at last he dies of cancer, the son, metamorphosing into the true salesman, proves the father wrong. He calls the doctor to tell him that the father has died. “They argued but it was no use. The doctor, on behalf of the tiny hospital, could offer him only fifteen dollars for the body.”

The son, named Feldman, grows into a department store magnate, as the reader finds out in the novel, eventually turns to a life of crime, is arrested, and revolutionizes the prison to which he is sent through the use of the same gifts and manias which possessed his father. (Another story excerpted from the novel, “The Merchant of New Desires,” hilariously depicts Feldman’s running of the prison commissary, which has become an avatar of his father’s wagon.) Together, the stories form a potent and typical introduction to Elkin’s work. The language is nonstop; the “vaudeville-like patter” is continuous. The manic events mask a desperate attempt to form an identity and connect with the world. Both the situations and the rhetoric display the art of the bizarre, the grotesque manifestations of feverishly heightened consciousness and wild emotional excess.

The rhetorical aspects of Elkin’s fiction combine with an exact description of every setting. Hotel rooms, for example, are described down to the texture and grain of the plastic wood veneers of the dressers and the weave of the drapes. The stark realism of locale combined with the wild multifaceted language of the characters (who often narrate their own stories) form a unique texture. Throughout, the language is not an end in itself, but rather a clue to the personality of the characters, a metaphor for their psychological states. Elkin’s typical protagonists are salesmen, con men, and “consumed consumers” who may be down and out, but are struggling obsessively and subjectively, acutely conscious of their every impulse and atom of their surroundings. They exist in a world of objective, unthinking, “normal” people whose lack of engagement is a source of alienation and cause for despair. They are frequently “ordinary” characters with brutally heightened consciousnesses in discontinuity with themselves and their milieu. Their monologues and harangues, often wildly funny, at other times tragically touching, are an attempt to discover their essences through the medium of language itself. The world does not become knowable, if ever, until expressed verbally.

“In the Alley”

Fearful of losing their identities, Elkin’s characters push life to its fatal limits until it retaliates. At times, they give in to their malaise with a brutal intensity. Feldman, the hero of “In the Alley” (Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers), suffering from a terminal disease, has been told that he will die in a year. He uses the time to die gracefully, stoically, with dignity; dying becomes his identity and life. His body, however, perversely refuses to die on schedule, and his new identity becomes absurd to him. He enters a hospital terminal ward to await his end and to immerse himself in his impending demise, to connect with others in the same plight. Yet his body still refuses to cooperate, and he is disabused of his self-concept of the stoic, heroic dier. There is no “fraternity among the sick.”

Feldman wanders about the city, a Joycean “Nighttown” of working-class bars, enters one, and takes up conversation with a muscular Slavic woman with a tattooed wrist. He tells her of his imminent but frustratingly deferred death, at first seeking affection and solace. Finally, however, seeking release and using the woman as an agent, he brings about his own doom: He tries to seduce her, and the woman, with the help of a tough female bartender, beats him senseless. He is carried out to the alley, a sign pinned to his suit reading “STAY AWAY FROM WHITE WOMEN.” Surrounded by garbage, Feldman, finally dying, thinks of his family, who had anticipated his death with admiration and compassion and “unmasked hope that it would never come to this for them, but that if it should, if it ever should, it would come with grace. But nothing came gracefully—not to heroes.”

“The Bailbondsman”

One of the very best pieces of fiction Elkin has produced is “The Bailbondsman,” one of the three novellas (the others are “The Making of Ashenden” and “The Condominium”) in Searches and Seizures. Shifting effortlessly between first-and third-person narration, the story relates a day in the life of a classically obsessive Elkin protagonist, Alexander Main, a “Phoenecian” bailbondsman in Cincinnati—a member of an extinct race, practitioner of a trade which requires him to consort with all layers of life from the ermine of the bench to prostitutes. He is greedy for total immersion in his milieu and obsessed by the mystery of the meaning of his life and its relation to the world. “I have no taste, only hunger,” he says—a literal pun, for he has no sense of taste—food is only fuel. He succeeds in his profession because he is a master of rhetoric and can persuade judges to set bail and persuade clients to seek his services rather than those of the competition. His Whitman-like consciousness absorbs everything—history, science, the codes of the underworld, literature—with total abandon. All experience floods his consciousness with equal priority, filtered through his expansive rhetoric. He dotes on language; even Crainpool, his gray assistant, enjoys his constant patter about everything from the allegorical parasitology of the liver fluke to the prehistoric teeth Main examines in a museum, tears coursing down his face as he thinks of the fugacity of life. Everything is emblemized.

Main is obsessed with the memory of Oyp and Glyp, the only clients who have ever jumped bail. He dreams of them as grave robbers in an ornate Egyptian tomb. The dream is a profusion of opulent archeological imagery. In his dream, Main apprehends the fiends, but the Egyptian judge foils him by refusing to set bail for a crime so horrendous and then compounds the affront by setting the thieves free because there can be no appropriate punishment. Oyp and Glyp represent to Main his potential lack of control over his environment—threatened by legal changes which may make his trade obsolete—and his inability to dominate totally his world and the mystery it represents.

Main’s obsession with domination leads him to his assistant’s apartment, where it is revealed that Crainpool had jumped bail years ago and that Main had harbored him from prosecution by employing him. He is “the only man in the world [he is] allowed to kill.” Main prepares to execute Crainpool, and the story ends as Main shoots Crainpool in the hand and chases out after him into the night. The “seizure” that ends Main’s search is obsessive, cruel, and destructive, but also a crushing embrace of the life force. Like Feldman, Main is determined to register his presence in the implacable universe.

Van Gogh’s Room at Arles

Most critics agree that the title novella in Elkin’s collection of three stories is the strongest. The story centers on an undistinguished professor named Miller from a community college in Indiana, who, when granted a fellowship to attend a think tank retreat in Arles in southern France, ends up being housed in the bedroom of Vincent Van Gogh. Indeed, the room contains the nightstand, the basin and pitcher, and the cane-bottomed chair depicted in Van Gogh’s famous painting entitled “Vincent’s Bedroom in Arles.”

Miller is something of an “innocent abroad,” at first unimpressed by the famous room and obviously outclassed by his more distinguished colleagues at the retreat. However, he gradually begins to appreciate the obligation the room places on him and makes a valiant, albeit feeble, effort to do some thinking while at the think tank, cobbling together a research “project” about the attitudes university professors have toward the lowly community college.

Miller’s sense of inadequacy is heightened throughout the story by the continual discovery of scenes from some of Van Gogh’s most famous paintings, all of which create the illusion of Miller’s moving in a world of art: “The Night Cafe in the Place Lamartine in Arles,” “Fishing Boats on the Beach at Saintes-Maries,” “The Langlois Bridge at Arles,” and “The Railway Bridge over Avenue Montmajour, Arles.” Even more challenging is the appearance of a number of Arles residents who look like characters in several Van Gogh paintings. A doctor who comes to see Miller after he faints from stress and jet-lag and who looks like Van Gogh’s “Portrait of Dr. Félix Rey,” tells Miller that descendants of Van Gogh’s models still live in Arles. Miller is more disoriented by this mix of past and present, art and reality, when he sees a man who looks like Van Gogh’s “The Seated Zouave” and a boy in a field with a great bag of seeds on his shoulder who looks like Van Gogh’s “The Sower.”

These encounters come to a climax when additional members of the “Club of the Portraits of the Descendants of the People Painted by Vincent Van Gogh” come to Miller’s room to give him advice for what the doctor calls his “sprained soul.” Miller’s final encounter with a Van Gogh painting occurs when he is introduced to Madame Ginoux, who, when they meet, bends her arm at the elbow and presses the knuckles to the side of her face in a pensive salute, exactly like the gesture in Van Gogh’s “Madame Ginoux with Gloves and Umbrella.”

At the end of the story, although the mundane Miller has not been radically altered by his visit to the art world of Van Gogh, he is not the same either, for the world of art has made him more responsive to the mysteries and beauties of life. He understands that although one cannot create like an artist, one may still try to see as an artist sees.