listening to his radio broadcasts, not even the station’s owners or technicians. Later, as host of a late-night radio call-in show, he will enjoy a success that proves no less problematic, as his callers’ obsessions begin to overwhelm him.

Control is also the key for Alexander Main in “The Bailbondsman.” Against all that he can neither understand nor control in his own life, Main asserts his power as bailbondsman to choose who will go (temporarily) free and who will not. Unlike the ostensibly bad men who predominate in Elkin’s fiction, Ellerbee in The Living End is saintly, excessively so. Killed by a robber, he is permitted a glimpse of heaven (which looks “like a theme park”) before being unfairly sent to hell, “the ultimate inner city.” Discovering there “the grand vocabulary” of pain, he learns to speak with the same intensity and extravagance as many of Elkin’s other heroes, all of them suffering the bad luck that comes of just being alive. In this, they are indeed made in their makers’ images: Elkin, with his bad heart and multiple sclerosis, as well as the God of The Living End. This is a God who has created heaven and hell, affliction and, finally, apocalypse, “because it makes a better story.”

Elkin’s jokey fiction is suffused with intimations of mortality. In The Magic Kingdom, Simon Bale organizes a trip to Disney World for a group of English children suffering from various terminal diseases. The children’s fate is cruel, and the novel itself is painfully, unsparingly funny, but the pain, here and elsewhere in Elkin’s fiction, is to a degree offset by the characters’—and the author’s—affirmation of life and spirit of defiance.

This is not to say that Elkin’s fiction resolves itself in any conventional way. Beginning with nothing more than a situation (and in the case of at least one story, nothing more than the word “bailbondsman”), Elkin does not develop his stories and novels in terms of plot and the Enlightenment ethos it implies. Instead, following the rule of whim and the muse of serendipity, he proceeds on the basis of opposition, of “action and respite, tension and release,” obsession and resistance, of “what the character wants to happen and what he does not want to happen.” Elkin’s protagonists move through their worlds comically repeating themselves, “the stammer of personality” asserting itself over and over.

“A Poetics for Bullies”

First published: 1965 (collected in Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers, 1965)

Type of work: Short story

Against the logic of submission and adaptation, the young protagonist defines himself in terms of his own perverse desires and supercharged rhetoric.

Of the nine stories in Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers, “A Poetics for Bullies” was the last to be written and the one Elkin liked best. The story marks Elkin’s breakthrough from his earlier, more realistic, and generally more sedate style to the approach that characterizes his later work. The story’s young protagonist-narrator is the unlovable but irrepressible Push the Bully. Push imposes his perverse will and vision on others, all of them, like Push, grotesques: Eugene, with his overactive salivary glands, fat Frank, Mim the dummy, Slud the cripple, Clob the ugly. A trickster as much by compulsion as by choice, Push claims that were magic real, he would use it to change the world, but because it is not real, he spends his time asserting himself and disillusioning others. Although this “prophet of the deaf” seems in many ways a younger version of one of Saul Bellow’s “reality instructors,” he also resembles the typical Bellow hero, Eugene Henderson, for example, in Henderson the Rain King (1959), whose clamorous “I want, I want” is Push’s own. “Alone in my envy, awash in my lust,” Push feels forever the outsider, though not in any clearly existential sense; he is more the perennial new kid on the block than the absurdist antihero of Jean-Paul Sartre and Albert Camus.

As if to prove Push right, an actual new kid, John Williams, immediately gains the acceptance that Push both desires and despises. Tall, blond, and handsome, the well-traveled and well-dressed Williams cuts a princely figure. A version of the main character in the slightly earlier “On a Field Rampant,” Williams is a “paragon” of virtue and Christlike lover of all, including those defectives whom Push loves to hate. He puts Frank on a diet and Slud in the gym, and he even tries to befriend Push, who has always tried to live his life so that he “could keep the lamb from the door.”

Push decides to fight Williams, “not to preserve honor but its opposite.” Willing to risk the pain he has always avoided, he is determined that his nemesis will not turn the other cheek. In this, Push claims, he is only following natural law: “Push pushed pushes.” Push succeeds; Williams strikes back, only to then extend his hand in friendship. “Hurrah!” cry the others, like the chorus of children at the end of Fyodor Dostoevski’s Bratya Karamazovy (1879-1880; The Brothers Karamazov, 1912). After a moment’s hesitation, however, Push rejects all offers and pleadings; he chooses instead to follow his own inexorable self rather than adapt and submit: “Logic is nothing. Desire is stronger.” Bully in no ordinary sense, Push is the “incarnation of envy and jealousy and need,” ready to “die wanting,” possessing nothing more and nothing less than “the cabala of my hate, my irreconcilableness.”

The Franchiser

First published: 1976

Type of work: Novel

The apotheosis of self-effacement, Ben Flesh tries to live without desire and therefore without personality.

If Push the Bully represents one extreme of character in Elkin’s fiction, then Ben Flesh, protagonist and narrator of The Franchiser, represents the other. “A Poetics for Bullies” and The Franchiser are also representative of two other aspects of Elkin’s writing. One is generic; there is the story’s depiction of “acute character” manifesting itself in a crisis situation versus the novel’s presentation of “chronic character” manifesting itself over a serendipitously (or whimsically) developed series of episodes. The other difference is autobiographical. “A Poetics for Bullies” and the other stories in Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers were all written before “anything bad” had ever befallen Elkin; The Franchiser was written after the author had suffered heart attacks, temporary blindness, and multiple sclerosis.

“Deprived of all the warrants of personality,” Ben is a man “without goals, without obsession, without drive” but in possession of a substantial inheritance from his wealthy godfather. That inheritance enables Ben, who has “no good thing of his own . . . to place himself in the service of those who had.” For Ben, this means buying franchises (buying names), in effect becoming Evelyn Wood (speed reading), Fred Astaire (dance studio), Mr. Softee (ice cream), Colonel Sanders (chicken dinners), America’s Innkeeper (Holiday Inn), and the like.

Ben’s efforts to define himself in terms of others prove as unsatisfying as his attempts to control his various, mainly outdated or poorly located businesses, the inflation-prone economy, the weather, even his own body. The prime rate rises, the temperature soars, energy suddenly becomes scarce, and Ben learns that he has multiple sclerosis. His illness is diagnosed in, of all places, the tropical fever ward of a hospital in South Dakota, where a fellow patient offers him this stiff-upper-lip advice: “Be hard, Mr. Softee.” Ironically, even perversely, that is precisely what Ben is doing, as the disease hardens patches on his brain.

His own health deteriorating and his eighteen nearly identical godcousins dying of bizarre maladies, Ben finally takes leave of his anonymity long enough to stake nearly all of his other franchises on a Travel Inn located in the town of Ringgold, Georgia. The inn, of course, fails, but not before Ben, putting his ear to the doors of the few occupied rooms, discovers that romance, even in its most perverse forms, is “as real as heartburn.” He is amazed and delighted, but his “ecstasy attack,” while clearly an affirmation of life, is also a chemically induced symptom of his worsening multiple sclerosis. “Nope,” Ben says to himself in the novel’s closing pages, “he couldn’t complain.” Would that he could, for (the novel suggests) he should. Lacking Push the Bully’s rage and resentment, however, Ben can only sigh, tragicomically resigned, perversely contented.

Her Sense of Timing

First published: 1993 (in Van Gogh’s Room at Arles)

Type of work: Novella

Confined to a wheelchair, a political geographer finds himself in the land of farce, where he discovers the actual extent of his helplessness.

Best known as a novelist and frequently anthologized as a writer of short stories, Elkin also produced a significant body of work in a form, the novella, that most contemporary American writers have, perhaps for commercial reasons, avoided. That Elkin found the novella form so appealing is understandable, for it allowed him to combine the emphasis on situation and acute character that typifies his short stories with the spatial freedom of the novel so necessary to the development of his poetics of resentment and obsession.

What especially distinguishes Her Sense of Timing is how painfully close Elkin—never an autobiographical writer but always willing to draw on personal material—is working to the autobiographical bone. He takes his own increasing state of helplessness and dependency (on the drugs used in the treatment of his heart disease and multiple sclerosis, on his wheelchair and stair-glide, and, above all, on his wife, Joan) and asks a simple question: What would happen if a character who is not the author but who is like him in terms of age, personality, academic affiliation, and medical history suddenly found himself home alone, abandoned by a wife who, after thirty-six years of marriage and a decade or so spent caring for her disabled husband, decided that she had had enough?

Although he can understand Claire’s leaving, political geographer Jack Schiff greatly resents her going and resents most her leaving on the very eve of his annual party for the graduate students whom he, in fact, does not particularly like. With Claire gone, Schiff must, quite literally, fall back on his own limited resources and abilities (including his ability to exploit others). Forced to “shift” for himself, he will come to understand better than ever before not only his humiliating helplessness but also the farcical nature of his situation. He takes pratfalls despite the presence of an expensive medical alert system, which he has installed the day Claire leaves and which the cunning, conniving Schiff will abuse, claiming a medical emergency when, in fact, he wants only someone to empty his urine container and close the front door.

Schiff is adept at beating the system, at taking revenge by taking advantage. Elkin makes Schiff’s situation at once convincing, comical, and emotionally affecting. “’I’d like,’ said Schiff, sorry as soon as he permitted the words to escape, ’for my life to go into remission.’” Failing that, the coward will once again turn bully, playing his handicap as if it were a trump card. In doing so, he seeks not just to assert himself but also to avenge himself, though invariably in petty ways. In Elkin’s fiction of obsession and resentment, the ways are always petty. The pettiness serves as further proof of the powerlessness that his characters feel so acutely and struggle against so mightily.

Mrs. Ted Bliss

First published: 1995

Type of work: Novel

An elderly widow copes as best she can with present concerns while, like Lot’s wife, she casts a backward glance over her life.

Mrs. Ted Bliss is the last novel Elkin published before he died. Elkin was always attuned to the wantings and wasting of the body and its connections to the body politic within and against which his characters measured their successes and, more usually, their failings. In his earlier novel, The Franchiser, Elkin focuses on a man stricken in his prime with MS (after inheriting a fortune from his godfather) and sets Ben Flesh’s cross-country travels against the backdrop of Ben’s own unraveling myelin and the nation’s energy crisis. Mrs. Ted Bliss is, as the title character’s name indicates, no less ironically allegorical but far more retrospective, even elegiac. Published in the middle of the roaring 1990’s with its soaring stock market, Mrs. Ted Bliss offers a sobering and highly affecting memento mori, made all the vivid by Elkin’s characteristically pyrotechnic prose.

This time the pyrotechnics are more subdued, as befits the novel’s aging main character, carefully doled out like a widow’s savings. Not that Mrs. Ted Bliss is financially strapped; she is merely at a loss following the death of the husband—a butcher, a dealer in flesh, sold by the pound—who, like many men of his generation, had done everything for their wives except, naturally, prepare them for widowhood. Dorothy’s story is a bit of Americana, a Jewish urbanized version of American Gothic, a rags-to-riches tale that takes her from Russia to Chicago and finally to Miami Beach where, at novel’s end, she awaits the coming of Hurricane Andrew and, likely, death. The hurricane is no tornado that will set this modern-day Dorothy down in wondrous, full-color Oz. Rather, she finds herself in the real-life version of the hell that Elkin conjured in The Living End, where God is a stand-up comedian playing to a literally captive audience of the unjustly damned. In Mrs. Ted Bliss, the fears are more mundane even if the punishment meted out to this female Job no less unjust, as Dorothy’s worries make her retreat from scam artists and encroaching urban blight into the relative safety of her aptly named but decaying condominium block, the Towers. Like Elkin’s other protagonists, this Sleeping Beauty/Rapunzel is presented, warts and all, and with a sympathy that Elkin had previously often tried hard to hide.

Like Elkin’s earlier fiction, Mrs. Ted Bliss is not concerned with developing plot or character conventionally. Just as the plot of The Franchiser parodies that of Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (1957), the plot of Mrs. Ted Bliss is little more than a peg on which Elkin hangs his prose as he traces Dorothy’s adventures, or rather pratfalls, including selling her late husband’s 1978 Buick LeSabre to a drug kingpin, who really just wants the parking place. When he is caught, Dorothy, more schlemiel than naïf, becomes a suspect in the investigation, having been paid five thousand dollars over book value. “Shorn of her decibels,” her beauty, her son Marvin, her husband Ted, and her freedom, she becomes increasingly ridiculous and fearful. As powerless as Elkin’s other, younger protagonists and no less angry with a God whose creation, seemingly so full of promise, turns out to be “fatally flawed,” the most she can hope for is the scaled back revenge of “being quits” with those who have done her wrong. Mrs. Ted Bliss is part Dorothy from TheWizard of Oz and part King Lear maddened and raging on the hearth. Less like the one with her three companions than like the other comforted by Edgar, Dorothy Bliss is last seen, terrified but not alone, in her darkened apartment as the storm approaches, huddling together with a security guard, a biblical Rachel in reverse, who, searching for her own mother, found Dorothy instead.