I don't know if Searches and Seizures … is Stanley Elkin's best book, but I'll tell you one thing—it's terrific. I feel as if I should write this in capital letters. No. Not capitals, headlines, maybe: READ ALL BOOKS WRITTEN BY STANLEY ELKIN. That's a little pushy; but if you want to learn to embrace multitudes, or construct catalogues of the crazy, lists of the looney, read Elkin. You'll learn to see pimples on the earlobes of the enormous, and to occasionally try and write bad imitations of Elkin just to touch the totem of his vitality. Elkin's works are profound and filled with stuff and ideas and visions and all the stimulations that make a critic want to examine him in depth, but above all he is a first-rate writer, a man of deep, almost Shakespearean compassion for the life of the individual no matter who he/she is, and he has one of the best eyes for detail of anyone writing now. (p. 140)

His books are filled with sustained comic and serious metaphysical flights of rhetorical salesmanship on people, on crayons, on consumer products, on the look of a hairdo, on one man's range of moving experiences, on hard luck, on low places and dirty deals, on high places and "plenty of plentitude." And the extent of his observations is matched by the genuine vigor of his descriptions. His work is filled with lust, with hunger, with hot juices burning his brain to know more, to see more, to live. Can you imagine Walt Whitman, Henry James, William Faulkner, Charles Dickens, and Woody Allen all pitching in?—Elkin is something like that.

Even when he contends with death, when he speculates on the future, when he examines the fuel that drives him, he doesn't think in terms of grand schemes and galactic dreams. He worries about all the details he hasn't seen…. Because Elkin's books have grown progressively more involved with wonder and mystery, they have continued, each in different ways, to grapple with death.

What is more important, for now, is to recognize that Elkin's love affair with life—in his novels—does not come out of political naiveté or faddish affirmation. It is wrung from a deep knowledge of human suffering given only to those who see in such detail that they are tortured into frantic searches and seizures…. It is hard to embrace a tortuous world. Few authors can look so closely at the texture of America and come away moved but still hungry for more. It is Elkin's great talent that when he sees plastic-motel America—consumer garbage, and piles of plenty, neon lips advertising the look of love, and all the detritus that most of us see and are repelled by—he also sees the human imagination, the human victims, the humans themselves standing somewhere behind the mess we all make. It can break your heart. But Elkin makes us embrace it all. (pp. 140-41)

The balance necessary for so close a look at contemporary life comes, in Elkin's books, from variations on his concept of style. On one level I mean that the energy of his rhetoric is not just manic; it is infectious…. In [another] sense, style has something to do with behavior. Everybody in Elkin's world seems to have some movie role in mind, but Elkin reveals these roles to us as a technique actor would reveal them—from accumulated outside detail that finally reaches inside. His best characters are not method actors—they are Olivier not Brando. But, the large supporting casts in his novels are often mediocre actors—types. We are given the set they work on, the costumes, the gestures, the clichés, grimaces, all the accumulated externals that shallow people mistake for inner personality or soul. Then we see them clearly: a mafia man who says softly, "it's Command Performanceville." We know how he looks, the gun under his camel coat, a businessman's look with only the minimum of lip movement. We have him. We've seen him in the movies, on TV—Mission Impossible. The Watergate Hearings, maybe. We really do see Elkin's characters everywhere, minor players, mostly letting their roles be thrust on them, never getting beyond the externals they imitate. They are Marcuse's one-dimensional humans, but to Elkin they are playing it the best they can.

On the other hand, Lawrence Olivier can play all the roles, and that is the secret of most of Elkin's manic heroes. They bear down on life by knowing all the roles, from outside in, from jargon to the edge of a breaking heart. Their energy comes from their drive to know all the movies, to shift roles as quickly as possible. They are acquainted with flux—who knows who'll come on stage next?—and they hunger for the challenge, for the knowledge…. Elkin's manic stars do, however, need strength. And, I'd like to talk for a moment about the evolution of style and its importance to his manic heroes, beginning with his first novel, Boswell…. (p. 142)

Boswell is literally a strong man, a weight lifter who turns his energy toward apprenticeship in role-playing. He is the most light-hearted of Elkin's manic heroes, but his range is terrific. He is a voyeur of everybody who plays their roles with gusto and style—the understudy for all the stars. He learns only from the best—"The Great," as he calls them. By the end of the book, the energy of his affirmation is still a strongman's energy. And so his major concern is: where does it end? how does he stop absorbing all the roles and expanding his ego? Feldman, in A Bad Man, solves this problem, and presents the very best of Elkin's manic heroes. He confronts both the plenitude of suffering and the plenitude of strength. It is a moving book. It made me understand two gut level lessons: 1. Add my suffering to the suffering of others and you don't have compassion, you have added suffering. 2. We are not made of glass. I believe this is part of the politics of balance. But, in Elkin's third novel, The Dick Gibson Show …, the major character, also an apprentice role-player who wants to be the radio announcer with the perfect voice, is no longer troubled by the ego. The problem now is bad news, bad news everywhere…. By the end of the book we have been flooded with the bad news of everyday, the sour stomachs of love, the bad breath of the hopeful, the empty venom of the mediocre—all the flotsam and jetsam of misery that echoes from those call-in, late night radio conversation shows. Again Elkin's range in misery is as impressive as his range in strength. But all that grief has its effect. Some balance is lost. Gibson himself hunts for a styleless style, hungering no longer for the extreme that leads to knowledge, but courting the ordinary.

I keep wondering, how tired is Gibson? how tired is Elkin? How long can style overcome misery? Perhaps the answer is encoded in the response of one of the bit players in this book: a man with a perfect memory for detail, a photographic memory, who can literally recite every figure in the carpet of any room he has casually walked through. He learns style from a woman who trains him to be a polished performer. They fall in love. But career and love life are interrupted because he grows very farsighted. Glasses or contact lenses would ruin his style. So he can no longer see the small details—he memorizes mountain ranges, and he keeps his show biz polish. But he loses love—and his audience. The Dick Gibson Show ends with the once strong manic hero stopped by detail, seeing suffering everywhere. Perhaps, like the man with the memory, Elkin has seen too far, counted too much on style to bring balance. In any case, the energy in The Dick Gibson Show has shifted; the minor characters play their suffering, foolish, ugly roles too well, and perhaps the style of the manic hero has its limits.

That brings us back to Searches and Seizures. It is a collection of three very fine novellas, and it presents some new explorations for Elkin. I believe he is examining the former givens of style itself. How is it connected to taste, to behavior, to attitude, and to action? The first story picks up the manic hero once again, The Bailbondsman, hungrier than ever for the gusto of knowledge, but tiring. Better than Gibson, but ready to admit, "I'm called on to make colorful conversation in my trade. Don't think I enjoy it. I'm a serious man; such patter is distasteful to me." But he does it well and although tired, he carries on to the end, both touched and touching, keeping the movie in motion. In the second story, Elkin departs somewhat, playing a little Henry James with The Making of Ashenden. Here, the hero is a man of exquisite taste on every level. Neither the most ardent leftist could fault his activism, nor could the moneyed-set fault his manners. He has style as balanced as the best of James' beautiful people. But when he meets the woman who is his match, he needs to purify himself of his discreet but nonetheless unvirginic past. So, of course, he goes into a wilderness that turns out to be like a series of art works … [and there] he lies down with a bear. Well, the rest is pure Elkin with a different style and the same wonderful embrace of life. Brewster Ashenden is purified, but while Faulkner might have loved the encounter, this is one he could never have written.

In the last novella, The Condominium, Elkin gives us another departure, a little bit of a Bellow-type character. I mean there is a little of that angst, a little of that lost diamond, scuffed by a bad old world. Here, style, place, and placidity are examined…. I believe Elkin is undergoing some change, and Searches and Seizures provides a great deal of provocation to understand his direction in depth. Read Elkin, please; he may come near breaking your heart, but you'll skip around too, right there in your office, on your rug—swinging and swaying right there as if you had hold of Melville's Catskill eagle, who "can alike dive down into the blackest gorges, and soar out of them again." Because, even if you don't soar, you can certainly laugh. And you can wait till later to worry—like the hero of The Condominium, flying from the fifteenth floor—about "the hole I'm going to make when I hit that ground!" (pp. 142-44)