Van Gogh's Room at Arles: Three Novellas

by Stanley Elkin

These three delicious novellas, from "a master of language and black humor" ( New York Times), demonstrate the author's mastery of the roller-cosater sentence, hair-pin narrative twist, and the joke that leaves readers torn between tears and laughter.

Genres: Fiction, Short Stories, Humor, Literature, France, Novella

320 pages, Paperback

First published March 1, 1993

About the author

Stanley Lawrence Elkin was a Jewish American novelist, short story writer, and essayist. His extravagant, satirical fiction revolves around American consumerism, popular culture, and male-female relationships.

During his career, Elkin published ten novels, two volumes of novellas, two books of short stories, a collection of essays, and one (unproduced) screenplay. Elkin's work revolves about American pop culture, which it portrays in innumerable darkly comic variations. Characters take full precedence over plot.

His language throughout is extravagant and exuberant, baroque and flowery, taking fantastic flight from his characters' endless patter. "He was like a jazz artist who would go off on riffs," said critic William Gass. In a review of George Mills, Ralph B. Sipper wrote, "Elkin's trademark is to tightrope his way from comedy to tragedy with hardly a slip."

About the influence of ethnicity on his work Elkin said he admired most "the writers who are stylists, Jewish or not. Bellow is a stylist, and he is Jewish. William Gass is a stylist, and he is not Jewish. What I go for in my work is language."

Reviews

[Deacon Tom (Feeling Better) · Rating 1 out of 5]

I recommend passing Ortho’s book. It is very loosely associated with Van Gogh. It is actually 3 short stories.

[Heronimo Gieronymus · Rating 5 out of 5]

What is it now? Nine? Right, that’s right. VAN GOGH’S ROOM AT ARLES makes it nine. Nine Elkins down. I only got to Elkin fairly late in 2016. So that’s nine Elkins is fairly short order, really. That should tell you something. That should tell you I have a serious yen for Stanley E. And I do. Oh, indeed, yes. He has become one of my very favourite writers. I am a hard-fallen convert. They should almost be sending me door to door. If you know anything about Elkin you probably know that his razzmatazz very often excites stabs at like razzmatazz from the commentariat. I myself have previously reviewed eight of these sumbitches. When reviewing Elkin one is liable to find all kinds of ways to pay service to the dizzying volley of wit, riff, routine. One is likely as not to invoke the whirligig frivolities of the vaudeville circuit, the ace standup maverick. I often find myself comparing him to virtuosic jazzmen or raging oompah orchestras marching clean through brick walls, failing to miss a beat. What this means. This means he is a genius steamroller language technician and very funny. His meter and method in some sense the comedian poet’s. Who can touch him sentence-to-sentence and at the level of the paragraph? Well, few. Precious few. He called himself a stylist. A stylist, he said, like Saul Bellow and William H. Gass. Indeed, he has much of the garrulous bonhomie of AUGIE-era Bellow and the impossibly rapturous thrust and parry of Gass. He and Gass may indeed be tops sentence-to-sentence and at the level of the paragraph. Elkin really began to explode with THE DICK GIBSON SHOW and THE FRANCHISER in the 70s, two personal favourites. I am also a huge fan of the late stuff, considering the 90s another peak. VAN GOGH’S ROOM, a book containing three novellas, appeared between his last two novels, both of which I revere utterly, and I am prepared to place it on a short list of his very finest books. You rise, in the best Elkins, beyond the level of the superlative, and find yourself floating in a kind of ambrosial realm, a place where qualitative comparison starts to turn to sand running through your fingers. Of what kind of parsing ought we avail ourselves when it comes to parsing perfection? What should I offer you in the wake of this particular encounter with perfection? Perhaps I will simply walk you through these three triumphant novellas. We start with “Her Sense of Timing” and Jack Schiff, Professor of Political Geography, wheelchair bound, one of Elkin’s infirm. (Elkin was a man who knew infirmity, himself having suffered an early coronary-type event, another of which would take him out, and having lived with multiple sclerosis most of his adult life.) Professor Schiff’s wife has just left him. Her timing could not have been worse. She has left him on the eve of the annual soirée he throws for his graduate students. He must endure a hellish bacchanal horribly compromised, utterly unable to assert jurisdictional authority. This beautiful comic story, told in a torrent, with not even a single break, is ultimately about how self-pity might benefit from the interpolation of bemusement, as though a certain spirit of bemusement might well serve as an extremely handy spiritual Swiss army knife, a capacity ready for the incapacitated. Self-pity + bemusement = farce. “I take to farce the way ducks take to water.” So says the academic, the political geographer. Later: “Checkmate! thought wily old Schiff. Gin! Name of the game! the crippled-up old political-geographer gentleman thought, planting his flags for Spain, for France. Well, he thought, for Farce, at least, Schiff’s own true motherland with its slapstick lakes and Punch and Judy rivers, its burlesque deserts and vaudeville plains, with its minstrel peninsulas and cabaret hills, its music-hall mountains and its dumb-show shores, all its charade forests, all its low-comedy lowlands.” A fine passage and pure Elkin. The man, Schiff, helpless in his wheelchair: he can barely prop himself up, besieged by roughhousing graduate students, their youth and their devil-may-care heedlessness a dazzling affront. “If you hang on and manage to live long enough you turn into a bowling pin.” There is the realization that that we live “by the frail myth of boundary.” Elkin is a steamroller, Prof Schiff gets steamrolled, but in a way he relents to with a kind of pitiful dignity, a dignity praiseworthy precisely for all its knowing reek of the pitiful. Schiff is at home in his gig, “the strictly hands-off of scholarship and the sheer delicious luxury of an arcane discipline,” and you sense he has a soft spot for his uncouth charges. Yes, self-pity figures, but self-pity is there for the overcoming. That is the name of the game. Hang not thy head, friend. Live the farce. Live the farce to the hilt. Look, Schiff is not going to be petulant about wifey’s sense of timing. He understands that he is not easy to live with, let alone nurse, what with his churlishness and frequent bouts of ill-temper. Schiff has fallen from grace. Sure, that will happen. Of course. What did Gurdjieff say? Something about thanking those who provide you with an opportunity to confront yourself. Self? “He was his own comic projection, something funhouse-mirror to his reality, the same distorted representation on the flat surface of his curved personality as Greenland’s.” As with the outrageously great novel THE MACGUFFIN, the Elkin that immediately precedes VAN GOGH’S ROOM AT ARLES, “Her Sense of Timing” suggests the notion of catching one's own reflection smack-dab in the middle of a flip-flapping spree. Very good shit. Okay, so, now the second novella collected in the volume we are discussing. The title, she ’s a mouthful: “TOWN CRIER Exclusive, Confession of a Princess Manqué: ‘How Royals Found Me ‘Unsuitable’ to Marry Their Larry.’” Another beauty. Naturally. You cannot possibly be surprised. This one is written in the first person, taking the form of sequential pieces written for TOWN CRIER by Louise Bristol (“La Lulu” in the tabloids), between January 12th and February 16th of 1992. When Elkin writes fiction in the first person he still writes in Elkinese. Take a look at THE RABBI OF LUD. By way of example. I think this is the first piece I have read by Elkin which is first-person-woman. He makes it pay dividends. We’re talking tokens positively spewing, video lottery terminal payday extraordinaire. Check out how he nails that landing. Anyway, Louise Bristol is being paid by some lowborn opportunist newspaperman to tell her side of the story; her side, that is, of her aborted engagement to Prince Larry (Lawrence, Lawrence Mayfair of the House of Mayfair), heir to the throne of, you know, England or the Englands or the Britains et cetera. Fake royal family, the fictional sort. King George and senior citizen ingenue wifey, Queen Charlotte, “their here-today-gone-today, spread-too-thin essence.” “Noël Coward King and Noël Coward Queen […]” So a very particular kind of fake royalty, an explicitly Noël Coward breed, wit of course being a determining factor here. “There Their Majesties were, two conflagrant figures, Himself in red silk dressing gown and seated on an honest-to-God throne with a yellow ring of gleamless crown perched light and rakish on top of his head like the wavy concatenations of a suspension bridge or the points on the crown of some picture-card king; Herself in a gilt chair a few feet off to her husband’s side and chugalugging smoke through a long silver cigarette holder.” Larry also has siblings. There are the two Princesses, Mary and Denise. Louise has good things to say about Mary who she claims has had her, Louise’s, back, you know, with the media. Denise doesn’t come off so hot. There are two other Princes besides Larry, the heir apparent, Prince Alec (“Oh, how that horser-arounder could horse around!”) and Prince Robin (whom she simply declares evil). Louise is a spirited, smart, no-bullshit type for whom a great deal becomes something like water off a duck’s back. Things like, you know, ending up not being the future Queen. She seems to have embraced with eminent good humour that this is just sometimes how these things play. What goes wrong? A bunch of things go wrong, but also sort of nothing. Chalk it up to men and their adolescent egos, their limp-dick spirit. Things come to something of a head in Cookham, Louise’s childhood home, when she confesses to the heir to the throne something she in retrospect might not have. Confesses, in should be specified, in flagrante delicto. But, really, so he’s not a good sport: not the end of the world. Louise has done her time in California, first, predictably as an English au pair girly, then as a Los Angeles hotel chamber maid, then as a sewer of houses. She’s been around, she’s about thirty and no sap. And intoxicating as it is at time to dally with Princessdom, the gig isn’t all candy and roses. What does it mean to be royalty? “Like artists’ models or film stars trained in the art of standing still, posing, their muscles as glib as bird dogs’, hounds’. Speaking for myself, I know I became like this trained—pardon my French—bladder athlete during my reign as his Princess manqué. Pardon my French.” We’ll leave it there. Onto the final novella, the title piece. Van Gogh’s room at Arles, with “its stuck, Provençal-warped door.” Another divine piece of unbroken prose, no stops, no rest, no breathers. Miller from Indianapolis, a kind of academic nobody, a kind of adjunct professor or associate professor or whatever at the amusingly named Booth Tarkington Community College (for all you MAGNIFICENT AMBERSONS fans). Miller finds himself invited to Arles by a Foundation in the roll of Fellow. Though he is determinedly a nobody, somehow they have given him Van Gogh’s actual room in that actual yellow house in Arles. Many of the other Fellows are high achievers from illustrious institutions— “all these infinity specialists, why-the-chicken-crossed-the-road investigators, and big-bad-wolf revisionists, along with other heavy hitters (one of the Fellows was writing a psychological biography of God)”—and this among other factors, including a room placement which may perhaps be more curse than blessing, makes the congenitally choleric Hoosier adjunct professor or associate professor or whatever quite generally snarly. (As far as the other Fellows go, you will note that Schiff from "Her Sense of Timing" can fleetingly be counted among them.) Naturally Miller is going to have call to dwell on commonalities he may or may not have with the room’s most famous previous occupant: “Neither was in his element in Arles. They were about the same age. Both were bachelors. Both had been repudiated by the Establishment. Van Gogh never sold a painting well he lived and, what, you think Booth Tarkington Community College was the first place Miller applied or sent his curriculum vitae? He’d asked for a hundred jobs. It wasn’t even the first place in Indiana. It wasn’t even the first place in Indianapolis! Also, Vincent was a little nutsy too.” Miller is supposed to be working on a monograph concerning what the big shots from the big schools think about community colleges. He does almost no work, accomplishes almost nothing, comes perilously close to having no brush with para-enlightenment. Literature has much to tell us about the quiet heroism of the slacker. Not just the drop-out strain in American letters. You have your OBLOMOV, of course, or, say, Albert Cossery’s LAZINESS IN THE FERTILE VALLEY. I’m talking about tried and true works of real spiritual significance. Miller does come to have his para-enlightenment. You’ll get there at the conclusion. It comes in the form of peerlessly great writing. Real deal revelation, paean to the miracle of vision. It of course turns out that being allocated Van Gogh's room at Arles is not more curse than blessing. Before that there are many complications and sundry delectations. Miller tries to self-talk, frame things efficaciously: “Just fucking make allowances, just fucking when-in-Arles.” There are increasingly terse relations with the excessively congenial Paul Hartshine of the University of Pennsylvania, a relationship Miller puts the final nail in the coffin of with some calculated antisemitism. It is on account of this that we have the bow tie that serves as auxiliary severed ear. Then we have the uncanny descendants of those whose portraits Van Gogh painted, commencing with a visit from Dr. Félix Rey, great-great-grandson of the famous médecin pained by Van Gogh, unmistakably recognizable as such, cards featuring the corresponding painting carried by the good doctor in the pocket of his suit coat. The doctor’s diagnosis, proffered over the modest bed in Van Gogh’s room at Arles: “Your soul is a little sprained. It’s nothing. We see it all the time.” Van Gogh happens to mean a lot to me. I often say that Jacques Dutronc in the very great Maurice Pialat's film about the painter is the most important man in any movie, the same way Maria Falconetti’s Jeanne d’Arc is the most important woman in any movie. And really let me just end by saying that you live in a paradise while you are reading an Elkin. It is just pure sustained high. VAN GOGH’S ROOM AT ARLES is quite simply as good as it gets. I’m not talking about escape, escapism. I am talking, friend, about ecstasy, about joy. Partake! By God, partake!

[Veronica · Rating 1 out of 5]

L'ho dovuto abbandonare, inizialmente mi prendeva, ma mi ha portato a noia, ho cominciato a saltare le parti per arrivare alla fine... Non volendo leggere in questo modo ho deciso di non terminarlo.
Non è male ma non fa per me.

[Molly Klodor · Rating 1 out of 5]

One of the worst books I've ever read. The writing was far too descriptive for my tastes, and it was, in a word, boring.

[Roberta · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a collection of three short stories, and I have provided both reviews and excerpts of each.

Book One—Her Sense of Timing
This book begins with the protagonist’s wife leaving him—literally in the opening lines. We learn of her calm demeanor (she kisses his cheek and cheerfully says goodbye on the way out), his outrage and disbelief, his severe physical debilities, and quickly thereafter, of his challenging personality! At first, I found his running, self-absorbed commentary, (or non-stop whining, if you prefer) to be difficult. I nearly stopped reading the book, but pushed through the first dozen or so pages, and by then was fully hooked. What was going to happen to this poor man who had the character of burning tires (acrid, unpleasant, and unfortunate)?
As I pushed through, I almost began to enjoy his philosophical, self-absorbed, deeply dependent and alternate-personality style fierce independence. What happens in this book occurs over a period of hours—probably a full day, if counted accurately—but it gives you a fully developed glimpse into his life. What you’re left with is a funny, if not altogether fun story. While you cannot help but feel sorry for this man who goes through his own sort of hell, you also feel that he deserves every bit of lesson that his wife and students teach him.

Schiff (the protagonist) is a college professor of political geography whose wife has unexpectedly left him just before his annual party; a party that he started a couple of years ago in an egotistical effort to force his students to somehow remember him fondly in the future. He is jealous that some of his contemporaries have students who call, write, and visit yearsafter graduation and he has slowly become aware that none of his students either contact him or ever seem to go into the field of political geography, which is both his specialty and his passion. This is his desperate attempt to change his fate before time runs out.

It is an interesting, fun, and challenging story. I particularly enjoyed the philosophical ruminating and have included an example below in the excerpt! It blends very nicely with beer swilling, smoking, and an “Animal House” type of party.

EXCERPT:
Schiff, a stiff and somewhat formal grown-up better than twice their age who called them “Miss,” who called them “Mister,” supposed them in on their professor’s domestic secrets, supposed himself (one of those—he supposed they supposed—hotshot, crisis celebs, a consultant in times of national stress to movers and shakers with means at their disposal—their bombs and high-tech devices—quite literally to move and shake the very political geography that had hitherto been merest contingency, simple textbook, blackboard example, his finger—their professor’s—on the planet’s pulses, its variously scant or bumper crops, its stores of mineral, vegetable, animal, and marine wealth—currents where the advantageous fish hung—an advisor—he supposed they supposed—to presidents, kings, and others of the ilk, who could determine a vital interest simply by naming it, pronouncing it, pointing to it chalktalk fashion on a map, virtually talking the hotspots into being) fallen in their youthful, fickle estimation, emotional, skittish as a stock exchange. So no wonder they seemed so nervous around him. His wife had left him, he stood as exposed as a flasher. His wife had left him, and now they perceived Professor S. as one who evidently—and oh so feebly—pulled his pants up over his uncovered ass one damaged leg at a time; a man, in the absence of crisis, not only like any other—his wife had walked, had taxicabbed out on him—but maybe even more so. He was revealed to them here on his—the political geographer’s and erstwhile hotshot, crisis celeb’s—very turf as one more defective, pathetic, poor misbegotten schlepp.

Elkin, Stanley (2010-10-26). Van Gogh's Room at Arles (pp. 71-72). Open Road Media. Kindle Edition.
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Book Two—Crier Exclusive, Confessions of a Princess Manqué: “How Royals Found Me ‘Unsuitable’ to Marry Their Larry”

This is a story about a woman who becomes almost inexplicably engaged to the heir of the British throne—of course, the characters are all jumbled from the current British royal family (in the fairness of changing names to protect the innocent, and all that; although, the royal prince depicted here reminded me a bit of P. Charles with his stuffy demeanor!). The ensuing story—details how the couple met, the engagement announcement, meeting the royals, the “royal engagement tour,” and the idle royal’s mischief and pointless existence—is hysterical.

It is a very fast-passed story filled with plenty of great British-style humor! If you want a quick read with a lot of laughs, this is a good choice!

EXCERPT (the first paragraph of the story):
I shouldn’t have thought I’d have gone public like this. Well, to begin with, there’s the question of our musty old laws, isn’t there? Oh, solicitors have gone all over it with their fine-tooth combs to see that the paper’s in the clear. I never referred to myself as “La Lulu,” and neither did Lawrence, Crown Patriciate, Duke of Wilshire, nor any other of their royal lord and lady highnesses and mightinesses. Nor all the king’s soldiers, nor all the king’s men. There’s no such person. That was chiefly an invention of the press; a legal fiction.

Elkin, Stanley (2010-10-26). Van Gogh's Room at Arles (p. 111). Open Road Media. Kindle Edition.
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Book Three—Van Gogh’s Room at Arles

This last story in the set was difficult for me to finish, which is one of my rules of reading. If one begins a book, one should have the good grace to finish the book. Not always easy!

Why not easy to finish? Well, the story didn’t seem to have a point. To quote a piece of the book’s description: “In the collection’s title story, Elkin writes of an insecure professor’s scholarly retreat with the most accomplished members of his field.” The “members of his field” bit refers to an interesting string of professors from all over the world studying (and writing papers about obscure, but interesting topics). The protagonist is an instructor at a community college in Indiana—definitely out of his league. The insecure professor was the problem. In his retreat, in which he literally was housed in Van Gogh’s Room at Arles, he wandered aimlessly though his five weeks, both mesmerized and depressed by his “peers,” the experience, and the location. It was a story of a missed opportunity, flowered with witty prose and snappy sappiness (yes, you might consider ‘snappy sappiness’ a brief example of what to expect).

The bright side was the delightful descriptions of the area in and around Arles, the described images of the artist’s famous paintings of the area, the random meetings of descendents of people forever immortalized—who go to some effort to look like (dress, hair, makeup, moustache, and so forth) their famous predecessors—and of the general experience of the intellectual scholarly retreat.

Thankfully it was a short story, if not a quick read (mostly because I kept setting it down…), and amusing enough to read with the other stories in the set.

EXCERPT:
“Do we know each other?” Miller said. “You seem familiar to me.”
“Oh.” laughed the doctor, “This is a common mistake I have so the likeness of my great-great-grandfather, Dr. Félix Rey, the médecin of Vincent Van Gogh, whom he attended for the amputate of his ear.” He took a card from the breast pocket of his suit coat and handed it to Miller. It was a postcard from a museum gift shop with a reproduction of Van Gogh’s “Portrait of Dr. Félix Rey.”
“You do,” Miller said, “you’re his spitting image!”
“Not a handsome man,” said Dr. Rey.
It was true. Both grand-grand-grandpère and grandfils had thin, vaguely Oriental faces like inverted equilateral triangles that were made to seem even more triangular by both the long, dependent Vandykes at the bottom of their chins and their flat, dark, brushcut hair. Astonishingly, like points of interest, the prominent left ears of the two young men (for they were young; both Miller’s physician and Van Gogh’s could not have been more than twenty-five or -six years old) seemed to flare out from the sides of their heads red as shame and exactly matched the shade of their full, pouty, Kewpie doll lips. (As they stood out against the general jaundice of their complexions.) Both men wore handlebar mustaches. Both evidently plucked their eyebrows.

[Esther Marlowe · Rating 1 out of 5]

I read the first of 3 stories and can't recommend it. A college professor has a debilitating progressive condition and is totally dependent on his wife at home. The book doesn't say how he manages twice a week at college. The day before a house party for his students, she ups and leaves him with an empty refrigerator. The story covers the events leading up to and including the party, and afterward.
I didn't even realize the story was over. I read partway through the second story of a girl having a fling with royalty on an island and couldn't connect it to the first story because it wasn't connected. The first one ended that abruptly. Didn't even try the 3rd story.

[wally · Rating 3 out of 5]

finished 26th january 2025 good read three stars i liked it nothing less nothing more kindle library loaner first from elkin and i read in the version available that elkin is...a man of letters...a big deal...this despite my not knowing of him or his stories until 2025. from the bio pieces sounds like he had been at it for a time. these three novellas are entertaining...first this guy a professor losing the use of his legs, wife walks out on him, what? after 37 years? after some time around the track. they had a party planned. party goes on anyway. second...what was the second? third...a guy, a professor, in europe, in van gogh's room....some sort of meeting of the quality, the hig-brow, all learned, all with matters on their mind, all with a big opinion...and the lowly professor from...bowling green was it?...no, wait now...tarkington booth community college maybe. a curious tale. the second...what was it? had to open a second page...yeah, the second is "a parody" of like what happened with princess di and charles. sans the other woman...who is now what, queen camilla? king charley? and that reality shows in part what the story says that royalty can get away with anything...including camelot and all that clan. not to mention all the dingle bulbs before and since. hi ho! hi ho!

[George · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 stars. A memorable, humorous book of three novellas. The three stories are:
‘Her Sense of Timing’ which is about Schiff, a 60 years old married man who is badly handicapped and has been married for over 30 years. His wife Claire suddenly without warning leaves him. Schiff has to cope with a student party at his house the following day. There are lots of funny, embarrassing situations that occur, highlighting his lack of independence.
‘How Royals Found Me Unsuitable to Marry Larry’ is told by Louise, who Prince Larry loses his virginity to. An oddball story, making fun of ‘royal’ protocols.
‘Van Gogh’s Room at Arles’ is about Miller, a lecturer at a USA college, residing in Van Gogh’s room at Arles for five weeks whilst researching his project on how academics see college education as compared to university education. Miller accomodation is of interest to the academics visiting Arles and Miller is constantly having visitors wanting to see Van Gogh’s room.

This is my first Stanley Elkin book. I became interested in this author as he won two National Book Critics Circle awards for ‘Mrs Ted Bliss’ (1995) and ‘George Mills’ (1982) and his book ‘The Dick Gibson Show’ was a National Book Award finalist in 1972.

[Josh · Rating 3 out of 5]

Elkin's second-to-last book, this collection of three novellas about people in over their heads (a disabled geography professor whose wife leaves him the day before the annual party he throws for his students, a commoner navigating her way through sudden fame, politics, and the weight of history when she falls in love with a member of the royal family, and a mediocre community college professor out of the country for the first time and surrounded by Ivy League elites at an academic retreat in France) is funny, sad, and high on the possibilities of language, but also a little thin, a milder echo of past glories. Still, his terrifying ability to keep his hands on the wheel of his wild, virtuosic sentences, steering them toward and away from chaos, is present in even his minor work, and the last few pages of the final novella hit as hard as Elkin in his prime.

[Babs Ray · Rating 3 out of 5]

Love the author's "voice," even if our hero was a little too cringe-worthy for me at times. Like Confederacy of Dunces, the hero in each story (I only read 2 of the3 novellas) is a social misfit who barrels through life half a self-loathing lunk and half a macho jerk. You both feel for them and know why their wives left them. Great strings of interior monologues, stunningly written, were a joy. Dipping back into the 1990s, pre cellphone or internet, with relics like bank statements and French francs, is always fun. And the hero's speech about community colleges to a room of Ivy League profs was priceless.

[Diane Mezzanotte · Rating 2 out of 5]

Of the three novellas in this collection, I enjoyed two. Sort of. I didn’t love any of them. I did not enjoy the looooong asides and parentheticals in almost every paragraph and too many sentences. And I’m not sure I really understand the main characters—most of whom I didn’t like at all. So, definitely do not recommend. 😄

[Jennifer Scott · Rating 1 out of 5]

I only read the first story. I think maybe I am just not fit for this author’s writing style. It just never grabbed me- this professor’s wife leaves him and then his grad students come over, make a mess, break things and leave? Not for me.

[Janet · Rating 2 out of 5]

The characters are generally unpleasant, although Elkin does a good enough job with presenting them that I did feel some sympathy for their self-induced problems. Even for novellas, these stories felt too long for me. Occasional humor, but often pretty tiresome to read.

[Eric · Rating 2 out of 5]

uneven

[Sharon McNeil · Rating 3 out of 5]

Clever! I'd never read Elkins before.

[zahira garibaldi · Rating 3 out of 5]

tbh didn’t finish reading bc i got bored but it’s decent. i only got through the first novella tho not even the part about the room at arles

[Barb · Rating 3 out of 5]

3 novellas - artsy, somewhat challenging to follow the storylines. But, it did make me think.

[Jennifer Molyneaux]

I couldn't finish this book. Too dry.

[Mark · Rating 2 out of 5]

(N.B.: The novella read was Her Sense of Timing, only available as part of this collection of three.)

A farce, with the twist of being recognized as such by its central character. Frequently hilarious, to the point of inducing a number of rare out-loud laughs, and Elkin has a knack for jabbing university life and Schiff's pretensions with precision, but never manages to produce any response besides laughter. I briefly, very early on, due to the university setting and aspects of Schiff, thought I might be in for Pnin-light, but that was a mistake. The wit and acute observations here are merely here for their own sake, to no notable end, only for the purpose of serving as strictly a light entertainment; it reminded me very much in this way The White Boy Shuffle, another amusement with something on its mind, but no way of conveying it or binding it to the humor that fuels the story.

Despite the fact that Schiff is basically an open wound for the entire book, he's so self-pitying that it seems unnecessary for the reader to spare any of his own; the parting line, an abject admission of his situation, couched in a gag, is a neat, clever (maybe overly so) ending that initially felt a bit unearned and too abrupt of an advance in Schiff's arc, but it's growing on me (very slightly) in both regards. The latter is especially hard to judge, as Schiff is intentionally painted as wildly paradoxical, especially but not only in his the fiercely protected artifice of his public self-presentation vs. his obsessive and neurotic private self (the two of which horrifyingly merge over the course of the novella), so it can be hard to track his exact progression along his fairly predictable path. Muddling things further is Elkin's use of comma-studded run-ons, frequently interrupted by em-dashed asides and parentheticals, that seem clearly intended to evoke stream of consciousness but feel much too consciously constructed and mannered for that intention to be fulfilled most of the time.

I read this for a quite dubious reason, because Elkin was suggested by a film critic, Glenn Kenny (whose tastes don't much align with mine) as being a potential influence on the Coen brothers, who I greatly admire, so despite the fact that I picked for my first Elkin a title that seemed the closest to their sensibilities, this was probably my own fault. That said, I still have A Bad Man and The Franchiser out from the library and will likely give at least the first a shot, in the hope that it's not a comparable trifle; there's an unmistakable wit to Elkin's writing, and if paired with a slightly less convoluted voice and more incisiveness, I could certainly see him producing something at least a little more noteworthy.

[Guttersnipe Das · Rating 4 out of 5]

First things first: regardless of how this book is listed on Amazon, it is neither out of print nor unavailable. If necessary, contact Dalkey Archive directly -- they're delightful people.

To me, a novella is the perfect length for the jazzy dense madcap diatribes of Stanley Elkin. Not for nothing does Francine Prose rate this Elkin’s best book. If a prince ever falls in love with you and you’re struggling about how to behave among royals and paparazzi -- you’ll find the second novella indispensable. Community college lecturers and any of us prone to feeling catastrophically lackluster in company will want to seek out the third.

But for me, the first novella, “Her Sense of Timing”, is the one that’s essential. This is one of the most acute (and hilarious) accounts of disability and humiliation I’ve ever come across. As a person with a disability, I cheered this edgy and all-out account of what it really feels like to live in a messy human body. Hooray for Stanley Elkin, who isn’t shy to tell the truth about the human condition and who can make literature out of ongoing struggles with an overfull pee bottle.

[Thomas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Three fish-out-of-water stories from a master of the parenthetical expression. The first and third stories are academic farces -- in the first, a kindly old wheel-chair bound professor is abandoned by his wife right before his annual house party, during which his graduate students turn his house upside down. In the third story a community college professor is inexplicably invited to schmooze with the full tenure crowd in Arles, where he is placed in the Yellow House at 2 Place Lamartine and is visited by the descendants of the people Van Gogh painted. The middle story revolves around the failed engagement of an English Prince to a commoner.

All three stories express a kind of helplessness and rely on Elkin's finely tuned style and self-effacing sense of humor. Not knowing any better, I would guess that Elkin wrote the first story as a semi-autobiographical spoof, and the second two on holidays in England and France. All three stories are great examples of his style and sense of humor, but taken individually they seem a bit overworked.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

Aggg. So great. So great. While the second novella didn't really resonate with me (it was told in first person, with a lot of framing going on, as opposed to the first and third novellas' simple third), the other two most definitely did. Super super funny, but weighty as well. Dialogue is great, manages to pull of multiple-paragraphed rants without seeming satirical. At his worst, especially in "Her Sense of Timing," Elkin sounds a little like bad Nicholson Baker, but those moments are rare. At his best, or even just at cruising-speed, Elkin, is reminiscent of Gaddis -- just as funny and just as witty (close to it, anyway). The two are definitely kindred spirits, but Elkin's voice is his own. Ah, the joy of discovering a new writer! Especially one as prolific as Elkin. This guy is my new favorite. I can't wait to read his other stuff.

[HomeInMyShoes · Rating 3 out of 5]

Why do I read Elkin?

The tops of the pizza boxes had been torn from their bottoms, and everywhere, teetering on the arm of the sofa, on the coffee table, left on a seat cushion, on a stereo speaker, in the makeshift dishes, the smeared, greasy, bronzed mix- and-match of the cardboard china, lay pieces of cold, uneaten pizza like long slices of abstract painting, their fats congealing, fissures opening in their cooling yellow cheeses, burst bubbles of painterly cholesterol, chips of pepperoni raised on them like rusty scabs. Bits of green bell peppers, tiny facets of oily onion, bright hunks of tomato like semiprecious stones caught Schiff’s eye, glinted up at him from the carpet. Crumpled paper napkins, like the soiled sheets of wet beds, soaked up spilled Coke. There was an aluminum rubble of crushed cans.

[Ian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stanley Elkin gets both lauded and chastised for being too “wordy.” I’m in Camp Laud, these three novellas being my introduction to his “short” stories, so I was in rambling wordplay heaven. I’ve remarked before that I would happily read Stanley Elkin’s take on “why’d the chicken cross the road” for 100 pages and that’s exactly how these three scenarios played out: long-form dad jokes from the darkest and corniest wordsmith. And for a collection written late in his career and life, he juggles his strengths with the same vim and verve of his younger days.

[Christopherseelie · Rating 3 out of 5]

Stanley Elkin was a shot in the dark read. Mainly I was interested in how he composed novellas; if there was any structural difference or unique characteristic to the medium.
I ended up giving this book to my father after reading two of the three stories. I think he'll like it more. Elkin's narrative voice is very American and verbose. His satire is veiled in the plot rather than becoming the plot. And in the tradition of satire, the characters are not very likable, which was refreshing.

[Tony Roberts · Rating 2 out of 5]

Elkin's writing can be beautiful, but the sentences became too convoluted for me to parse. Thus, I lost connection with the story and just drifted along hoping, finally, to encounter a full stop so I could take a bathroom break.

I was dispirited after the first novella and considered finding another book, but there was enough intriguing about the writing so that I kept going hoping the second or third story would resonate. Sadly not for me.

[Ted Wong · Rating 4 out of 5]

None of the characters are likable--in fact, they're horrible people with all of their ugly prejudices and selfishnesses on full display--and everything that happens is awful. And yet all of the characters are dripping with poignant humanness, and everything that happens is hilarious and poetic. And the writing--from the overall structure to the frequent weird syntactic ambiguities--makes for challenging, interesting reading.

[Jeremy · Rating 5 out of 5]

In one of these three, wildly varied novellas, a wealthy man makes crazed love to a rutting she-bear.

It's worth twice the cost of the book to see Elkin describe (as only he could) a horny bear's vagina.

Nuff said?

[Erik Wyse · Rating 4 out of 5]

Another fine work by Elkin. As inventive and stylistic in his prose and plots as any other writer. The third, titular novella proved to be devastatingly tragicomic, as it detailed the flails and humblings of a Hoosier Prof amidst a group of truly elite intellectuals.

[Ariella · Rating 3 out of 5]

I only read two of these three novellas before I got sick of Stanley Elkin's addiction to similes.