The fierceness in Stanley Elkin's Boswell is actually in some good part borrowed—not from James Boswell but from Saul Bellow. Mr. Elkin's character named Boswell speaks the wheeling, exuberant language of Augie March, and he has Augie March's penchant for metaphysical categories. Like Augie, too, he is submitted to a succession of tutelary "big personalities," and then he ends by asserting his own contrariety. Like Bellow's Henderson, Boswell is gigantic, ready to prove in the flesh the agonies of the spirit. The likenesses are unmistakable. And indeed Boswell—who like James Boswell is a collector of the great—in an instance invites Bellow to his wedding, along with Faulkner and Hemingway. It is a way of paying debts.

But despite dependency, and despite his cute trick in naming a character James Boswell, Elkin does have the talents of obsession…. The novel is credibly and cogently about Life and Death, nothing less. Elkin's Boswell goes roving among great men—rich men, geniuses, miracle performers, powers—with high spirits attuned to his despair, in desperate search for immortality…. Death is inevitable, but Life is better. The great thing, he decides halfway through, is to get as much as possible for one's death, to have one's history matter; by the time he is done he has discovered that the secret of greatness in life is the active, unreconstructed, insolent ego. There is something question-begging about both discoveries, to be sure, but Boswell in this comedy he plays out is an inventive man on the stretch, and his life is in him. (pp. 761-62)