![]() Quite possibly only Statley Elkin possesses the exact blend of irreverence and care, of hard-core realism and fabulous invention, to have pulled this off.Įlkin knows that cliches are the substance of our lives, the coinage of human intercourse, the ways and means that hold our messy sleves and sprawling nation intact. And I should say at once that this "triptych," as Elkin calls it, composed of three sections entitled "The Comventional Wisdom," "the Bottom Line," and "the State of the Art," is the work of a master, a story eloquent in its gestures and amazing for the ease with which it moves from a liquor store hold-up in Minneapolis to the "wall-to-wall Wall" of damnation, from Heaven as a "theme park" to Hell as "the ultimate inner city." Half farce, half morality play, The Living End puts God himself on trial, the Lord faced off against the damned who in their countless number equal Everyman. THE LIVING END is Stanley Elkin's comic fable of Heaven, Hell and the Last Days, a small book big in evey way but length. ![]() By TERRENCE DES PRES TERRENCE DES PRES is the author of The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps. ![]()
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