Bookclub: "Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers"
Presented by Chris Lehmann
Washington Post Book World Editor
Tuesday, May 29, 2001; 2 p.m. EDT

Welcome to the online meeting of The Washington Post Book Club, a monthly program presented by the editors and writers of Washington Post Book World.

Post Book World editor Chris Lehmann will be leading the discussion on this month's selection, "Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers," by Stanley Elkin. Read Lehmann's review of the book.

The transcript follows.

Editor's Note: Washingtonpost.com moderators retain editorial control over Live Online discussions and choose the most relevant questions for guests and hosts; guests and hosts can decline to answer questions.

Chris Lehmann: Greetings--

The floor is open for any and all reactions and/or questions on Stanley Elkin's Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers. I suppose that, for the sake of getting the ball rolling, I'll immodestly resurrect one of the questions I raised in the intro I wrote: Do Elkin's characters strike you as the hapless antihero types we've been conditioned to recognize in so much of modern American fiction? Or are they (as I'm inclined to believe) something more in the nature of knight errants, struggling to dope out some coherent private code of right conduct, shading toward heroism? I guess I think of a number of the Criers protagonists--eg., Push in a Poetics for Bullies, Perlmutter in Perlmutter at the East Pole, and the noble-manque in On a Field, Rampant--in this vein. (Others, such as the protagonists of the title story and Among the Witnesses are, I grant, a good deal more schlemiel-like.) And on a somewhat related note, I can hear echoes of Elkin's thematic influence--and certainly his intoxication w/ wordplay and the power of language in a number of recent younger prose practitioners, such as Rick Moody and David Foster Wallace. What, if anything do we discussants make of this? Is Elkin's increasingly baroque way with wordplay and compulsive wisecracking a forerunner of the postmodern fictional sensibility? (Or put somewhat less pretentiously and more hopefully, Is contemporary American fiction finally starting to catch up with Elkin)?
Over to you--and thanks, as always, for taking the time to look in.

Lenexa, Kans.: Mr. Lehmann, --as with Walser, really enjoyed your Elkin pick--

Found author's tone in the 1990 Dalkey preface to be altogether winsome--nice blend of humor, self-deprecation, and talent. Some random reactions:

C&K,K&C: Has such an authentic ring--a great short story.
ED WOLFE: Great scenes. Liberation through dispossession.
AMONG WITNESSES: Moving Borscht Belt tragedy.
THE GUEST: Loved it--"Excuses" enable a talented wastrel (similar to suicide in Kasdan's 1983 film "The Big Chill").
IN ALLEY: Nice "existential hopelessness."
RAMPANT: Rich allegory of human condition / search. . . .
BULLIES: Neat idea. Fun. Cosmic Laws.
COUSIN LESLEY: Good black humor.
MORTY PERLMUTTER: "57-time loser of the Nobel Prize."

Chris Lehmann: Glad you liked the book--as with Walser, Elkin's one of the handful of writers I actively shill for, and it's especially gratifying when readers share my enthusiasm. I second most of your impressions of the stories, though I do tend to feel (as Elkin later did) that the endings of both Ed Wolfe and In the Alley feel a little too gestural, and partake a bit too much in the tipping of the author's own hand. But the buildup in both stories is so darkly comic and the characterization so sharp that one (or me, anyway) is given to forgive an enormously talented writer such symblic flourishes.

Shady Side, Md.: What would you call the cause of death in the short story in the alley? Did the "hero" provoke the women in the bar into a fight to quicken his death?

Chris Lehmann: Hi, and thanks for writing. I think your sense that the protagonist brings his end on himself deliberately is at least half-right. Certainly, in his dying moment, he feels a much stronger private satisfaction at the anonymous note pinned to his jacket, which reads STAY AWAY FROM WHITE WOMEN, than at the earnest strivings against the encroachment of death that were urged upon him over his hospitalization. As Elkin relates at the outset of the story, the guy feels he has already outlasted his own death, and is looking for some suitable end in the world beyond the confines of the scripted decay set up for him in his doctor's care. (BTW, I believe the stories in Criers largely came out after the sudden death of Elkin's own father--though just ahead of his own astonishingly premature heart attack in his mid-30s and his later lifelong struggle with MS--and I think some of the themes he's experimenting with in this story go on to loom large in his later work, eg., The Franchiser and The Maigc Kingdom, which are, among other things, extended meditations on the oddly antic character of debilitating
illness.)
But as usual, I digress: I think your sense is right in that the protagonist is seeking a death in the world, and the course of events him backs him into a death of a singularly unheroic characters.

Bethesda, Md.: I'm struck by your reference to Elkin's increasing word play. So complex it makes his later works forebidding (at least "off-putting") to many of us who don't want to struggle with his wordplay. Did you spot any reason for this, other than pure love of language? Or should I say "languages" since Stanley did love yiddishisms, regional dialects, etc.?

Chris Lehmann: No, I don't think the wordplay is off-putting to general readers, though it does make for some long sentence structures and (especially) clauses in parentheses and between dashes that can far outsrip the skeleton of his sentences proper. But generally, the sentence structure are justified by the invention of the language and the speech-like quality of Elkin's prose. In one appreciation of Elkin's work, rick Moody has written that the basic unti of composition in Elkin's fiction is not the sentence, but the breath--as in the case with, say, a jazz saxophone solo (just after Borscht Belt comedy, jazz is the most frequent formal analogy reveiwers use to characterize Elkin's prose). But I think the length of his sentences generally widens and contracts in response to his thematic concerns. The epic George Mills, tracing the succession of no-account working class heroes who bear the sponymous name across scores of centuries, begins not even with a sentence proper but, as it were, in mid-breath: "Because he knew nothing about horses." And before you know it, you're off on a eorge Mills tour fo all western civilization--the sentences elongate, the perceptions tumble in and out of parenthese the similes grow gradulaly more outlandish. But it has nothing of the ostentation, the lok-at-me-being-clever quality that mars (for my money) so many otherwise promising forays into literary modernism, or whatever you want to call it.

Silver Spring, Md.: What do you think is the central conflict and the theme of "Criers & Kibitzers"--the title story in the collection?

Chris Lehmann: Thanks for writing. I think the principal conflict in the story is an internal one--Greenspahn's efforts, first, to square his botomless grief with the stark, mundane quality of his workday routine and its various dramatis personae; and, finally, his effort to square his image of his dead son with what he comes to accept as his reality--the closing, heartbreaking image of his hand swiftly dipping into the till. The reader has no clear sense of how, or whether, Greenspahn will bring himself into some sort of reconciliation with these bruising truths, but the effort to fix them alongside his workaday life make up the central conflict I see in the story.

Bethesda, Md.: We found your selection this month to be very challenging, insightful, and thought-provoking. Elkins was truly a masterful writer. We wondered, however, about your assertion that the wiseacres and hard-luck cases in the book are anything but resigned. Perhaps, we were looking at the wrong things, but we saw little to indicate heroism andthe struggle to overcome. Could you provide us with any examples to illustrate your feeling that the characters are not monolithic.

Chris Lehmann: Thanks for writing. I guess I see evidence of the struggle for some sort of comically chastened heroism--if not its successful completion--in a number of characters. As I mentioned, the protagonists in On a Field Rampant, A Poetics for Bullies and Perlmutter at the east Pole all present, in deeply idosyncratic ways, versions of this quest. (I think here especially of Perlmutter's appeal in the taxicab warehouse to acquire the accumulated, cliches wisdom of Manhattan cabbies.) As I noted to another correspondent, this theme feels very much in the front and center of In the Alley--though of course there too, it produces a resolution that feels anything but heroic. Cases such as Ed Wolfe, the protagonist of the Guest and his host (who is featured in among the Witnesses) are more ambiguous, but they, too, are at least registering the, uh, existential absence of the possibility of heroism if not enacting its outright chivalric code.
I guess the broader point I'm trying to elicit in all this is that unlike other practitioners of modern literary motifs that feel familiar, in formal terms, to Elkin's prose--irony, absurdity, authorial noncommitment--Elkin puts something vitally at stake in the center of the chaos all his characters are facing down. sometimes it's their life's vocation, as in On a Field Rampant; sometimes it's their immediate health and well-being as in the title story and In the Alley. And I think that's a central notion that we easily overlook, since we're often conditioned to encounter characters in similarly themed stories as flat, affectless, beings. Elkin's characters seem to me, above all else, to be struggling, and that's often what makes them much more engaging than many other designated ficitonal glyphs of (post) modern ennui.

Crofton, Md.: Elkin seems to believe that man is rotten to the core. I especially found this to be true in the title story. cuustomers are irresponsible and greedy. Greenspahn sees the worst in everyone. He seems to be the spokesman for Elkin. Agree?

Chris Lehmann: I guess I think Elkin's view of humanity, like his view of most things, is a bit too complicated to be simply rotten to the core. Certainly his fiction doesn't lack for bad actors and shoddy motives, but there are also rather astonishingly large-hearted figures--here they meet rather dour ends it's true, but I at least can't help but admire the fidelity to character you see in Push, the protagonist of A Poetics for Bullies, PErlmutter, the tireless searcher after recondite anthropological truth in the story bearing his name and even the grim, hopeless-sounding Greensphan in the title story. And certainly in Elkin's novels, eg. George Mills, The Dick Gibson Show, Mrs. Ted Bliss, you see characters who are very animatedly engaged, reasonably compassionate and (not least) riotously funny, all of which I'd submit are among the very best human qualities.

Crofton, Md.: Chris, you really hit the jackpot with this book.
I loved it. No writer can get into the head of his character more skilfully than Stanley Elkin. How would you compare this book with Van Gogh's Room at Arles?

Chris Lehmann: I have to confess I only read the first story in Van Gogh's room at Arles, which I do remember liking--but I stupidly left the book on a commuter train and haven't yet gotten round to replacing it. The stories in Elkin's novella collection, Searches and Seizures, though, have a similar mood to some of the Criers stories. The Bail Bondsman feels like a cousin to Greenspahn, and the one about the condominium I dimly recall reading at times like "The Guest." The big caveat here, though, is the Ashenken story, which concerns an inter-species theme probably not suited for a family paper's website. . .

Washington, D.C.: What other books do you recommend by Stanley Elkin?

Chris Lehmann: I think other good Elkin books to start on are The Franchiser (the ailing, decaying Ben Flesh's paen to the great retail roadide of AMerica), The Dick Gibson Show (a nearly nonstop celebration of the sheer joy of american speech), the Magic Kingdom (a journey of terminally ill British children to the eponymous rlando theme park eerily prescient of teh Make-aWish Foundation). Also Boswell--his first novel about a pro westler's obsessed quest to defeat death, and the epic, glorious George Mills, paen to the aimless everyman through the ages (talk about your knights errants. . . .) More acquired tastes are probably The Living End, The Rabbi of Lud, and a Bad Man.

Washington, D.C.: When the protagonist in In the Alley dies amongst the garbage and filth after having been humiliated and beat up, what was Elkin trying to tell us? There is no death with dignity?

Chris Lehmann: In part, yes--though as I noted in another reply to an In the Alley query, I also think that this death squares more closely with his sense of himself having outlived his death, and needing some response from the cosmos equal to his own haunted sense of nullity. In an odd way, the character's death might be taken as retrospectively fitting, if not (obviously) dignified.

Washington, D.C.: Why does Bertie in The Guest steal from the Premigers? Do you think that it's in his character to make such a statement?

Chris Lehmann: I guess the short answer here is "Yes"--I think Bertie is intended as a parody of an early '60s hipster, observing a transparently self-serving cde of instant gratification--all of which compounds the irony of the actual heist, which he fondly imagines will finally install that great hipster desideratum, bourgeois fear, in his hosts, even though he had nothing to do with the robbery. . . .

Washington, D.C.: In his preface, Elkin states that he wrote these stories before he developed what he calls "the revenge of style." Do you agree or do you think that these stories represent the beginning of the "style" that he asserts pervade his later works?

Chris Lehmann: A very good question. I think you can see the beginnings of his later style in some of the stories here, notably On a Field Rampant and Perlmutter at the East Pole. In the main, though, I think Elkin's right to note that he doesn't develop his, well, high-baroque style until later works. (You see it as early as The Dick Gibson Show and A Bad Man, and it's certainly in full flourish by George Mills.) But any writer's style is kind of like his or her fingerprint, unmistakably his or hers even when it's more or less embryo.

Bethesda, Md.: In response to another questioner, how do you conclude that there is no death with dignity?

Chris Lehmann: I don't think that's what I did conclude--or if I did, it's not what I meant to. I was trying to highlight what the character took to be the _fittingness_ of his death and its circumstances, if not by the judgment of most onlookers, its dignity. Sorry if I sugested otherwise in my haste.

Lenexa, Kans.: Thanks for your nice response. Not disagreeing with you at all regarding the knight-errant element in Elkin protagonists; however, it does seem to be that Push is more on the black side of the Manichaean equation. John Williams representing the noble side.

Also, did you think of a parallel between Perlmutter and Kilgore Trout? Thanks.

Chris Lehmann: Well, Push, at least, has a higher estimation of his own mission, perverse as it may be. "I proabbly cant save myself but maybe that's the only need I don't have. I taste my lack and that's how I win--byu having nothing to lose!" John Williams, on the other hand may be noble, but Elkin certainly gives nothing approaching like this rich, paradoxical view of his motivation. Without endorsing Push's tactics, I think you can say there's more recognizably human experience in his anguoshed sense of mission.

Spring Valley, Calif.: Sorry to be off subject, though not completely. I acquired the book too long ago, and forgot to read it for today. I did recently read Mrs. Ted Bliss though, and loved it. There's always notice taken when a woman writes from a man's point of view and vice versa, and whether they've carried it off. In this case I felt that Mrs. Bliss, in her widowhood, sort of took on a male persona. Sorry to (partially) change the subject.

Chris Lehmann: I guess I didn't have that response to the novel--though I also have to confess that it's been a while since I read it. If anything, her intrigue with the Mobster and the adventures that spring from it might qualify her for (very) broad characterization as something of a femme fatale, but don't hold me to that judgment--again, I'd have to review more of the book.

Chris Lehmann: Well, the ticking cyberclock tells me it's time to wrap the session up. Once again, many thanks for the thoughtful questions--and don't forget to tell your friends about Stanley Elkin.

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