Yet Elkin believes committedly in the necessity for living an examined life.

The notion that we all face death alone, and that we can cope with this situation only by a kind of manic fortitude, is developed by Boswell over the first few pages of the novel-pages that can be said to meander somewhat, while Boswell (surely named for Johnson's biographer, though Elkin leaves the allusion implicit throughout the book) reflects on what the succession of odd adventures which constitute his life has taught him. 'People don't believe in death, Boswell claims, but Boswell does as much a convert to death as Larry in O'Neill's Iceman, he seems to think that life acquires its form and definition from the fact of death, much as Wallace Stevens would say it acquired beauty. Indeed, the very first words of Elkins' first published novel, Boswell (1964), seem designed to establish a keynote for the book as a whole, if not an entire career-picking up as they seem to from the ending of the film Body and Soul: 'Everybody dies, everybody. For if Elkin seems to be some sort of spiritual descendant of Nathanael West in the ways in which he attaches out-loud, falling-on-the-floor humor to reflections on the human state as a steady downward plunge to death, he is nevertheless very much his own man in the manner in which he explores and develops that tradition. I should like to make a gesture towards righting that wrong by attempting a necessarily brief survey of Elkin's fictional works, and by making some general observations about his style and themes. Yet though his books have inspired a following of devoted readers-both in and outside of the academic community-Elkin can be said to have largely missed out on the recognition due him. In seven volumes of fiction published since the mid-Sixties, Stanley Elkin has made clear claim, by reason of the quality inherent in his work, to consideration as a major contemporary American writer.

The Dick Gibson Show by Stanley Elkin