Stanley Elkin is a "writer's writer," a designation at once happy and sad. Sad because his older titles are not to be found at the nearest paperback store but, with luck, in the used book stalls. His is the sort of name publishing houses like to trot out when accused of Harold Robbins or Robin Moore.

Elkin does close-order dialogue as snappy as Heller or Roth, and his eye for contemporary detail is as sharp as Barthelme's. So what's amiss? Let him tell you. Like many modern writers, he's forever talking about what he's up to through the guise of his narrator…. (p. 33)

["The Bailbondsman"] is one of the great works in the language—right up there, perhaps, with [Faulkner's] "The Bear" and [Melville's] "Bartleby." But you must grant Elkin his premises. He has no interest in "the arduous, numbing connections" in plot or even structure. He's not anti-story,… but rather has an insatiable "sweet tooth for instance," which he treats with gags, interpolated tales, catalogues and assorted set pieces. Like Tristram Shandy, he believes in progress by digression.

Two more discomforting things. Character leaves him cold: he is exclusively "distracted by personality," the outré—no middle-range intensities for him. Thus, he is always on; there are no readerly reliefs, no rest stops on his highway. (pp. 33-4)

Elkin's new collection of novellas, The Living End, will probably disappoint his faithful; it's slighter, less fiercely written than Searches & Seizures. The lead story, "The Conventional Wisdom," is of interest, however, as a sort of parable about Elkin's fictional method….

The motive force of Elkin's writing is "the conventional wisdom" itself. His aggressive, high energy rhetoric comes into being under the pressure of cliché, which is not to suggest that his métier is either satire or camp. Rather, he seems to share with Emerson the vaguely platonic idea that the hackneyed is "fossile poetry"—the Truth in tatters, in its fallen condition. When he is good, Elkin inhabits the interstices of stereotype, wherein he cracks jokes, performs prodigies of description, wonders mightily, and as a byproduct, comments acutely on the way we live.

"The Conventional Wisdom" is joined in The Living End by two other long stories inspired by pat phrases: "The Bottom Line" and "The State of the Art." The three works are contiguous: they feature the same cast and take place mostly in Heaven and Hell. If "The Bottom Line" is unconvincing, "The State of the Art" has brilliant moments. Especially outrageous and curiously moving are the passages in which Elkin elaborates the old gags about the Virgin Mary's sluttishness into an anguished interior monologue and in which he perceives a brittle-talking Christ (the Lord's "designated hitter") and God Himself through an antic grid of father/son stereotypes….

[The novellas in The Living End] are streamlined, tailored to the ear, not the eye. It is in Searches & Seizures, where Elkin has room to dilate, that he is most incorrigibly himself….

["The Bailbondsman" is] where Elkin shines. It is riddled with routine, caparisoned with catalogue. The novella follows Alexander Main through a more or less ordinary day…. Main is Elkin's most brilliant monitor of the conventional wisdom. In his mid-50s, he has re-invented himself as a cliché, as "a cross between a railroad conductor and a deputy sheriff." (p. 34)

In no other work does Elkin more clearly reveal the root of his obsession with the tired and overly true. "We die dropouts," Main says to Mr. Crainpool, in between taking shots at him….

The future leans on Alexander Main "like a mountain range." Were he plugged into its hokey quotidian, were he fluent in the conventional wisdom to come, he would be impervious to death. For Elkin, cliché gives life a sacral intensity and mastery of it confers, perhaps, a certain immortality. (p. 35)