As a novelist, Stanley Elkin has often been too smart for his own good. The outrageous vision … that animates his stories—among the most tightly brilliant published by a contemporary author—has tended to become flaccid over the long haul of a novel. The Dick Gibson Show (1971) offered some hope that Elkin had become able to harness his enormous gifts and deal with the demands of form. But in retrospect, that novel's success seems to have more to do with the accidental confluence of Dick Gibson's performing style and his creator's weakness for spectacular schtickery than with Elkin's learning to provide us with something beyond mere astonishment. That, at least, was the judgment forced on even sympathetic readers by his more recent long work, especially The Franchiser (1976), a lumpily indigestible porridge of small boffos and Big Thoughts. Thus the triumph that is Elkin's The Living End comes at once as a stunning surprise and as a temptation to say we knew he could do it all the time.

In The Living End Elkin has finally found a subject worthy of him. No more does he diddle with the surrogates, no more leave us wiping the laughter from our eyes and wondering if we really care quite all that much about One-Hour Martinizing. This time, Elkin goes directly for the big one: God, He Who, etc.…

This is, of course, vintage Elkin; everyone is a standup comic. But precisely because it's God talking, the question of why He does what He does is genuinely important—especially when it turns out that Elkin is ultimately addressing the obligations of all creators. And suddenly—when the eternally-disfigured Christ learns that his suffering occurred solely because God thought it would make a better story—the laughter stops, and the very funny, very serious Elkin goes deeper than he's ever gone before. The Living End makes it at once possible to forgive God, and unnecessary to forgive Stanley Elkin.