Stanley Elkin, The Living End

crumb-containing raincoats & universe-containing truffles

“‘Where I get My ideas?’”

In Stanley Elkin we finally have an answer to the question: what if someone had snuck ayahuasca into Bernard Malamud’s seltzer?

Like Malamud, Elkin was a Brooklyn-born Jew and (though he moved early to the Midwest) he spent his career writing in the borough’s weary, witty, wised-up cadences.

Malamud: Kobotsky stared at his crippled hands. Once a cutter of furs, driven by arthritis out of the business.

Elkin: Ellerbee had been having a bad time of it. He’d had financial reversals. Change would slip out of his pockets and slide down into the crevices of other peoples’ furniture.

They belong to an exclusive club, Elkin and Malamud (Saul Bellow and Grace Paley sit on the advisory board). Upon admission each member is issued a threadbare gray-brown raincoat, its pockets stuffed with library call slips and bread crumbs for the pigeons.

But what distinguishes Elkin from his fellow kibitzers — what you wouldn’t necessarily pick up on a casual bookstore perusal — is that he is insane. His books set out through familiar landscapes of cramped kitchens and enervated sidewalk-sweepers (you settle in for some dingy domestic epiphanies, a few embittered eruptions) but then they drive off the nearest bridge: into surrealist critiques of consumerism; onto the battlefields of feudal Europe. My favorite of his derangements is The Living End — which begins as the tale of an unlucky liquor store owner named Ellerbee, but spends the bulk of its generously spaced hundred-and-forty-eight pages in various vivid and fantastical afterlives.

On page twenty-two Ellerbee is shot during a holdup. And rather than shift his novel’s focus to, say, the widow and her sudden personal and financial burdens, as Malamud might, Elkin writes this:

“Who are you?” Ellerbee said.

“I’m an angel of death,” the angel of death said.

And then, by way of a transition:

They went to heaven.

Elkin’s metronome never slows, but the leaps between measures become increasingly dizzying — first we’re in Heaven, then we’re in Hell, then we’re in some mysterious limbo with one of Ellerbee’s murderers. The reader keeps thinking he must have missed something (Wait, who is buried alive and trying desperately to get the attention of a nearby groundskeeper?), but this is just the pace at which Elkin’s sparking prose and fervid imagination happen to move. If The Living End came with a warning label, like a controlled substance, it would read: Keep up, keep up, keep up.

The pleasure of Elkin, the reason people read him, is for his musicality, the sound-savoring, sweating-on-the-bandstand hustle of it:

Which left only pure pain, the grand vocabulary they had given him to appreciate it, to discriminate and parse among the exquisite lesions and scored flesh and violated synapses…

And I love his prose. I sometimes find my middle finger tapping the back of the book while I read it.

But what I love more is his lightness — the giddy freedom with which he tries on ideas and discards them; the way he refuses to get mired in the implications of his own premises. He isn’t Terry Pratchett, constructing a cutesy and coherent afterlife that he can stretch into a bestselling series. And he isn’t Saul Bellow, getting into straitjacketed fistfights with his own feverish intelligence. He’s a man traveling through multiple dimensions at high speeds, recording what he sees. This doesn’t sound like a compliment but it is one: The Living End reads like a first draft.

When Ellerbee’s in Hell, God comes to visit.

He was clean-shaven… in a carefully tailored summer suit like a pediatrician in a small town…

And God, it turns out, talks like Stanley Elkin.

“Where are you? You — punks, Beelzebubs, My iambic angels in free fall, what’s doing?”

He rambles to the assembled damned for a while, increasingly fed up with them as an audience, and then He says this:

“You like this? You like this sort of thing? Backstage with God? Jehovah’s Hollywood?… Well here I am. Here I am that I am. God in a good mood. Numero Uno Mover moved. Come on, what would you really like to know? How I researched the Netherlands? Where I get My ideas?”

Each time I read the book, I stop at this passage as if to admire the view from a cherished overlook. I love God’s sweaty irritability, first of all — familiar to anyone who’s ever given a talk to a bad audience in a too-hot room. And I love the senselessness of his proposed question about the Netherlands. But what I really love is that final sentence: Where I get My ideas?

The capitalization of My is, first of all, a small, good joke — a wink to the keeper-uppers. But the complete fusing of God and author — that God should, like a writer griping on the phone to His wife after a bad book event, mock the unanswerable ubiquity of Where do you get your ideas? — is a mind-melting delight, a chocolate truffle that happens to contain the universe. Where could God get His ideas? Who has pestered Him with this question?

And where, for that matter, does Elkin get his ideas? Don’t we, after all these pages of Boschian nightmares and sense-defying travels, have a right to know? Is it really such a stupid question?

But God and Elkin have already moved on. A half-dozen ideas — of unknown origin and terminal velocity — await.