Stanley Elkin once described his literary taste as delicatessen rather than haute cuisine. "It's that yen for the salami sandwich at the gourmet dinner … it is for the disheveled, what the cat dragged in, the rumpled in spirit," he wrote….

Elkin's taste, of course, is not as lowbrow as he claims. His greatest strength is the ability to combine high art and pop culture without shortchanging either one. His frequent subject is the regular guy with an all-American dream of making it big, but his sentences are often convoluted enough to give a Jamesian pause. This density of language may have kept Elkin off the best-seller list, but his natural audience is the one that appreciates John Irving and Kurt Vonnegut.

George Mills is not his most affecting book, and certainly not his funniest, but it is quintessential Elkin in style and substance. His five previous novels and two story collections not only capture Middle America; they embrace it…. Elkin deflates intellectual pretensions by recognizing that most people are perfectly comfortable in a fast-food world.

The Living End, Elkin's last novel, sets us up for George Mills. God puts in an appearance, and even he turns out to be a regular guy—part storyteller, part stand-up comic, part practical joker. George Mills takes this idea even further: it is about 1000 years of guys who are so ordinary they hand it down from father to son as a family tradition. From the first George Mills, servant to a nobleman during the Crusades, to the last, a working stiff in contemporary St. Louis, these are men who live under the curse of their "blue collar blood," pass on to their sons the story of this heritage, and always seem to be the butts of God's practical jokes.

Elkin focuses on the contemporary George and his upper-middle-class nobles and masters, intercutting George's story and the tales he has been raised on: those of his "Greatest Grandfather," of his own father, and of the 19th century English ancestor who landed in a Turkish harem. The novel is intricate, full of flashbacks, imagined conversations, and remembered family legends; it is also labored, brilliant in parts, and cumbersome as a whole. The historical sections often strain for laughs …; Elkin's real gift is for depicting the plastic-coated world of today. Overall, this work is less humorous than most of Elkin's, for the Millses are obsessed with their fated family history, and their curse of ordinariness denies them the vitality and even the aspirations of Dick Gibson and Ben Flesh.