Discussion Topics
What makes Stanley Elkin’s style so distinctive? How is a typical Elkin sentence or paragraph structured?
Elkin’s plots tend to accrete rather than develop. Locate places in his work where plot is most clearly subordinated to Elkin’s interest in language and jazzlike riffs.
Elkin’s fiction depends on his characters’ occupations: the language, rhythms, and activities of their jobs, whether franchiser or widow. How does this interest in occupation manifest itself? How does it demonstrate the author’s command of different kinds of work?
How and how well does Elkin draw his characters? How well can readers “see” them? Are they more seen or heard?
Voice—that of author and character—is especially important in Elkin’s work. What does this voice sound like? Is the voice that of Elkin, or does he modify his narrative style to fit a particular character?
Elkin’s characters have been described as obsessed. What exactly are they obsessed about? Find passages in which their obsessions and obsessiveness are especially apparent.
Elkin said on more than one occasion that “The Book of Job is the only book.” In what ways do his characters suffer? What justification is there for their suffering? What reward?
Rage and the desire for revenge often fuel Elkin’s characters. Over what do they rage? At whom do they direct their revenge?
Other Literary Forms
In addition to his short fiction, Stanley Elkin produced several novels, including Boswell: A Modern Comedy (1964), The Rabbi of Lud (1987), and The MacGuffin (1991). He also wrote a screenplay, The Six-Year-Old Man (1968), a memoir, Why I Live Where I Live (1983), and a collection of essays, Pieces of Soap: Essays (1992). In addition, Elkin edited several collections of short fiction and wrote numerous reviews and works of literary criticism for scholarly journals.
Achievements
Over the course of his career, Stanley Elkin received numerous grants and awards. In 1962, he won the Longview Foundation Award, in 1965 the Paris Review prize, in 1966 a John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Fellowship, in 1968 a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship, American Academy of Arts and Letters grant, in 1980 a Rosenthal Foundation Award, in 1981 a Sewanee Review award, and in 1983 a National Book Critics Circle Award. Three of his books were nominated for the National Book Award, and Van Gogh’s Room At Arles: Three Novellas (1993) was a finalist for the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction.
Other literary forms
Stanley Elkin published two collections of his short fiction, Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers (1965) and Early Elkin (1985); three collections of novellas, Searches and Seizures (1973), The Living End (1979), and Van Gogh’s Room at Arles (1993); one collection titled Stanley Elkin’s Greatest Hits (1980); and another of essays, Pieces of Soap (1992). He also wrote a film script, The Six-Year-Old Man (1968), and edited several collections of short fiction. Why I Live Where I Live, a memoir, was published in 1983.
Achievements
Since their emergence in the mid-1960’s, Stanley Elkin’s novels and short fiction have been praised by critics as some of the best satiric writing in American literature. The novels tend to be darkly comedic performances of unusually articulate, marginal characters struggling to define themselves in a confusing and harsh modern world. Elkin’s writing career was generously acknowledged in the form of numerous grants and awards. In 1962 Elkin won the Longview Foundation Award, and in 1964 he received the Paris Review John Train Humor Prize. In 1966 he was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship, in 1968 a Rockefeller Fellowship, in 1971 a National Endowment for the Arts grant, in 1974 an American Academy grant, in 1980 a Rosenthal Foundation Award, in 1981 a Sewanee Review award, and in 1983 a National Book Critics Circle Award. Three of...
(This entire section contains 152 words.)
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his books were nominated for the National Book Award, andVan Gogh’s Room at Arles was a PEN/Faulkner Award finalist.
Bibliography
Bailey, Peter J. Reading Stanley Elkin. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1985. This study of Elkin’s fiction examines Elkin’s major themes in order to counteract misreadings of him as another in a series of black humorists, especially given Elkin’s association with black humorists of the 1960’s. Each of seven chapters discusses a separate theme or thematic element in Elkin’s work. A comprehensive index follows.
Bargen, Doris G. The Fiction of Stanley Elkin. Frankfurt, Germany: Verlag Peter D. Lang, 1980. The first book-length work of criticism on Elkin. Examines his association with the literary movements of metafiction, black humor, American Jewish writers, and popular-culture novels. Bargen argues that Elkin’s work is similar in some ways to all of these but dissimilar enough to resist categorization. Her work includes an extensive biography, an interview with the author, and a comprehensive bibliography and index.
Cohen, Sarah Blacher, ed. Comic Relief: Humor in Contemporary American Literature. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1978. Several authors engage in a discussion of the role of humor in the writers who emerged in the 1960’s and 1970’s, with Elkin figuring prominently in the discussion. Cohen aligns Elkin with black humorists, identifying their common traits, for example their need to laugh at the absurdity of modern culture.
Dougherty, David C. Stanley Elkin. Boston: Twayne, 1990. Dougherty discusses all of the fiction through The Rabbi of Lud, including stories and novellas, emphasizing Elkin’s almost poetic use of language and sense of vocation. The chronology, brief biography, bibliography of secondary works, and discussion of the uses and limitations of classifying Elkin as a Jewish-American writer, a satirist, a black humorist, and a metafictionist make this an especially useful work.
Olderman, Raymond M. Beyond the Waste Land: The American Novel in the Nineteen Sixties. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1972. Olderman’s study is the first treatment of Elkin’s fiction in the context of other emerging authors of the 1960’s. He discusses Elkin and others of his generation, repudiating the image of modern society as the “wasteland” depicted in T. S. Eliot’s landmark 1922 poem. Olderman identifies a new kind of idealism emerging in contemporary fiction.
Pinsker, Sanford. “Sickness unto Style.” Gettysburg Review 7 (1994): 437-445. Discusses Elkin’s collection of novellas Van Gogh’s Room at Arles and his collection of essays Pieces of Soap primarily in terms of prose style. Discusses how the Van Gogh novella focuses on pictures within pictures and is an example of impressionism in the Van Gogh manner.
Pughe, Thomas. Comic Sense: Reading Robert Coover, Stanley Elkin, Philip Roth. Boston: Birkhäuser Verlag, 1994. Explores the humor in each author’s fiction.
The Review of Contemporary Fiction 15 (Summer, 1995). Special issue on Elkin, with essays by Jerome Klinkowitz, Jerome Charyn, William H. Gass, and others. Features an interview with Elkin in which he discusses the mystery in his fiction, the nature of plot, the essence of story, and his prose style.
Vinson, James, ed. Contemporary Novelists. 2d ed. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1976. A comprehensive and broad study. Vinson includes Elkin in an overview of writers from the 1960’s and 1970’s. The section that covers Elkin most comprehensively is the section written by David Demarest, Jr., who discusses Elkin’s place among his contemporaries.
