"George Mills" is a character and condition—"blue-collar blood"—beginning with an eleventh-century English stable boy pressed into the Crusades, reappearing in the early nineteenth century when George IV sends George Mills the forty-third as courier to a Turkish sultan, and ending, the line now defunct, with a middle-aged St. Louis furniture mover who, like the George Millses before him, listens to the hardships of the rich and searches for an audience to tell "the sad intricacy of things," all the protocols and sorrows his blood knows.

"Because I never found my audience"—that's the reason Stanley Elkin's God in The Living End gives for destroying the world. Ironically, this 1979 fable of an artist's final revenge became Elkin's most widely read work, bringing his other (and often better) novels back into print. Now in George Mills Elkin has written—like his extravagant God, like a whole P.E.N of gods—his most ambitious and best novel, but I'm afraid its wealth of tale-tellers and listeners, all squeezing their exchanges for some D.N.A. of voiceprint, may overwhelm an audience not already confirmed in Elkin excess.

All the world as occasion for words, situations devised to circumstance and celebrate the tongue: it's an ample notion, broad and generous and passionate but more hazardous for fiction than Tinker Creek for travel or jails for journalism, a method that has let Elkin's books fall through the crack of reputation between realists (Bellow, say) for whom words serve the world and experimentalists (say Barth) whose words construct a world. Perhaps not George Mills, for here Elkin cinches the circle of his practice tight: the energy and precision of his language make real, even necessary and instructive, its odd occasions.

The "range of the strange," as an earlier Elkin character put it, is unusual in this novel, even for Elkin: wholly fabricated and persuasive tales of medieval salt mines, Janissaries, and eunuchs, a blacksmith's bad luck in small-town Vermont, Astral Projection in Cassadaga, Florida, and in the book's present a travelogue of Mexican laetrile cures and a choreographed funeral. Performances nested in performances, the stories are frames and analogs for the final George Mills, childless at fifty-one, living with a bad back and a dumb wife in a white backwater of South St. Louis yet convinced he is "saved," not by religion but by his certainty that nothing will ever be expected of him. (p. 37)

The St. Louis that envelops George Mills is daytime TV, the domestic melodrama of upscale sex and moneyed disasters. The lives are imposed on Mills by a minor novelist named Cornell Messenger whose costume-jewelry salesman father, like Elkin's, "compelled his arias," made him feel "obliged to take the stand from the time he had first learned to talk, there to sing, turn state's evidence, endlessly offer testimony, information, confession, proofs." Between Messenger's gossip and his own remembered adventure, two kinds of experience and perhaps two kinds of contemporary fiction, George Mills steers with humane resources to his conclusion, rather haplessly stated, that the point of life is "to live long enough to find something out or to do something well." George Mills is no artist, but his novel is high art, transformed like all of Elkin's books and sentences from the merely curious and sunken ordinary.

Elkin invents emotion. He sets up for wit and delivers instead some of the most moving scenes in contemporary fiction. They cannot be retold, but the means are no less than Faulknerian: the oral posing of alternatives, suspending resolution, spreading language to every corner of possibility, more suspension—then the brief, clean release of feeling. Still America's magnifico of metaphor, as well as alliteration, Elkin also remains a very funny man, adept at crazed monologue, goofy dialogue, and the exhaustive series. In George Mills, though, Elkin has powered his routines beyond comedy and beyond pathos to the emotional clarity that comes when the writer no longer worries about amusing and prompting his audience.

"George Mills" is a name for compromise. The novel does not. George Mills is a wonderful, grief-ridden, resisting, and finally—for Elkin—a pure book. (pp. 37-8)