Never using one adjective when he could use three or more, Elkin's book was just not appealing to me. It starts with an interesting premise, following the men of the Mills line for a thousand years, each succeeding generation with a son named "George" and each generation cursed to a life on society's outskirts, 50 generations of futility as laborers and n'er do wells until the current George Mills, who works as a mover for a business that evicts the poor from there homes in St Louis, decides it's time the curse is lifted. More interested in literary style than plot, there are sections that are quite interesting but nothing seems to cohere as a story. Back to the simplicities if genre fiction for me...