The MacGuffin

by Stanley Elkin, Chirs Lehmann (Introduction)

Overview

Bobbo Druff, a coca leaf-chewing street commissioner on the cusp of just-past-it, transforms his mid-life crisis into a paranoid web of mysterious events in a plot reminiscent of Hitchcock.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781564782236
Publisher:	Deep Vellum Publishing
Publication date:	12/01/1999
Series:	American Literature
Edition description:	1ST DALKEY
Pages:	283
Product dimensions:	6.02(w) x 9.01(h) x 0.84(d)

About the Author

Stanley Elkin (1930-1995) was an award-winning author of novels, short stories, and essays. Born in the Bronx, Elkin received his BA and PhD from the University of Illinois and in 1960 became a professor of English at Washington Universityin St. Louis where he taught until his death. His critically acclaimed works include the National Book Critics Circle Award-winners "George Mills" (1982) and "Mrs. Ted Bliss" (1995), as well as the National Book Award finalists "The Dick Gibson Show" (1972), "Searches and Seizures "(1974), and "The MacGuffin" (1991). His book of novellas, "Van Gogh's Room at Arles", was a finalist for the PEN Faulkner Award.

What People are Saying About This

Cynthia Ozick

"Stanley Elkin is no ordinary genius of language, laughter, and the irresistible American idiom: he is an ingenious genius--an inimitable sword-swallower, fire-eater, and three-ring circus of fecund wit and inexhaustible comic artistry. A bountiful novel about the mind of a most uncommon City Commissioner of Streets, The MacGuffin flies through the air with the greatest ease while keeping a quizzical eye open for every spiritual pothole, psychological traffic snarl, and stuck cultural stoplight."

G Wolfe

"I find I've underlined The MacGuffin like a schoolkid, relishing the astonishments. How does Stanley Elkin make magic, book after book? Well, sentence after sentence, word after word, is how. By an unappeasable curiosity about the country's and the heart's works is how. He performs his singular alchemy on cliches of idiom and the spirit, translating what was shopworn into what becomes, by his magic, renewed, freshly true. He is an irreplaceable treasure, as anyone knows who has read him."

Editorial Reviews

In The MacGuffin, that mad Joycean poetry is still there. . . . The sentences are long riffs of jazz; the words swarm and lather; the prose is exuberantly betroped, exhilaratingly de trop. . . . Elkin is brilliant.
Lorrie Moore, New York Times, 3/10/91

Lorrie Moore

Elkin is one of the grand originals of American fiction--as death haunted as Samuel Beckett, as funny as S. J. Perelman. . . . Elkin simply cannot bear to produce a lifeless sentence . . . The MacGuffin is wonderfully funny. . . . Most readers will want to say, again and again, "Mr. Elkin, sir, you are one hell of a writer,'"
Michael Dirda, Washington Post Book World, 3/10/91

Michael Dirda

By now it shouldn't be necessary to insist on the importance of [Elkin's] work: a list of the American novelists who have mattered over the last three decades would be a pitifully short one if it left him off. . . . He is a sublimely funny writer, an inspired stand-up performer. . . . Druff is gifted, like other Elkin protagonists, with almost miraculous verbal energies. . . . Elkin's whole representation of the American here and now is what deserves most praise. . . . Elkin clearly has just about all of us in mind, and the loving generosity of his wonder of things as they are, and as they might become, is as essentially American as anything in Emerson or Whitman. We owe him thanks again.
Thomas R. Edwards, The New Republic, 5/20/91

Thomas R. Edwards

In this exuberant, offbeat novel, the wildly inventive Elkin ( George Mills ) unleashes a Hitchcockian MacGuffin (the narrative spirit) which takes over the ebbing life of Bobbo Druff, 58, the fairly honest but bribable street commissioner of a mid-size American city. Kafka-esque unseen enemies and their supposed spies, perhaps including Bobbo's newly acquired mistress, Meg Glorioso, may be trying to nail him for an unspecified crime linked somehow to the hit-and-run death of the Lebanese Moslem Shiite girlfriend of his son Mikey, a 30-year-old ninny. Bobbo winds up talking to the MacGuffin and eventually locks him out of his house. Elkin's imagination flags toward the end, but he has rewarded us with many comic turns, including the courtship of Bobbo and his future nagging wife under Hays Office rules: Bobbo has had to keep one foot on the floor at all times. First serial to Playboy. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

Elkin here presents Commissioner of Streets Bobbo Druff, who, believing he is losing his power, orchestrates a series of useless and paranoid gestures to show that he is still top dog even though no one actually is challenging his authority. Though weird, the book was praised by LJ's reviewer for its "inspired, Joycean wordplay based on clich s, shoptalk, and technical jargon" (LJ 2/1/91). Copyright 2000 Cahners Business Information.\

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