comedy and horror—the reader understands that in trying to protect himself from life’s pains, Mills has withdrawn not only from others, including his wife, but also from whatever would make him human. Unlike Elkin, who agrees with the William Faulkner character who says, “Between grief and nothing I will take grief,” Mills unwisely chooses nothing.

The cause of George’s predicament is his Millsness. Although a number of other Elkin characters are affected by their past—Feldman’s salesman father in A Bad Man (1967), for example, or Ben Flesh and the inheritance from his godfather in The Franchiser—only Mills carries the burden of a nine-hundred-year family history that began when Gillalume, “a sissy sir,” “doomed” his servant, the first George Mills, and “cursed” his race: “Learn this Mills. There are distinctions between men, humanity is dealt out like a deck of cards. There is natural suzereignty like the face value on coins. Men have their place. . . . It isn’t luck of the draw but the brick walls of some secret, sovereign Architecture that makes us so.” It is neither curse nor fate, however, that dooms the Millses; it is the Mills story which they take so seriously, so humorlessly. Passed down orally from father to son, always assumed to be true but never verified, the Mills history has no status other than as fiction, as family myth. Thus, the Millses are doomed by their own credulity, their failure to imagine for themselves any other than a cursed life, and their choosing, albeit unknowingly, to perpetuate the Mills myth by telling and retelling their stale story and by naming the son George in generation after generation.

George nearly comes to understand this simple fact when, in his youth, a spiritualist named Wickland tells George about his parents. As Wickland explains, any George Mills could have broken the chain; none did “Because people are suckers for fate, for all the scars to which they think they’re entitled.” Seeing themselves as victims—history has thwarted them, tied their hands, controlled their destiny—even gives a certain tragic dignity to their self-inflicted sufferings and shortcomings and at the same time effectively excuses them from responsibility for their lives. Elkin, whose muse is “Serendipity,” believes not in fate but in an arbitrary world ruled by “whim.” Whim, however, including the “controlled whim” of art, is one thing the George Millses have never accepted. George’s Oedipus-like attempt to escape his fate (by fleeing from the spiritualist camp at Cassadaga, Florida, and from his parents) cannot succeed because even in his flight, he continues to believe the Mills myth. Instead of abdicating his role as myth-victim in the Millses’ nine-hundred-year slapstick history, George carries his self-imposed burden with him.

Among those whom George meets by chance during the course of his whimsical odyssey, two are of special importance both for the light they shed on Mills and for the way their vibrant characters and stories outstrip Mills and his family saga. For all their differences, Mills and Cornell Messenger, a well-to-do university writer, are similar in many ways. Both are middle-aged, passive, burdened with family problems, burned-out, conscious of being second-rate, and submissive to fate; both are heirs (George of his Millsness, Messenger of his aunt’s wealth), both are storytellers (one by compulsion, the other by profession), and finally, both are go-betweens. It is through Messenger that George meets Judith Glazer, who, although dying of pancreatic cancer, is the novel’s most vital character. A compulsive mischief-maker, she takes pleasure in humiliating her family and friends, betraying their secrets and trivializing what they hold important. Herself betrayed and humiliated by cancer, Judith responds with all the bitterness that Elkin’s powerless characters can muster. She is, in Elkin’s view, the human situation in extremis, and because she fights back, her bitterness is rendered in nearly heroic terms as she translates her pain and humiliation into the language of the impotent—sarcasm: “God is good,” she tells Mills in Mexico. “He really is. He’s a genius. He creates the poor and homeless and gives them a warm climate to sleep it off in.”

Although Mills travels to Mexico as Judith’s employee, her paid companion and chauffeur, the relationship soon deepens. As her condition worsens, he becomes her sole visitor, her friend, nurse, brother, and, of course, her audience. When in her pain, the hallucinating woman screams “Marco,” it is Mills who plays her deadly serious child’s game, soothing her with his answering “Polo,” and it is Mills who, having heard her litany of quotidian losses and complaints, the “I never had’s” which end with “and I never had all the shrimp I could eat,” brings her a large bag of boiled shrimp—a comic yet utterly moving gesture. These understated signs of affection and compassion contrast with the reader’s earlier view of Mills as a man unable or unwilling to love. (The “nonreciprocity of desire,” as one character calls it, is one of Elkin’s recurrent themes.) For a time, George breaks free of his Millsness and is not indifferent to any despair but his own, but if Judith’s dying brings out the best in Mills, then her death brings out the worst. The inter vivos trust Judith leaves her husband and daughters results in a legal contest (as she maliciously planned), and for a time, Mills has a measure of power: both sides want his affidavit. Mills discovers that the wealthy and powerful are dependent on the Millses of the world and always have been dependent on them. The reader discovers something more: that the difference between the powerful Claunches and the lowly Millses is less important than the anguish, suffering, and death that bind them together. There is a certain poetic justice in Harry Claunch’s refusal to help the man who helped his sister; as Claunch explains, “You’re a guy gets a kick out of other men’s power.” Claunch is right, for George does envy power, but it is also true that George has come to understand the depth of his loneliness and to grieve, not entirely selfishly, for the love he has never received or given.

For a while, the world does seem to conform to George’s Mills-induced preference for unhappy endings—lost jobs, disinherited husbands, psychologically disturbed and brain-damaged children, marriages ending either in death or divorce—but then suddenly, queerly, “things work out,” as Messenger, “the epilogue man,” says. Having neither confidence nor hope, George is isolated from that vision of community, of reciprocated love, for which so many of Elkin’s characters yearn. Not having fathered a son, George has finally broken the Mills chain, but in the worst possible way, for now he has no one to whom he can tell his story. George Mills does not end, however, on this ironic note: in a lay sermon delivered to a Baptist congregation, reminiscent of Fred Clumly’s sermon at the end of John Gardner’s The Sunlight Dialogues (1972), George finds his talk turning into a confession, and along the way, he makes a number of important discoveries: that he is not saved; that he has been “stuck in his grace like a ship sunk in the sea”; that there never was a curse; that life is not a curse; that he is not all alone—all people are his brothers and sisters; that his desires are theirs as well—that desire is universal, not personal; and, finally, that “I ain’t saved. I spent my life like there was a hole in my pocket, and the meaning of life is to live long enough to find something out or to do something well. It ain’t just to put up with it.” George’s discoveries are rather unstartling, even trite, but that is exactly Elkin’s point: the clichés are true, the ordinary is extraordinary. That, not nine hundred years of fate, is George’s serendipitous discovery.

Elkin once likened George Mills to an ever-flowing fountain of tales, though its unapologetically episodic form may unsettle some readers. In Part One, you'll find a delightful standalone narrative about the Greatest Grandfather and his involvement in the "First Crusade." Meanwhile, Parts Two, Three, and Five unravel the fragmented adventures of the modern-day Mills, interspersed with flashbacks to his youthful days in Florida and musings on his father's life choices. Part Four introduces us to the saga of the forty-third Mills, who offers a first-person account of his encounter with King George IV. In a signature move, Elkin then transitions to a third-person historical omniscient perspective for the majority of the tale.

This non-linear storytelling — placing the forty-third Mills's tale in Part Four — accentuates the thematic connections across generations of Millses and their adaptations to life's circumstances. It further illustrates Elkin's commentary on the capriciousness of history. After all, could anything be more arbitrary than adhering strictly to a chronological recounting of events?

Moreover, the novel's episodic essence leads to nearly self-contained anecdotes. A notable example is a lengthy letter penned by a rogue spiritualist, detailing his mystical experiences to the guru employing George in Florida. Initially appearing as a lengthy diversion in the Mills chronicle, this story, published independently, eventually reveals its significance as part of George's spiritualist education. Within the novel's thematic tapestry, it exemplifies an obsession turning compulsive and showcases the extents to which individuals pursue spiritual enlightenment.

For those new to the world of George Mills, the book's intricate plots, episodic structure, and overarching theme positing history as yet another narrative might pose a challenge. Nevertheless, it is a humorous and whimsical read, probing deep questions about how we interpret history, and it promises rich rewards upon revisiting with newfound appreciation and insight.

In the enchanting novel George Mills, a work Elkin cherished as his favorite, critics have hailed it as both formidable and perplexing. The tale intricately weaves the theme of historical determinism through a magnificently exaggerated saga of a family's destiny spanning a millennium. Each successive generation is graced with a solitary male heir, always named George Mills. The story unfurls around the seemingly inescapable fate of each generation ensnared in an evolutionary cycle that Elkin eloquently terms "yeomanized a thousand years." The novel's core lies in the struggle between our ability to shape our destiny and the shackles of what might be deemed "historical inevitability."

Elkin paints a vivid picture of the modern-day Mills—a furniture mover in St. Louis—not with sympathy, but with a critical eye, prompting readers to scrutinize the moral high ground of the affluent and disdainful. Among them is a prickly heiress who employs Mills as her chauffeur and eventually confides in him, a reflection of the cultural power held by those in privilege. Meanwhile, Mills, whose lineage includes skilled and even talented forebears, remains entrenched in a working-class reality. Elkin complicates this historical conundrum by questioning whether such disparities in wealth and opportunity stem from fate, chance, inherited traits, the machinations of the elite, or the tacit acceptance of the powerless.

Elkin further enriches this tapestry of historical fairness by introducing a cultural mystery. Two mighty institutions, academia and religion, play significant roles in the narrative of contemporary St. Louis. Mills finds himself engulfed in university politics, becoming adept at forecasting academic power plays. As his employer embraces religion in her twilight years, and Mills, who in his youth dabbled with spiritualists, later becomes involved with a renegade pastor. The novel culminates with Mills delivering a poignant sermon in the pastor's church, echoing its thematic essence. The narrative also delves into the lives of two ancestral Mills entangled with the era's prevailing hierarchical establishments. "Greatest Grandfather" inherits a fateful curse from his "master," the second son of a minor noble line: "Men have their place ... It isn't luck of the draw but the brick walls of some secret, sovereign Architecture that makes us so." Another tale recounts the forty-third Mills, who becomes an intimate of King George IV before finding himself a captive of a Turkish Sultan. The cultural message is unmistakable: Institutions and their leaders perpetuate a hierarchical design, where the legacy of the disenfranchised erects barriers that confine them to their birthright class.

George Mills stands as Elkin's most ambitious entry into the realm of the picaresque, tracing its lineage back to the vibrant narratives spun by eighteenth-century stalwarts like Henry Fielding and Laurence Sterne. Within these tales, the thread that ties everything together is the journey of the protagonist, often cast as a charming rogue or an outcast of society. As early as his debut novel, Boswell: A Modern Comedy (1964), Elkin embraced this storytelling philosophy, weaving the episodic exploits of a mischievous hero. In this literary adventure, Elkin presents three unique iterations of Mills's tale, each unfolding in its own distinct style and rhythm.

Humor and anachronism frequently color Elkin's tapestry of motifs. Much like Joseph Heller in God Knows (1984), Elkin gleefully scrambles the timeline, subverting the authority of history itself. In a memorable scene, Greatest Grandfather thwarts a barbaric massacre with a timeless defiance, echoing the nineteenth-century spiritual refrain: "ain't gonna study war no more!" This novel bursts with Elkin's trademark energy, capturing the essence of modern popular culture's clutter and chaos. One vivid episode features Mills engrossed in a Jerry Lewis telethon, a scene that lays bare the morbid sentimentality festering in contemporary American life.

Technically speaking, the most remarkable part of this book is a testament to Elkin's homage to William Faulkner. The tale of George's father's failed quest to break the curse unfolds not through straightforward storytelling but as a piecing together of the past. George, alongside a spiritualist later entwined with his mother, crafts a plausible narrative to explain their enigmatic history—a creative impulse that births myth and archetype. Reminiscent of Quentin Compson and Shreve's explorations in Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom! (1936), George and Rev. Wickland, fueled by each other's revelations, unearth a credible explanation for a puzzling event.