The short and simple annals of the poor have often been the starting point for Stanley Elkin's wild, raunchy imagination. George Mills is no exception, but Elkin strains the rather plot-less framework of the novel by interpolating two long chapters that tell the stories of two historical George Millses: the first, who accompanies his noble master on the First Crusade and does some time in a Polish salt mine; and the forty-third, who (by chance) makes the acquaintance of King George IV and is sent on a diplomatic mission to Constantinople, where he happens into becoming a janissary and lives in a state of arrested horniness in the harem of Yildiz Palace. These two sections are not historical pastiche but contemporary Elkin, whether George Mills I is talking to his horse in the salt mine or George Mills XLIII is being fed a kosher lunch by the British ambassador to Constantinople. Both historical chapters stand well enough on their own to qualify as short stories, but as structural elements of the novel they seem as arbitrary and anomalous as flying buttresses tacked onto a split-level house.

Theoretically, the reader ought to care about George Mills: it's seldom enough that popular fiction turns to the working classes, and we ought to enjoy the opportunity for sympathy with the proles. In fact, Elkin spends his best energy not on his central character but on his digressions; George Mills, bland but observant, is a kind of Everyman-cum-Candide who visits whatever venue tickles his author's fancy. As a result, this overgrown, unpruned novel includes memorable, if erratic, sections on spiritualism and astral projection, King George IV's obsession with mother's milk, the protocol of the Ottoman court and of the American dance hall on Saturday night, the mores of the Mexican cancer clinic, and the dormitory-brothel of a medieval Polish salt mine.

Elkin's black humor generates some wicked portraits and throwaway scenes that would sustain another novelist for weeks…. (pp. 74-5)

Elkin has a special fondness for freaks, outsiders, and cheerful brutes; he is not without tenderness for the human condition, but even when he is being delicate he is grubbier, randier, more outré than most—a poet of orifices, a bathroom rhapsode. Readers of other Elkin novels will not be surprised to find that one of the most brilliant passages in George Mills describes how the world looks … when you've just had handfuls of horse dung shoved in your face.

George Mills is Stanley Elkin's ninth work of fiction. It is billed as his "breakthrough novel"—which may be a reference to the amount of time and territory it covers, though it is less outrageous than The Making of Ashenden, the amazing novella in which a man makes believable love to a Kamchatkan brown bear, and less humane than The Dick Gibson Show, whose hero wends his picaresque way through the radio stations of America in search of his identity. No one should expect a serious novelist—especially a madly inventive one like Stanley Elkin—to keep writing the same book, but George Mills is so often rambling and tiresome that the reader thinks wistfully of earlier, pre-"breakthrough" novels by this eccentric virtuoso. (p. 75)