Swept along by Stanley Elkin

Earlier this morning Nige recorded his first encounter with Stanley Elkin’s brilliant and rollicking Dick Gibson Show. “Elkin is, among other things, an absolute master of the spiel,” Nige writes—“once he gets going, he has you, there’s no resisting, he sweeps you along on his torrent of words. Rather than a man writing a novel, he sounds and feels like a man talking to you, urgently, hilariously, endlessly inventively, twisting and turning the language, keeping it alive, always keeping you with him. . . .”

I studied under Elkin at Washington University in St. Louis. In fact, I wrote my masters thesis on The Dick Gibson Show—surely an academic first of some kind, as I put it elsewhere. Nige’s description of his prose, the best thing I have ever read about the experience of reading him, reminds me of the principle of style that Elkin enunciated one day in class. A student complained about Conrad’s lack of verbal concision. She held that “Less is more.” Elkin became impatient. “Less is less,” he said irritably. “More is more. Enough is enough.”

One small correction. Nige writes: “The Dick Gibson Show is loosely structured—as with Bellow, the structure is hardly the point. . . .” This is not wrong at all. Elkin’s novel is loosely structure indeed, but it has a structure. Elkin adopts the Enlightenment commonplace, which divided European history into the Dark Ages, Middle Ages, and Golden Age. And perhaps this might be described as a flexible structure rather than a loose one, like a card file, since Elkin is able to expand and contract it as suits his needs (“Enough is enough”), while proceeding more or less steadily toward his goal.

My full-length essay on the novel is here. The time has come for an Elkin revival.