Mrs. Ted Bliss (Magill Book Reviews)

At a glance:

“All books are the Book of Job,” Stanley Elkin used to say. His surely were. All seventeen were variations on a theme by William Faulkner: between grief and nothing, choose grief. Elkin knew grief firsthand—the bad heart, the even worse multiple sclerosis—transforming it into the art grievance, in which even the pettiest complaints, the worst whines, got the full gargantuan treatment. Elkin’s writing is always rhetorically extravagant and narratively resourceful, but it is also deeply human, even generous in its own oddly angled way.

MRS. TED BLISS is of a piece with his earlier work—Mary Cottle’s strangely affirmative curse at the end of THE MAGIC KINGDOM (1985) no less than the ahs of remission at the end of THE FRANCHISER (1976). Yet it is different too, more elegiac, less excessive, though hardly subdued. What Elkin has done here is tailor his rhetorically rich, narratively wayward style to fit his title character. Mrs. Ted Bliss is the latest and, with the author’s death on May 31, lamentably last of Elkin’s Job-like cast of the put-upon and the passed-by. The widow of a Chicago butcher, Dorothy is financially secure in her Miami Beach condo but also at a loss: unable to give up “her baleboosteh ways,” fearful of a world she barely understands (Ted did everything for her), cut off from her children (one by death, two by distance) and from others (as much because of “her need not to appear needy” as “increasing cumulative nerve deafness”). In Elkin’s fiction “character is habit”—and Dorothy is always in character, grotesquely so.

Elkin’s plots are similarly unconventional, a series of casually rather than causally or chronologically related riffs set in motion by a mere contrivance, what Alfred Hitchcock called a MacGuffin, in this case Dorothy’s selling of Ted’s 1978 Buick LeSabre to a Venezuelan neighbor who, of course, turns out to be a drug dealer. In the twelve years from Ted’s death to the arrival of Hurricane Andrew at novel’s end, Dorothy learns what most of Elkin’s characters do, that in a world in which “everything and [everyone] came fatally flawed”; “edge” rules, “the secrets of the upperhand.” Yet she also learns something else, something that has always been at the heart of Elkin’s raging comedy: that “everything . . . falls away. Family, friends, love fall away. Even madness stilled at last. Until all that’s left is obligation.”

Sources for Further Study

Boston Globe. September 3, 1995, p. 15.

Los Angeles Times Book Review. September 3, 1995, p. 1.

The New York Times Book Review. C, September 17, 1995, p. 7.

The New Yorker. LXXI, September 25, 1995, p. 104.

San Francisco Chronicle. October 15, 1995, p. REV7.

The Washington Post Book World. XXV, September 10, 1995, p. 5.