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The Man Who Knew Too Little
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20462 |
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BOOK WORLD
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5 / 1991 |
2,165 Words |
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Thomas DePietro
Thomas DePietro is a senior contributor to the Kirkus Reviews
whose reviews have also appeared in Commonweal, the Nation,
the New York Times Book Review, and many literary
quarterlies.
His first book, From Mad to Maus, a study of comic books
written for adults, will appear next year. |
THE MACGUFFIN
Stanley Elkin
New York: Linden Press, 1991
265 pp., $19.95
Stanley Elkin belongs to that lucky group of metafictionists who began publishing in the sixties, and were quickly scooped up by the academy. Back then, our best universities welcomed John Barth, Robert Coover, William Gass, and Elkin--to name just a few--on their faculties. And English profs everywhere, in thrall to all sorts of hermetic critical theories, soon carved a space in the curriculum for these playfully ponderous prose writers. (This was, remember, before the canon itself got hacked to shreds by a later generation of critics armed with a new set of isms). Elkin and his fellow reflexive novelists share with their academic admirers a fascination with language for its own sake, an insular aesthetic that eschews both mimesis and morality. Not for them the pulsating heart of conventional storytelling, an honest representation of human life. Instead, in the circumscribed worlds of metafiction, reality itself comes under attack, and language reveals its inability to say anything meaningful about anything but itself.
For general readers (those old-fashioned believers in the common pursuit of truth and beauty), the consequences of such lifeless literary notions have been extreme and unpleasant, from the glib and empty little exercises of the late Donald Barthelme to the self-conscious ditherings of Barth in a stream of bloated novels. For his part, Elkin has more successfully disguised the hollow core of his fiction. In novel after novel, he seems, among other things, to be truly interested in the professional lives of his garrulous, no-nonsense protagonists, delighting in the jargon of their trades and callings, be they a bail bondsman, a radio announcer, a franchise owner, a rabbi, or, as is the case in The MacGuffin, a city commissioner of streets.
Robert "Bobbo" Druff, an appointed official "in a relatively out-of-the-way, not-much-more than middle-sized city with no major league franchise," talks a good "mouth campaign." His backslapping instincts and feel for the civic boost have kept him alive in local politics, where vision and principle matter less than a "thick skin, or at least a willingness to deal." But recently, this 58-year-old civil servant senses something wrong with his well-ordered life: "it was as if he had somehow mysteriously lost, well, force." Always "on the trail of fresh potholes" from the backseat of his chauffeur-driven limousine, a diminished Druff suddenly finds himself at the
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