up over his uncovered ass one damaged leg at a time; a man, in the absence of crisis, not only like any other—his wife had walked, had taxicabbed out on him—but maybe even more so. He was revealed to them here on his—the political geographer’s and erstwhile hotshot, crisis celeb’s—very turf as one more defective, pathetic, poor misbegotten schlepp.Elkin, Stanley (2010-10-26). Van Gogh's Room at Arles (pp. 71-72). Open Road Media. Kindle Edition.~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~Book Two—Crier Exclusive, Confessions of a Princess Manqué: “How Royals Found Me ‘Unsuitable’ to Marry Their Larry”This is a story about a woman who becomes almost inexplicably engaged to the heir of the British throne—of course, the characters are all jumbled from the current British royal family (in the fairness of changing names to protect the innocent, and all that; although, the royal prince depicted here reminded me a bit of P. Charles with his stuffy demeanor!). The ensuing story—details how the couple met, the engagement announcement, meeting the royals, the “royal engagement tour,” and the idle royal’s mischief and pointless existence—is hysterical. It is a very fast-passed story filled with plenty of great British-style humor! If you want a quick read with a lot of laughs, this is a good choice! EXCERPT (the first paragraph of the story):I shouldn’t have thought I’d have gone public like this. Well, to begin with, there’s the question of our musty old laws, isn’t there? Oh, solicitors have gone all over it with their fine-tooth combs to see that the paper’s in the clear. I never referred to myself as “La Lulu,” and neither did Lawrence, Crown Patriciate, Duke of Wilshire, nor any other of their royal lord and lady highnesses and mightinesses. Nor all the king’s soldiers, nor all the king’s men. There’s no such person. That was chiefly an invention of the press; a legal fiction.Elkin, Stanley (2010-10-26). Van Gogh's Room at Arles (p. 111). Open Road Media. Kindle Edition.~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~*~Book Three—Van Gogh’s Room at ArlesThis last story in the set was difficult for me to finish, which is one of my rules of reading. If one begins a book, one should have the good grace to finish the book. Not always easy! Why not easy to finish? Well, the story didn’t seem to have a point. To quote a piece of the book’s description: “In the collection’s title story, Elkin writes of an insecure professor’s scholarly retreat with the most accomplished members of his field.” The “members of his field” bit refers to an interesting string of professors from all over the world studying (and writing papers about obscure, but interesting topics). The protagonist is an instructor at a community college in Indiana—definitely out of his league. The insecure professor was the problem. In his retreat, in which he literally was housed in Van Gogh’s Room at Arles, he wandered aimlessly though his five weeks, both mesmerized and depressed by his “peers,” the experience, and the location. It was a story of a missed opportunity, flowered with witty prose and snappy sappiness (yes, you might consider ‘snappy sappiness’ a brief example of what to expect). The bright side was the delightful descriptions of the area in and around Arles, the described images of the artist’s famous paintings of the area, the random meetings of descendents of people forever immortalized—who go to some effort to look like (dress, hair, makeup, moustache, and so forth) their famous predecessors—and of the general experience of the intellectual scholarly retreat. Thankfully it was a short story, if not a quick read (mostly because I kept setting it down…), and amusing enough to read with the other stories in the set. EXCERPT:“Do we know each other?” Miller said. “You seem familiar to me.” “Oh.” laughed the doctor, “This is a common mistake I have so the likeness of my great-great-grandfather, Dr. Félix Rey, the médecin of Vincent Van Gogh, whom he attended for the amputate of his ear.” He took a card from the breast pocket of his suit coat and handed it to Miller. It was a postcard from a museum gift shop with a reproduction of Van Gogh’s “Portrait of Dr. Félix Rey.” “You do,” Miller said, “you’re his spitting image!” “Not a handsome man,” said Dr. Rey. It was true. Both grand-grand-grandpère and grandfils had thin, vaguely Oriental faces like inverted equilateral triangles that were made to seem even more triangular by both the long, dependent Vandykes at the bottom of their chins and their flat, dark, brushcut hair. Astonishingly, like points of interest, the prominent left ears of the two young men (for they were young; both Miller’s physician and Van Gogh’s could not have been more than twenty-five or -six years old) seemed to flare out from the sides of their heads red as shame and exactly matched the shade of their full, pouty, Kewpie doll lips. (As they stood out against the general jaundice of their complexions.) Both men wore handlebar mustaches. Both evidently plucked their eyebrows.
Why do I read Elkin?The tops of the pizza boxes had been torn from their bottoms, and everywhere, teetering on the arm of the sofa, on the coffee table, left on a seat cushion, on a stereo speaker, in the makeshift dishes, the smeared, greasy, bronzed mix- and-match of the cardboard china, lay pieces of cold, uneaten pizza like long slices of abstract painting, their fats congealing, fissures opening in their cooling yellow cheeses, burst bubbles of painterly cholesterol, chips of pepperoni raised on them like rusty scabs. Bits of green bell peppers, tiny facets of oily onion, bright hunks of tomato like semiprecious stones caught Schiff’s eye, glinted up at him from the carpet. Crumpled paper napkins, like the soiled sheets of wet beds, soaked up spilled Coke. There was an aluminum rubble of crushed cans.
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Three fish-out-of-water stories from a master of the parenthetical expression. The first and third stories are academic farces -- in the first, a kindly old wheel-chair bound professor is abandoned by his wife right before his annual house party, during which his graduate students turn his house upside down. In the third story a community college professor is inexplicably invited to schmooze with the full tenure crowd in Arles, where he is placed in the Yellow House at 2 Place Lamartine and is visited by the descendants of the people Van Gogh painted. The middle story revolves around the failed engagement of an English Prince to a commoner. All three stories express a kind of helplessness and rely on Elkin's finely tuned style and self-effacing sense of humor. Not knowing any better, I would guess that Elkin wrote the first story as a semi-autobiographical spoof, and the second two on holidays in England and France. All three stories are great examples of his style and sense of humor, but taken individually they seem a bit overworked.
—Thomas
