[Wolitzer is an American novelist, critic, and author of children's literature. In the following review of Van Gogh's Room at Arles, she praises Elkin's prose style, humor, and compassionate understanding of his characters.]

The cover of Stanley Elkin's 1985 novel read Stanley Elkin's The Magic Kingdom, which brings to mind titles like Stephen King's "It" and Jacqueline Susann's Once Is Not Enough. What was Mr. Elkin's book doing in that particular pantheon? His work had never achieved blockbuster status, or been turned into a mini-series or movie. Mr. Elkin is a star of a very different literary universe, where well-constructed and difficult books are revered, and where a dream double bill at the local multiplex would be "Donald Barthelme's Snow White" and "Samuel Beckett's Malone Dies." There was nothing big and glitzy about Mr. Elkin's darkly comic novel, which concerned a group of terminally ill children sent on a whirlwind Make-a-Wish Foundation-style trip to Disney World.

Now, eight years later, Mr. Elkin has written Van Gogh's Room at Arles, a subtle, complicated, often astonishing collection of three novellas. This time around, it almost makes sense to think of the book as "Stanley Elkin's Van Gogh's Room at Arles," not because it feels showy and sensational, but simply because the collection is so singular to its author, and the room in its title seems to belong as much to Stanley Elkin as to Vincent van Gogh.

The first novella, an exercise in helplessness and rage called "Her Sense of Timing," takes place far from Arles. Jack Schiff, a professor of political geography at a university in St. Louis, is a victim of a debilitating disease that has left him a virtual invalid, largely dependent on the care of Claire, his wife of 36 years: "Even in restaurants Claire paid the check, figured the tip, signed the credit-card slip. His disease had turned him into some sort of helpless, old-timey widow, some nice, pre-lib, immigrant lady."

At the beginning of the novella, Claire has just announced that she's leaving Jack, and she proceeds to pack her suitcases and scram. What follows is a maddening and riotous account of Schiff's struggle to reconcile himself to being on his own for the first time in years. Not only has Claire left him in the lurch, but, even more horrible, she's departed on the eve of Schiff's annual party for his graduate students, a big, messy affair that Claire has always overseen. What will he do? How will he cope?

Schiff (and, cleverly, Mr. Elkin) turns to one of those companies that install emergency aid devices in the homes of the elderly or disabled. The S.O.S. Corporation swiftly dispatches a team to Schiff's house, and his relationship with its members, Bill and Jenny, becomes the source of much broad, dark humor. He's forced to rely on them for every little thing, and when it's time for him to pay for their services, he enlists them to go rummaging around the house for his checkbook:

"I think it may be in one of the drawers in the tchtchk."

"Say what?"

"The cabinet in the hall. We call it the tchtchk."

"That's a new one on me. You ever hear that, Jen? The choo-choo? Heck, I can't even pronounce it. How do you say that again?"

"Tchtchk. It doesn't mean anything."

"Just a pet name, eh? From your salad days…. It's just something you ought to bear in mind…. Well, that you had salad days…. That's why the good Lord usually lets us hold on to our memories…. So we can remember the times before our wives had to carry us around piggyback."

The word "tchtchk" summons up the private shorthand used by longtime couples, the secret language of marriage that usually can't be shared with anyone else, or even fully translated. Later in the novella, when Jenny casually refers to the "tchtchk" as though it were a common word, the moment is surprisingly affecting. Schiff starts to grow attracted to her, to come alive for the first time in years. Although he's in a wheelchair, in a position of potentially humiliating vulnerability, this "pre-lib, immigrant lady" slowly gains back a good measure of his American maleness and bravado.

That night at the graduate students' bash, which takes place despite his protests, Schiff finds himself attracted once again, this time to a student named Molly Kohm: "He was gathering courage, putting together a sort of schoolkid's nerve he hadn't used in years…. Yes, Schiff thought, I'm going to touch her. I'm going to reach over and hold her."

Mr. Elkin, who teaches at Washington University in St. Louis and who has written eloquently elsewhere about his own multiple sclerosis, here explores the ramifications of degenerative illness, from the purely physical difficulties of the smallest everyday actions to the roaring anger and frustration of not being in charge. The novella gamely confronts weakness and strength, and ends with—no surprise—a really good punch line.

Mr. Elkin's second novella, "Town Crier Exclusive, Confessions of a Princess Manqué: 'How Royals Found Me "Unsuitable" to Marry Their Larry,'" brings us a bit closer to France, at least in terms of geography. This is a tour de force about a woman who falls in love with Lawrence, Crown Patriciate of England. Coming as it does on the heels of a major British monarchy shakedown, the novella is timely and funny, although inhabiting the mind of Louise, the commoner who briefly nabs Prince Larry, is at least as arduous as occupying the body of Prof. Jack Schiff. Louise rambles on, relating choice tidbits to a supermarket tabloid, Town Crier, that has bought the rights to her story. As Mr. Elkin portrays her, Louise is a kind of breezy, souped-up Fergie-Diana hybrid, an ordinary woman plucked from the normal world and brought into the palace nuthouse. "Town Crier Exclusive" is a witty piece of work, studded with bits that lampoon the royal family. Some are based on actual events, such as a reference to an intruder sneaking into the Queen's bedroom to watch her sleep, while others are pure Elkin, as in a scene in which the Prince's relatives discuss the upcoming wedding with the prospective bride and groom:

"Would it be all right, do you think, if we wore, well, jeans, to the wedding?"

"Jeans? To a Royal Wedding? In Westminster Abbey?"

"I told you he wouldn't go for it."

"Well, not jeans, or not jeans exactly. Regular morning coats and top hats for the boys, actually."

"And gorgeous gowns for the ladies. With these ravishing big hats and really swell veils."

"Just cut like jeans."

"From stone-washed denim."

"Oh, it would be such fun! The Sloane Rangers would just die!"

"Town Crier Exclusive" is often truly funny, but at times it's a little too thickly packed with ludicrous humor and circumlocutious side trips, and it does go on somewhat longer than it should. After a while, the clutter of Mr. Elkin's version of royal life becomes a little too much to take and, like Fergie and Diana bolting the palace gates for good, the reader finally wants out.

Mr. Elkin's strongest stuff is saved for last. The title novella concerns a professor named Miller who's won a foundation grant and been sent to an academic retreat in Arles, where, by a stroke of luck, he's assigned to van Gogh's bedroom. All the accouterments of the great man, depicted in his famous painting of the room—the basin, the pitcher, the bed—have been left for the less-than-great man to use. Miller is out of his element in every way; the retreat in Arles is a think-tank hideaway for intellectuals from all the great institutions: Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Booth Tarkington Community College. Booth Tarkington Community College? That's where Mr. Elkin's protagonist teaches.

All around him, other institute fellows proudly describe their work: "Myra Gynt, a composer from the University of Michigan, explained how it was her intention to set the lyrics of various Broadway showstoppers to the more formal music of the 12-tone scale." "Farrell Jones held forth regarding his conclusions about the parallels between the mood swings of manic-depressives and babies." A man in a wheelchair is in Arles to research a project on his theory that "world-class cities were almost never found on mountaintops." (Although he's not named, we can guess that he is meant to be Jack Schiff of "Her Sense of Timing," whose reappearance is a self-referential wink to the reader.)

Finally, when it's Miller's turn in this game of rarefied show and tell, he fails miserably. He's been invited by the foundation to work on a study of the image of the community college among academics from prestigious universities, and at the end of his description of this vague, bogus-sounding project, Miller faints dead away.

A doctor is summoned who turns out to be Félix Rey, the great-great-grandson of van Gogh's own doctor, Félix Rey. The young Rey is the spitting image of his ancestor, right down to the tips of his reddened ears. Over the course of Miller's stay in Arles, he becomes aware of other members of the Club of the Portraits of Descendants of People Painted by Vincent van Gogh. These characters haunt the edges of the novella like apparitions, creating an atmosphere reminiscent of parts of Joyce's story "The Dead," invoking the greatness of what's past and the mundane but moving humanness of what's still living.

In this novella, Mr. Elkin muscularly demonstrates his talents through his easy transitions from shtick to art and back again. He has great fun listing the catalogue of intellectuals, getting their names just right: "Samuels Kleist, a vernacular architect in his late 60's, Yalom and Inga Basset, pop psychiatrists…. Jesus Hans, statistics adviser to the third world." Mr. Elkin can also be highly poetic, a kind of borscht belt visionary who reaches for a real epiphany near the close of the novella:

Miller decided to turn off the light. Low as the light had been, his eyes still had to adjust to this new black dark. What he saw now, the almost colorless configuration of shapes and masses, made a different and still stranger picture and, as dawn came and the light turned milky, and then, as the sun rose higher and the room experienced its gradual yellowing, it seemed almost to go through a process of queer simultaneity, of aging and renewal at once.

This time, Mr. Elkin doesn't go out with a punch line, but the humor lingers even as the novella closes with a long passage of charged and beautiful writing.

The three novellas in Van Gogh's Room at Arles are linked through shared themes and obsessions, with Mr. Elkin the ironic geographer lurking in a corner, overseeing the landscapes of his characters' lives. Mostly, though, the novellas are connected by Stanley Elkin's distinctive and unflagging voice. In his new book, that voice is big enough to fill the whole room.