The Magic Kingdom

by Stanley Elkin, Rick Moody

Brimming with Elkin's comic brilliance and singular wordplay, The Magic Kingdom tells the story of Eddy Bale, who, determined to learn from the ghastly experience of his son's long, drawn-out death, decides to raise enough money to take seven terminally ill children to Disney World in order to give them a dream vacation before they die.

Genres: Fiction, Novels, American, Death, Americana, The United States Of America, Jewish

317 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1985

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

[Vit Babenco · Rating 3 out of 5]

I see The Magic Kingdom as a failed attack on the pop culture and bad taste – the humour is mournfully morbid and in spite of all the jokes the atmosphere of the novel remains funereal.
A bunch of terminally ill British children is taken on the tour of Disneyland in Florida and in the plane a girl sees a dream…

Before the ride was finished and the conductor collected her ticket, Lydia had several other opportunities for fine photographs. She got a rare close-up of Tarzan pruning his treehouse and an absolute stunner of a cannibal picnic. Once again the mate silenced the engine and, putting his fingers to his lips, indicated that Lydia be quiet. Together they listened to the cheery campfire songs the cannibals were singing.

And soon enough the children see the magic kingdom in reality…

“All right,” Mickey Mouse said, “let’s see a show of hands. Who wants to be cremated? What, nobody? All right, who’s for being planted? Hands? Not anyone? Buried at sea then? Recycled? We’re running out of options here. Boy, you’re some tough kids to please.”

No matter how much glorified, mice are vermin.

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 5 out of 5]

Exuberance is the perfect descriptor for Elkin’s works. Like his bunkmate Bill Gass, his fictions swing to their own rhythms, refuse to conform to any cosily crafted preconception of a satisfying sellable sentence, and demonstrate a fearless dexterity over the English language that would make any spindle-shanked homeboy raised on Eudora Welty and F. Scott Fitz soil his carefully stapled MFA thesis. My first Elkin inroad was The Franchiser, a supersized maxi-novel snapping its dungaree straps and popping its pants buttons, abundant in crazy riffs and loops and digressions and tangents and manic plots, overwhelming and brutal like a triple-decker cheese and beef and chicken and salad superduperpooperwhopper. My second Elkin, The Magic Kingdom, skinnies down to an extent, losing nothing of its exuberance and comic brio in the process, and takes a less nihilistic tone to sit alongside the humour, making an almost perfect combo of strut and heart. As the parade of carping one-star nitwits below have limned, this novel follows a group of dying London children to Disneyland, allowing Elkin to stare sickness and death in the face like a prancing ogre farting in the Grim Reaper’s ears, moving freely between his marvellously diverse cast of eccentrics, hopping around in their heads with such stunning insight into the fundamental hollow-sorry-crudity and tirelessly impish spirit of human borings, one is left prostrate on the floor in pools of ecstatically loosed drool and piddle. A command(ing) performance!

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

The wonderful Dalkey archive have a great casebook online with some free essays on this book: http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/product/....

The "Make a wish" foundation states its mission as the following:

Wishes are more than just a nice thing
A wish experience can be a game-changer for a child with a life-threatening medical condition.

This one belief guides us in everything we do at Make-A-Wish®. It inspires us to grant wishes that change the lives of the kids we serve. It compels us to be creative in exceeding the expectations of every wish kid. It drives us to make our donated resources go as far as possible.

Most of all, it's the founding principle of our vision to grant the wish of every eligible child.

Wishes are more than just a nice thing. And they are far more than gifts, or singular events in time. Wishes impact everyone involved - wish kids, volunteers, donors, sponsors, medical professionals and communities. The impact varies. For wish kids, just the act of making their wish come true can give them the courage to comply with their medical treatments. Parents might finally feel like they can be optimistic. And still others might realize all they have to offer the world through volunteer work or philanthropy.

Whatever the odds, whatever the obstacles ... wishes find a way to make the world better.

There are people who can read that with a positive mind-set, and simply applaud the organisation and its viewpoint. And there are others, and I am one of them, who find it all deeply problematic (even though, of course, I have no real right to comment, not being either a dying child or the parent of one. All of these comments are written from a privileged perspective, and god knows how I would feel if anything happened to my son). It is problematic, not least because it fails to take into account the fact that such donations might be better spent on finding cures for terminal diseases, rather than a day swimming with dolphins or a trip to Disney World. And what happens to these kids the day after their wish has come true? When they are back in the hospital bed with nothing now to dream of but their long and painful decline?

How do we face the horrific and impossibly bleak reality of a seven year old dying in pain, with nothing to look forward to but an end to the suffering? How does one write about such a thing without descending into maudlin pathos and mawkish, oprah-style sob-stories?

Elkin shows us how. You do it with prose firing on all cylinders, prose which uses all the tricks and techniques available to it. You do it with humour and sorrow, with an unflinching and unromanticised gaze. This takes Greatness. Elkin has it. We should be grateful for that.

[L.S. Popovich · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Magic Kingdom is bound to arouse mixed feelings from many readers. If you approach it as a playground for linguistic experimentation, it succeeds in entertaining. From most other perspectives, I felt, it failed to compel me. The forceful writing Elkin is known for is here in evidence, but the scenario makes for a long, dull ride.

Beginning with a shamefully incompetent, off-putting, regurgitative, slapdash, silly, irrelevant, pathetic, and harrowingly awkward Introduction by Rick Moody, I was immediately put on guard. I'd read Elkin's book Living End. My opinion of that work plummeted as the page count increased. He seemed, at the time, an inconsistent writer with major talent, who might start a book well, only to go off his rocker midway, as if flipping up his middle finger at the reader who had the gall to enjoy what he had been doing while sane, so he could glory in his own insanity. This novel marks out its course after a short, unrealistic episode, assuming layers of importance and grandeur after the shaggy dog story of its beginning. This is a journalistic look at dying children, but it becomes a grotesque display of exploitive descriptions. It might have been deep, meaningful or heartbreaking. In a sense it is, but you have look past the fireworks. Elkin calls attention to every garish flaw in our troupe of unfortunately doomed children. Not only are they physically appalling when reduced to mere carnival spectacles, but they prove to be morally bankrupt, as if in result of their unfair lot in life. Elkin has no restraint when it comes to casting the black light over his characters' stained sheets. We are given such details as never vacate the mind of unsuspecting readers till their dying day.

As with other Elkins, humor abounds, but the wit can be mean, in my opinion. Most good satirists give up their compunctions, hang ups, and filters, and delight in exposing the worst blemishes of our nature without batting an eye. I would have appreciated all of the care and delicate nuance that went into the massive, page-sprawling paragraphs of description if I had bought in to the other thin aspects on offer. It lacked exploration, where it might have benefited from tension, emotional investment was wanting, as I perused with a sigh all of the infantile fixations going on within the text. Am I supposed to be impressed that he can shock and awe with his verbose humor, autopsying the characters who might have provided backbone or humanity to his vacuous novel? I get that a potty-mouthed Mickey Mouse figure is bound to crack a few grins in the audience, but what about the rest of the conversations? The personalities of many of the players are touched on here and there, loathe to initiate any attachment, sympathy or comfort. The youngsters are as libidinous as their guide, and in groups only elevate the haphazard enterprise's goofy futility. I was much saddened by the novel. Not because I contemplated all of the meaningful questions Elkin posits, but because he limited his book to the least amusing observations of a very bright creator.

[Cody · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a tightrope walk, what an accomplishment! You have to be a master to handle this subject matter (which, of course, Elkin is) with any sort of grace. O, what grace. What mercy he affords our ill-doomed detachment of the walking dead. The Magic Kingdom perfectly balances the simultaneous pains and humors of life without ever dissolving into pity, something that would be easy to do considering.

This is a celebration of existence—best witnessed in the virtuosic ‘Parade of the Normal’ chapter—as more than window-dressing for death. Death’s blinkered omnipotence and inchoate myopia as soon as we draw our first breath. There’s no avoiding it, but through Elkin’s lens we are allowed to glimpse the lucky card we drew, the long matchstick. Read this when you need affirmation that your life is nowhere near the shit deal it could be. I’ll be swimming in the waters of The Jungle Cruise with my little blue girl.

[PaperBird · Rating 1 out of 5]

Dinner party, guy in a circle, tells a story, one by one people leave, until it's just you, guy keeps telling the story, to just you, and won't stop, he's in a wheelchair. Your eyes glaze over. You look down at the drink in your hand. It's empty.

[Josh Friedlander · Rating 4 out of 5]

A thrillingly unique book. Weird topic, baroque sentence structures (everything is repeated in increasingly rare synonyms, like a hyper-verbose echo), a plot that wends through Buckingham Palace and Disney World in a morbid, yet matter-of-fact, monotone. Elkin lived much of his later life with Multiple Sclerosis, and this chronicle of pain and palliative care in the land of magic consumerism suggests that all of us - with moles, flab, nostril hair and varicose veins - are suffering, or temporarily in abeyance. Beginning with a death, and then spinning out into the worlds of its (mostly) terminally ill heroes, this story lands one mordant punchline after another. Poised at the edge of the abyss, it seems not to want to take sides, merely to point out how strange it all is.

[Arwen56 · Rating 3 out of 5]

Romanzo originalissimo e notevole, anche se forse non adatto a tutti. Cosa abbiamo in buona sostanza? Una mezza dozzina di bambini affetti da malattie devastanti e destinati a morte certa, nonché un’altra mezza dozzina di adulti affetti da fissazioni di vario genere che dovrebbero essere le loro guide nel corso di una cosiddetta “vacanza da sogno” a Disney World, in Florida. Va da sé che il risultato è abbastanza esplosivo.

Ma se, date le premesse, vi aspettate una narrazione che stimoli le lacrime o smuova la commozione, siete in errore. Niente di più lontano dal vero, benché, a volte, alcune frasi siano davvero struggenti nella loro implacabile e nuda logica (Se ho l’età per morire, allora ho anche l’età per fumare dice ad esempio uno di questi bambini, cui viene negato il permesso di provare una sigaretta).

Una trama vera e propria non c’è, non c’è una storia, non c’è neanche un vero e proprio inizio e una fine che porti da qualche parte. Quel che c’è è un’affabulazione continua, che sfocia in un constante fiorire di situazioni, ricordi, sogni, rimandi, immaginazioni, supposizioni e fatti, che catapultano il lettore in una dimensione vera e falsa al contempo, retta solamente dalla forza travolgente delle parole, cui bisogna abbandonarsi per poterla comprendere e accettare.

Non sempre questa poco lineare struttura può dirsi riuscita, ma più spesso sì. E’ gioco ed è tragedia. Ed è uno sguardo irriverente, ma non impietoso, verso il palcoscenico su cui noi tutti recitiamo semplicemente vivendo.

A me è piaciuto.

[Dolceluna ♡ · Rating 4 out of 5]

E' possibile ironizzare su dei temi scottanti e paurosi come la malattia infantile e la morte? E' lecito suscitare nel lettore risa in maniera così genuina e spontanea quando non ci sarebbe altro da fare che piangere e piangere?
Stanley Elkin, una delle voci più interessanti della narrativa postmoderna americana, ha accettato questa sfida ambiziosa, regalandoci una stralunata fiaba tragicomica. Quella dell'inglese Eddy Bale, che, devastatato psicologicamente dalla morte del figlioletto e abbandonato subito dopo dalla moglie, decide di organizzare un viaggio vacanza a Disneyworld per un gruppo di sette bambini affetti da rarissime malattie terminali, una sorta di regalo finale in un regno fatato per sette piccoli condannati alla morte. Tra le vicende di questi poveri protagonisti e quelle personali dei loro strampalati accompagnatori, nel Regno Magico di Tapolino e della Bella Addormentata accadrà veramente di tutto. E alla fin fine, si piangerà con un sorriso sulle labbra, o forse si riderà con un'amara lacrima pronta a scendere. Questo geniale romanzo di Elkin, che fa della morte il suo tema centrale senza suscitare pietà o imporre moralismi, non è facile da capire e apprezzare, così come non è facile capire e apprezzare tutto ciò che va oltre gli schemi in cui siamo abituati a stare. Se fosse un quadro sarebbe un capolavoro di Andy Warhol, se fosse un oggetto sarebbe un dolce confetto rosa scagliato su uno sfondo nero, se fosse una figura retorica sarebbe un ossimoro, come una dolce morte o un'amara risata, un accostamento tra due elementi tanto diversi da risvegliare nel nostro spirito sentimenti vistosamente contrastanti. Anche la scrittura, con frasi che spesso sembrano infinite, non è facile da seguire, ma non c'è da stupirsene, vuole riprodurre i pensieri, devastati e confusi, dei personaggi, chiaramente privi di una forma sintattica precisa e organizzata.
Blasfemo? Esilarante? Pretenzioso? Giudicatelo voi.

[Laura · Rating 5 out of 5]

La manera en que Elkin expande y contrae, intensifica, convierte en delirio, todo lo que toca, es aquí INSUPERABLE. Amantes del humor negro, negrísimo, y también tierno, tiernísimo, A POR ÉL.

[Splendini]

"Mia moglie mi ha piantato. Ho perso un figlio. Non ho una vita già abbastanza piena?"

Me la sono cercata, non c'è che dire.
Di Elkin avevo amato Il condominio e la sua bravura è palese. Ti smarrisce in periodi quasi spiraliformi che sono un vero incanto.
Ma un romanzo che parla di un padre che perde il figlio piccolo dopo indicibili patimenti e che per questo decide di regalare il "viaggio della vita" a Disney World ad altri sette bambini affetti dai più assortiti e disgustosi mali incurabili, per quanto sia stato definito - e a ragione - un intelligente esempio di graffiante humor nero - finirà per cadere in ovvie trappole e, nonostante la bella scrittura, negli inevitabili struggimenti, con tutti i cliché del caso, binomio morte-sesso, disperazione e tenerezza, con l'aggravante di alcune pagine davvero pesanti da digerire e alcuni dettagliucci fisiologici che restano tenacemente aggrappati alle sinapsi.
Tra pietas e pathos a un polo e un umorismo grottesco e impietoso all'altro, il libro resta lì a metà, non riesce a superare in modo convincente la sfida di una trama così insidiosa e troppo ambiziosa.

[Callie Zucker · Rating 5 out of 5]

five hundred million stars wouldn’t even cover it. the funniest, most wretched and delightful and masterful book i’ve probably ever read. with such a mastery of words, who even needs the trappings of plot—but then to have the BEST possible plot anyway, and never fall into sentimentality, or apathy, or misanthropy, make me feel so fucking stunned to be alive, so thrilled about the most upsetting most depraved most wretched parts of life. so thoroughly floored. you may never see fuck street again

[Peter Landau · Rating 4 out of 5]

THE MAGIC KINGDOM is a comic novel by Stanley Elkin, which is comic to a degree, but very novel. The story of taking terminally ill children on a dream vacation to Disney World is a premise that didn't hold much promise for me, it seemed like a gangster going to a therapist or cops and robbers, but then THE SOPRANOS and THE WIRE are two of my favorite recent TV series. And like those shows, plot is not the engine driving this book. It's the style of the writing and the characters, who are written like black holes in which Elkin's manic prose spirals around and digs down to the core of their experiences in dizzying bouts of dense paragraphs made up of rhythmic sentences that either wowed me or lost me. I do wish someone would write a comic novel that was funny. Jack Handey's THE STENCH OF HONOLULU was one of the few that made me laugh out laugh. But then humor, for me, is best seen not read. I need a pie in the face, which looks a lot funnier than it sounds, so someone out there write a pie in the face so I can taste the cream and humiliation.

[Jeremy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Yeah, it was a weird book.

It was about weakness in the face of a finite life, and for this Elkin used terminally ill children and their caretakers.

Of course Elkin never wrote a child character in his life, so the children are these wizened little goblins and elves, sometimes spouting more wisdom and displaying more reason than the adults, which is to say: Any at all.

The adults in the book: A father obsessed because of his son's death from a rare untreatable disease, a compulsive masturbating nurse whose womb can only bear monsters, a doctor obsessed with the "fact" that life's natural state is disease, and who is deeply distracted when confronted with a perfect specimen of the human body, which is in the person of another (male), homosexual nurse, who steals the blueprints for Disney's "It's A Small World" animatronic display for his partner (a wax museum curator) via an illicit tryst with the hot attendant at the haunted house.

This one is genuinely comic. It's not like those Roth books that are called "comic genius" but which are actually only mildly funny, and that only occasionally, but are called comic because their irony is painful and thick. No, this book is hilarious. But it's also depressing, deeply, and revealing of human nature (if you buy into the author's thinking--I do).

Elkin finds his love of humanity in observing our predictable reactions to a life too difficult to bear sanely.

[Shane · Rating 2 out of 5]

The style of this book, it's diction so to speak, the phrasing and overall treatment of every single paragraph (also including, but not limited to the many asides (many asides coming within asides of asides themselves) stuffed together like soldiers in a trench, shivering for their lives with the enemy not 50 yards away, like money, forgotten, but stashed under a matress patiently waiting for a use that will never come), because everything has a reasonable explanation, made this book a more frustrating read than it needed to be, than it ever should have been, than it could ever hope to acheive on its own, than any other book might aspire to be. I found myself spending more of my time trying to keep track of the multitude of asides, seemingly unrelated (yet with a reasonable explanation, no doubt), occuring in characters heads over split seconds, but in real, hard, dependable, concrete, tangible pages sometimes taking upwards of no less than a chapter to come to fruition. As I mentioned before, everything has a reasonable explanation, and this review will stand for my rating of two out of a possible not one, not two, not three, not four, and less than six stars.

[Aleksej Nilič Kirillov · Rating 4 out of 5]

Si può sorridere di un gruppo di bambini malati terminali diretti a Disneyworld al fine di passare una settimana spensierata in attesa del trapasso? Si può, si può. Il black humor di Elkin è lucido e spassoso senza mai oltrepassare il limite, l'idea di per sé è veramente incredibile ed il libro si articola in mille situazioni vorticose che riescono a trascinare il lettore in un riso a denti stretti alternato a momenti potenzialmente commoventi. Consigliatissimo!

[Pino Sabatelli · Rating 4 out of 5]

È possibile raccontare la malattia, il dolore e, addirittura, la morte di un bambino in maniera sfacciatamente incurante di qualsiasi preoccupazione per il politically correct, tenendosi alla larga dai trabocchetti della retorica e dalle lacrimose trappole dell’emotività e, nonostante tutto, scrivere un gran libro? Dopo aver letto questo romanzo so che la risposta è: sì.
La recensione completa su http://www.ifioridelpeggio.com/magic-...

[Lisa Vegan · Rating 5 out of 5]

A hilarious book about terminally ill children. Really. A take off on a “make a wish” type of scenario involving a group of sick children on a trip to Disney’s The Magic Kingdom. Wickedly funny. It’s mostly satire. but the kids are interesting. And I think I particularly enjoyed it because at the time I was a Disney fan.

[Stuart · Rating 1 out of 5]

The comedy was laboured, the social observation weak, the language obfuscatory to the point of despair.

And, worse, it was really quite uninteresting, despite a potentially strong subject.

[j · Rating 3 out of 5]

As I am learning, Elkin is a very peculiar writer. He is clearly skilled with language, and his style is unique. Between this and The Franchiser, one can clearly see a writer who prizes prose over plotting -- but Elkin is also the concocter of wonderful ideas. I was drawn to this novel by the pitch black and irresistable premise. Where Elkin takes that premise defies all expectations one could possess or guesses one could make as to the content of this work. That is part of the nagging non-joy of this book: namely, the lack of any gratification. This is bleak and brutal novel, full of incredibly long bricks of puked, unbroken text -- many of which feel intended moreso as devices to purposefully make the reader weary than as any sort of badge of rigorous chest-puffing linguistic machismo (this fact is, ironically, quite refreshing). That the bulk of this book will be like this is not immediately apparent, because the opening chapter is a perfect setting of the scene, complete with a devilish little punchline. And then, again early on, Elkin crafts an absolutely ingenious sequence wherein the children appear in each other's dreams, interacting with their disparate imaginings of what the titular theme park will be like once they arrive.

Arriving at the park plunges the novel into murky, scattered, and sometimes tedious waters. Elkin could almost be applauded for hinting at the concept of pitch black comedy while never quite being comedic (this is contrary to The Franchiser, which is quite a funny book). A satirical angle seems obvious, until you actually read the book and find that Elkin has instead taken such a non-obvious approach. There's something of a beautiful juxtaposition here -- that of the Disney park being the ultimate idealization of what escapism is, and that the protagonist's journey there is contrarily specifically designed as something of a wallowing exercise, as anti-escapism, as a grand reminder of his life's greatest heartbreak: the death of his young son.

The finale, where a sex scene is staged and described with linguistic fervor approaching the cosmic, is something to behold. And all throughout are smaller character moments that are beautifully sad: one child's panic while riding the Haunted Mansion, an impulsive and desperate shopping spree, a similar manic arcade trip where one child goes frantically from machine to machine sliding quarters into slots and letting others play. I don't know what everything adds up to, other than a vaguely sick feeling.

[Graham P · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Magic Kingdom is a deathbed comedy, as instigating as it is downright insane. But the catch is that it's so fucking funny. Elkin is one of the literary kings of the uncouth joke that makes you cry when the punchline slaps you in the face. His words and his playfully punkass structures are like gasoline on the ill-prepared fire. He'll inundate in the sensory and sometimes, let you catch your breath. In this situational sitcom, set in all places --Disney -- he careens outside the paragraphs and pages, detailing the inner and outer worlds of these wonderfully painted characters. Quite the achievement.

Boy, am I going to miss the gang: Janet Order, her blue skin and hazardous hole in her warm heart; Noah Cloth, the wanna-be capitalist whose bone tumors deprive him even of the simple task of counting money; Benny Maxine, the victim of Gaucher's disease, a lumpy vaudevillian whose smart-cracks like a comedian, equal parts Borsch Belt and London wise-guy; Rena Morgan, a magician of the handkerchief, all mucus and noxious fillings of the lungs, a true sweetheart in need of a hug; Charles Mudd-Gaddis, the progerian old man only 7 years old, a verbose tyke with a hair-thin temper, rightly so; Lydia Conscience, the bearer of an ovarian tumor the size of a late-term pregnancy, a dreamer; and Tony Ward, the pale and prone tyke, an enslaved by infection spectator of all the charades that befall this gang. They're like the 7 Dwarves to the dysfunctional adults who guide and chaperone these sick children on their last magical tour of Disney).

Elkin doesn't give a flying hoot and holler, and god bless him for it. He's become one of my favorite writers, so much so that I've purchased the bulk of his novels in fear that they'll go out of print. God, what a shame that would be.

To Elkin: "Make me feel dumb, but at least give me wonder."

On getting the shit end of the stick: "...selling all manner of arguments and disputes right down to the thorny question of taste itself: what to do for instance if only yellow balloons remained to be distributed? Who should get the caramel, who must take the toffee..." Elkin sure knew how to write about those getting that shit end of the stick.

(and btw, Mickey Mouse, he sort of is a dickhead)

[Max Mcgrath · Rating 2 out of 5]

What a drag....

[🐴 🍖]

jeez anything w/ the kids interacting is so so good... it's wild that basically all the vivacity in this springs from the characters that are terminally ill. conversely whenever it focused on the adults my interest level just fell off a cliff, & elkin did that thing he always does where he says something and rephrases it, he separates it w/ a comma and states the same thing with different wording, he adds a clause where he reiterates what he just said using synonyms. tres gass-y; tres gassy. i lament the book that coulda been if the focus were a little more tightly on the children, w/ a few more hijinks tossed in; that being said i don't regret reading, esp in light of that fantastic opening chapter where bale petitions the queen (and the punchline thereof!)

[Andrew]

It's not the novel The Living End is, and it does ramble a bit, but it's still Stanley Elkin's comic voice. That being said, Elkin has set himself up for one hell of a challenge in writing a book like this-- writing a book about dying kids that is actually funny and actually humane is no small task, and there are very few writers who could accomplish it, in the same way there are very few genuinely humorous writers. 90% of supposedly “comic” fiction tends to be both unfunny, and bad fiction.

[Karen Newton · Rating 1 out of 5]

I couldn't even get through the first chapter. This book used a lot of big vocabulary which I could use context clues to figure out but it just wasn't a fun read. I like the idea of helping children with needs but I couldn't enjoy it so I stopped reading.

[Eric · Rating 4 out of 5]

An odd book. Not exactly laugh-out-loud funny, and there were times when Elkin's verbosity reduced me to skimming, so often I couldn't really follow the thread of the various characters' thought processes, but somehow I enjoyed the book anyway. Just had to be open to the writing style and submit to it. Elkin doesn't have nearly as much contempt for Disney as I would have expected, from either the premise or the introduction (by Rick Moody, whoever that is), and the satire isn't nasty, or even particularly dark. Everybody in the book--or most of them, anyway--seem to have good intentions; more often than not they are thwarted by their own shortcomings, neuroses, psychological self-ignorance, realizing their mistakes only too late, but they tried.

This is one of those books that pokes around in the absurdity of the human condition and the practical mundanity of all of those Big Questions we trouble ourselves about--life, death, the universe, everything. Consumerism isn't necessarily excoriated as an evil in itself so much as a symptom of that larger search for meaning. You reach out blindly for Truth and find that the only thing within your grasp is a Mickey plush. Ah, well, that's something to hold at night.

(Incidentally, this book also touches on the Goofy/Pluto disparity a year before Stand by Me. although I have no memory of whether that conversation was taken from King's earlier novella or was invented for the film.)

[Phil reading_fastandslow · Rating 4 out of 5]

I ripped through this one! A grieving father escorts a group of very sick/disabled children through Disney World, accompanied by caretakers whose own bodily fixations are treated with unnerving frankness. Writing while living with multiple sclerosis, Stanley Elkin understood how disability is flattened into sentiment or weaponized for moral instruction. Rather than becoming trauma p*rn, this is an uplifting and irreverent comedy.

What emerges, insistently, is a portrait of disabled life that refuses to behave. Elkin gives the children voices full of vanity, humor, boredom, longing, and curiosity, including desires that are physical, private, and inconvenient. They want rooms of their own, unsupervised moments, the freedom to imagine pleasure without correction. Again and again, the novel reverses society’s stare, allowing these children to assess the so-called normal bodies around them with the same blunt curiosity usually reserved for them. In doing so, Elkin dismantles the fantasy of bodily normalcy altogether.

Disability here is simply a condition of being alive, no more or less strange than any other. The novel’s argument is loud, messy, and deliberately impolite: diagnosis does not cancel appetite, and fragility does not negate fullness. Elkin refuses pity, refuses uplift, and refuses silence. What he offers instead is something rarer and riskier, a vision of disabled life that insists on desire, mischief and contradiction.

[Manudo Mcmanus · Rating 4 out of 5]

Magic Kingdom es la historia de un grupo de adultos disfuncionales (lo son por su forma de relacionarse con los demás) y de un puñado de niños con enfermedades terminales que emprenden un viaje juntos a DisneyWorld con la esperanza de que, de alguna manera, sea emocionalmente sanador para los críos. Parece mentira, pero probablemente este sea uno de los libros más "humanos" que he leído. Es una maravilla que, partiendo de una premisa con semejante carga de humor negro, Elkin construya un relato tragicómico tan vital y a la vez diseccione a la perfección las miserias de sus personajes mostrando tan bien su patetismo y de rebote el nuestro. Lo que no me ha gustado es la elevada frecuencia con la que Elkin recurre al texto entre paréntesis y la longitud exagerada de estos incisos (algunos ocupan prácticamente una página entera), que muy a menudo dificultan la lectura. Si no fuera por esto último, lo recomendaría con mucha fuerza.

[Becca · Rating 2 out of 5]

I felt this novel was reminiscent of Dave Eggers' A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Like Eggers, Elkin uses a childish, outlandish voice as an attempt at not only humor, but a grief-driven narrative which knows little intellect for all the pain he has suffered from the loss of a child.

However, the prose is no masterpiece. It is written in the urgency of a grieving person, beautiful in its cause and using heart-centered, poetic prose. But it is not finely crafted or slaved over in the way more effective narratives can be. But this voice has value, as grief is not a crafted emotion either.
Elkin's writing style is an artful Pollock-like attempt at making a narrative of the lack of structure that grief abides to.

[Paul]

I honestly don’t know how I feel about this. Was it a black comedy? I didn’t laugh, but it was funny. I guess it was just too sad. Sick kids should be off limits. But nothing should be off limits, that’s not what art is about. And there’s the divorce, and little Liam being Britain’s most well known sick kid, and the Mickey Mouse scene in the hotel room. Well, the writing itself was terrific, I found the digressions to be highly entertaining. I liked most, if not all, of the characters. It’s just so morbid, funereal, and downright sad. I’ll need to let this one marinate for a bit.