The Franchiser

by Stanley Elkin, William H. Gass (Foreword)

Ben Flesh is one of the men "who made America look like America, who made America famous." He collects franchises, traveling from state to state, acquiring the brand-name establishments that shape the American landscape. But both the nation and Ben are running out of energy. As blackouts roll through the West, Ben struggles with the onset of multiple sclerosis, and the growing realization that his lifetime quest to buy a name for himself has ultimately failed.

Genres: Fiction, Novels, Literature, 20th Century, American, Jewish, Humor

342 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1976

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 5 out of 5]

The Franchiser is the best Stanley Elkin’s novel that I’ve read so far and it is a unique masterpiece.
Consumerism is evil. The more we consume the emptier we become. Consumption and hedonism corrupt personality, society and culture. The Franchiser is a tale of the ultimate consumerism that turns the main character into the human pulp.

Thus, ends are justified by means, since all means, if they work, are ultimately equal, that is, efficient. It is only ends which are unequal. We would both agree that some ends are nobler than others. Since means are interchangeable then, it is only ends which ever need to be justified.

We live in a constant search for our due place in the world but in the process both we and our world keep deteriorating slowly.

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 3 out of 5]

This frustrated and tickled me in equal measure. I adored the frenetic pace, the comedic chutzpah and cartwheeling craziness in the manner of Ishmael Reed or D. Keith Mano’s Take Five. The language was serpentine, maximal and gushed out like golden fonts from a tyke’s diaper (or nappy, if you’re British, which you aren’t, are you?) BUT. And here’s a big but . . . I like big buts and I cannot lie. This exhaustive style, in today’s hypertwitchy reading world, lends itself to the weary page-scan, the lazy skip-scan-skip until the dialogue kicks in or a paragraph break finally pops up from the descriptive shrubbery. So I think that’s Elkin’s downfall as a novelist: he’s too damn sesquipedalian in this age of the decircumlocutious. But I thought the ride was a scream: Ben is a sublime comedic schmuck, a perverse inversion of the American Dream, and his adopted family of afflicted brothers and sisters tenderises the savage. BUT. There are moments of sexual wish-fulfilment (i.e. seventies retro stuff), a little tasteless satiric cruelty (killing off his cast of lovelies in ha-ha-disgusting ways), and that endless gush of words floods what would otherwise be a bitter and lean satire. Elkin’s own troubles with MS are channelled through Ben in a detached but “recognised” way, i.e. he doesn’t drown the problem in humorous abandon. But he leaves us too mired in his vast imaginative bog to touch a tangible emotion. I will read another Elkin. [P.S. This book has the ugliest cover Dalkey has ever designed! Look at it!]

[Jonathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Elkin is my comfort food, my junk-comfort food - all those lovely flamboyant calorie-filled sentences that fly by and tickle me in all the right places.

I have loved others of his more than this, which felt a little unsubtle and obvious in its satire at times, but would still recommend it without hesitation.

[Krok Zero · Rating 5 out of 5]

An amazing panoply of rants, gags, absurdities, theses, vignettes; an overwhelming orgy of language, a brilliant exercise in aestheticized awareness; a spirited allegory of bicentennial America, the Great Gatsby of the '70s; a set of outrageous comic conceits, ever-expanding, shocking, puzzling — yet not a cartoon, always inclusive of a wide range of authentic human experience to transform, mangle, mock or respect. Stanley Elkin: the funniest great American novelist or the greatest funny American novelist that you probably haven't read. So stop probably not having read him.

[Graham P · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ben Flesh. Born from the sweat of immigrants, cut from the cloth of mass-produced materials, force fed The American Dream from an all-you-can-eat buffet. The Franchiser is about America told through a capitalistic insanity, a modern-day road novel about a sick man traversing a sick country during its bicentennial celebration, a man not only on a mission to acquire businesses--the golden arches, the dairy queens, the car washes--but have his voice heard in each of the 50 states, only to find himself losing meaning, losing himself.

What makes this novel so brilliant is its language, especially Elkin's dialogue coming from the mouths of the morally unhinged, the ribald and ever so random moments of glorious madness. It is downright fucking hilarious at points, and terribly sad at its core. Case in point, his surrogate family made up of twins and triplets, and all of them stricken with carnivalesque illnesses (one born with her heart outside her lungs, and another born with rampant, uncontrollable racism), and of Flesh's MS, where his body betrays his senses, disallowing him any comfort in the modern luxuries of modern living, the tactile losing all its textures. This is a brilliant novel. Stanley Elkin is a genius and it's a shame we don't hear his name much in the literary circles of today.

(advice from a hitchhiker)
"Get a normality. Live on the plains. Take a warm milk at bedtime. Be bored and find happiness. Grays and muds are the decorator colors of the good life. Don't you know anything? Speed kills and there's cholesterol in excitement. Cool it, cool it. The ordinary is all we can handle. Now beat it. Goodbye."

(Ben Flesh on hiring the disenfranchised)
"Bringing on line entire generations of those who live with expectations lowered like the barometric pressure, who neither read the fortune cookie not spell out their own horoscopes in the funny papers. Can you imagine such indifference? Not despair, not even resignation finally, just conditioning so complete you'd think bad luck was a congenital defect or a post-hypnotic suggestion...last hired, first fired...strange, unexplained lacunae in their curriculum vitae."

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was terrific! I really was blown away that I could feel so emotional and swept away by what I thought was going to be a silly satirical novel on how capitalism churns out stuff we don’t really need (or something). It oscillated between thoughtful and provocative to hilarious and gut-wrenchingly sad. It was a joy to read about the dance studio party, and just hilarious the relationship he has with his 17 god children. Ice cream melting, and the hospital scene. Ben Flesh is a really awkward guy that talks a little too much or is just friendly enough but is sort of unnerving and makes you want to duck out of the conversation he’s trapped you in. But he’s also very smart, resourceful, competent, conscientious, and profoundly lonely. His illness, and his description of his best friend at the end of the book almost had me in tears. While the idea there’s more to life than wealth or success is far from a new one, the way that Elkin spun it together had me engaged start to finish. Highly recommended.

[Rand · Rating 4 out of 5]

Novel as manic excess of Americana made taut by the panic of existence.

In what other book does the main character lick Colonel Sanders's fingers and then proceed to discuss authenticity with the Chicken Prince?

Moments of sheer hilarity, (very) brief interludes of tedium punctuated by brilliance following still yet more brilliance. Elkin's consummate style is sustained throughout. If you've read any of his other books, you'll want to read this one too. One character from another of his novels even makes a brief cameo!

excerpt:

He rises, intending to go to his room, when his eye is caught by the map on the big display board opposite the registration desk. The concentric hundred-mile circles make the states behind them a sort of target, twelve hundred miles of American head as seen through a sniperscope. He goes up to the map, to dartboard America, bull's-eyed, Ptolemaic-Ringgold. He examines it speculatively. And suddenly sees it not as a wheel of distances but of options. It's as if he hasn't seen it properly before. Though there are dozens of road maps in the glove compartment of his car, he has rarely referred to them. Not for a long while. Not since the Interstate made it possible to travel the country in great straight lines. Why, there are signs for Memphis and Tulsa and Chicago in St. Louis now. Signs for Boston and Washington, D.C. in the Bronx. Seen this way, in swaths of hundred-mile circles like shades in rainbows, he perceives loops of relationship. He is equidistant from the Atlantic Ocean, from the Gulf ofMexico and Pine Bluff, Arkansas, and Centralia, Illinois. He could as easily be in Columbus, Ohio as in Petersburg, Virginia. New Orleans rings him, Covington, Kentucky, does. He is surrounded by place, by tiers of geography like bands of amphitheater. He is the center. If he were to leave now, striking out in any direction, northwest to Nashville, south to Panama City, Florida, it would make no difference. He could stand before other maps like this in other Travel Inns. Anywhere he went he would be the center. He would pull the center with him, the world rearranging itself about him like a woman smoothing her skirt, touching her hair.

[Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

"Past the orange roof and turquoise tower, past the immense sunburst of the green and yellow sign, past the golden arches, beyond the low buff building, beside the discrete hut, the dark top hat on the studio window shade, beneath the red and white longitudes of the enormous bucket, coming up to the thick shaft of the yellow arrow piercing the royal-blue field, he feels he is at home. Is it Nashville? Elmira, New York? St. Louis County? A Florida key? The Illinois arrowhead? Indiana like a holster, Ohio like a badge? Is he north? St. Paul, Minn.? Northeast? Boston, Mass.? The other side of America? Salt Lake? Los Angeles? At the bottom of the country? The Texas udder? Where? In Colorado's frame? Wyoming like a postage stamp? Michigan like a mitten? The chipped, eroding bays of the Northwest? Seattle? Bellingham, Washington?

Somewhere in the packed masonry of states."

...I will never be this good.

[Brent Legault · Rating 2 out of 5]

I respect Elkin's writing, but that doesn't mean I like it. He presses hard. He thinks big. He wants his words to swallow the world. But often, he just sputters and flaps. I don't know, it could just be an older sense of humor that doesn't travel well, that's overripe, that bruises easy. Remember when Milton Berle was funny? Neither do I.

[Cody · Rating 3 out of 5]

It’s been too long now since I read this to give it a proper review. It’s Elkin, so read it. May I recommend my erotic memoir, My Bed, My Prison: Confessions of an Polymorphously Perverse Bed-Ridden Autoerotic, as well?

[Nick · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book is flatly ridiculous from the start and keeps freewheeling it to the end. It would be easy to not like the book, but the mix of neuroticism and mass culture commentary was interesting for me. The experience is uneven, a few scenes miss or fell flat for me but there were several high points as well, none better (for me) than the Fred Astaire dancehall speech within the first 100 pages.

Recommended for fans of Gass/DFW who can tolerate raunchy humor that wouldn’t be out of place in a Tom Robbins book.

[Matthew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Elkin's a master of the huckster's cant, everything always lurching into the transcendent ecstasis of the mundane. I always like visiting this fantasy palace he built out of 2x4s and three-penny nails, where the impure and the average are exalted, where the implausible voice is the only thing to hang onto, where the characters spin wildly out of control in the still-steady hands of an author who always knew what the hell was really going on.

He was a mean old son of a bitch, in the words of a friend who knew him--threatening even from his wheelchair--and I wish I hadn't driven tired and newly poor into Saint Louis, ten years too late to meet him.

[Chris Gray · Rating 3 out of 5]

"How do you live? Where do you go?"
"I live by my itinerary," Ben said.

Elkin must have been more than a little bummed that JR was published seven months earlier. For my time, that's a more fun, accomplished book on a runaway, capitalist America. This had its own quirks and excitement, too. I bet I will return to Mr. Elkin.

[R. · Rating 3 out of 5]

Since the conclusion of hostilities in the American Civil War, that mysterious "they" that throw the levers and push the buttons that make the country run, that "they" has pursued the single minded goal of transforming the United States from a plural mass to a singular amalgamation. No longer is the United States an "are" it has become an "is". Fueled by the efficiency of one size fits all retail America, driving through Dodge City is driving through Tallahassee is driving through Amarillo is driving through your town.

Elkin's book "The Franchiser" captures the mid-life crisis of a consumer age, where comfort is found in the repetitive sameness of modern amenity and the ativism of unadulterated consumerism. In "The Franchiser", Elkin traps Ben Flesh in a familial version of this sameness with a collection of twins and triplets, his god-cousins, to whom he is bound by a death bed promise of the vig. Flesh translates his personal sense of duty to this unified mass of unrelated family into a personal conquest of the nation's highways and bi-ways as Flesh becomes a commanding officer in the war to spread uniformity to the masses through the purchase of franchise businesses. Flesh spends half an adulthood providing for and pleasing the god-cousins while he drives, alone and sullen, across the country checking on his fleet of franchises.

In the midst of his travels, Flesh becomes symptomatic of multiple sclerosis. The man who spent his early years engulfed in the sounds and smells of suburbia, and all that its wage earners have to offer, suddenly has a terrifying internal short circuit of the senses. In large part, Flesh's MS focuses his attention to the vast gulf between himself and any real family.

While the book is celebrated for its frenetic reference to the stalwarts of the consumer culture (it is, it seems, the economic companion to Robert Coover's 500 page pop culture pre-Wikipedia titled "The Public Burning" or a literary link to Tom Wait's lyrics to "Step Right Up"), many modern readers will struggle with the prose and the pacing. Still, "The Franchiser" is a good Polaroid of what we collectively once were when oil and inflation supplanted email and Facebook as a mis-mash of culture and national security.

[Heronimo Gieronymus · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read my first Elkin, CRIERS & KIBITZERS, KIBITZERS & CRIERS, a once-much-remarked-upon collection of early pupal bits and bobs, not half so gloriously frenzied as the mincemeat merriments to come, just over two years ago and just short of my thirty-seventh birthday. I have since read seven Elkin novels. For awhile I thought that my coming to Elkin so late--a writer I was practically born to get down prostrate before in paroxysms of worship, holiest of holies as he has fast become--was regrettable, product of an egregious oversight. But, really, was it all that regrettable? No, not really, not as such. I'm alive. I abide in faith that I'll be around awhile. And the older you get the more restorative the life-altering surprises, the more hopeful the knowledge that there have to be others that you have likewise not yet stumbled upon or backed up into. First read Elkin at thirty-six. At thirty-nine he pretty clearly has to be in All Time Top Five Writer range for me. Categorization as such being a personal thing. Hell, it hardly gets more personal. Those following along will be able to deduce that I must have written about eight Elkin Goodreads reviews since late 2016. Indeed. I have indeed. It is hard not to cover all the same bases each time one steps up to plate. When we talk about Elkin we of course talk about words, an avalanche of them, words like Hitchcock's birds descending on Bodega Bay, and we are likely as not to invoke the jazz soloist, at the very least take off from the notion, perhaps deploying sterling silver Elkinese, suggesting a renegade oompah John Coltrane wearing snakeskin boots and high on LSD 25. Elkin's good buddy William H. Gass wrote the intro included in the Dalkey edition of THE FRANCHISER. Good pals, and the two men who have gone furthest into the hills of American language for to hit the real paydirt. Because THE FRANCHISER tells the story of compulsive franchise-acquirer Ben Flesh, Gass is able to make a very fine joke, more telling than it might first appear, about the Word made Ben. One language master spiritedly tipping his fedora to another language master, quick ironic wink, they happen to be best friends. Though both men see language as a sprawling playset with near-infinite permutations promised by its innumerable moving parts, what Elkin does that Gass really doesn't, however, or at least not nearly so routinely, is demonstrate complete possession of the comic set piece and mastery of the architecture of gag, the anatomy of lark. Placed within the body of work, the Elkin oeuvre, THE FRANCHISER has to be right at the top of the list in terms of calculable honest-to-goodness audible laughs, distinct guffaws. At least as pertains to this reader. Sometimes when you get to a punchline (and a punchline here is only a very brief, perhaps illusory breather) you suddenly understand fully the journey you took there, the logistics of the setup, and you nearly collapse in awe. What do I do? Do I laugh? Or do I just let my jaw hang here in struck stupefaction? A reviewer should be less worried about spoiling plot points than ruing the routines. It is not for nothing that many (looking at you, John Leonard) invoke vaudeville and standup when assessing Elkin. So language is his thing. His whole raison d'etre. He is a mirthful fish in the water of it. THE FRANCHISER maybe more than any other Elkin I have read presents a rich buffet of nouns. American personhood and thingness. As a novel of a time and place, it is overloaded with stuff, what one character calls the "cargo of crap." It is a novel about consumerism in which going into business is itself a kind of manic shopping. It is about the emerging brand name homogenization, the strata of franchise. Ben Flesh buys franchises. He prefers to be called a "franchiser," he tells Colonel Sanders (I shit you not, though the reader is in more than one sense being shitted), instead of "franchisee," because the latter sounds too much like a cross between a Frenchman and a Chinaman. In one of Elkin's all time great wierdo conceits, we switch occasionally, in wildly vertiginous fashion, from third-person-omniscient to first-person-Ben-Flesh without ever being given the faintest notion of the presiding modus operandi behind this strategy of estrangement, ultimately serving as it does the careening carnivalesque craziness of the whole, ahem, enterprise. Highway-bound Ben Flesh, driving across America in his Cadillac (a new one every year), from one of his franchises to another, riffing, motormouthing, holding court like taking hostages. “Ben, the empire builder, the from-sea-to-shining-sea kid connecting the dots.” We come to understand this commercial leviathan that post-war America has become as mightily precarious, with its rolling brownouts, energy crises, and fluctuating interest rates. Civilization is precarious, as is the life of each fragile, mortal man, woman, and child caught up in it as though in an undertow. Mortality and infirmity are everywhere in Elkin. He returns again and again, naturally, himself an afflicted fellow. Ben Flesh, like Elkin, suffered a heart attack in his thirties and comes to be resolutely wracked by multiple sclerosis, the disease Elkin lived with most of his adult life. Elkin thus comes closer than he ever has here to writing directly about his own suffering, though of course he keeps matters conspicuously jolly, reminding us how much comes down to attitude. Then there are Flesh's godcousins. His godcousin guarantors, eighteen twins and triplets, all manifoldly identical, their own franchise, whom Colonel Sanders calls "Doppelgängsters," and each of whom has a ridiculous ailment that will take him or her out ridiculously. Flesh insistently reminds them that their deaths are not, have not been, and will not be ridiculous. Life is ridiculous. Ultimately that is Elkin's fairly congenial subject. Absurd, delirious life, with its pratfalls, misadventures, and benign humiliations. Or as he puts it: “ludicrous life, screwball existence, goofy being.” All of this counterpointed with reverent acknowledgement of the no-way-out-but-out ending. This is a novel that riffs prodigiously and repeatedly on the miracle of existence; ironically, sure, but one undervalued thing irony can do is oddly (offly) colour without selling short. Ben Flesh is not just some analogue for corporate insanity and rubber-stamped commercial ugliness. He throws himself into the unruly hilarity, giving as good as he gets, making giddy music out of dilapidated existence, turning everything into maelstrom and orgy. Hurtle yourself at life. Riches are abundant but time is in short supply. Do a little détournement, practice a little psychogeography of the highways and byways. And heed thy READER'S DIGEST: laughter, goddamnit, is the best medicine.

[Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

Stanley Elkin, "The Franchiser." Godine, 1976.

"The Franchiser" has been on my bookshelf for a long time. I think that I may have bought it through the old Daedalus Books catalog, which dates me as well as when I purchased it. (Also, at the halfway point, the binding split completely, and the book came apart. Poor glue. Time for a rubber band prosthetic)

Elkin is an award-winning novelist who spent his career at Washington University. William Gass wrote the introduction to the volume. Most interesting for me is that Elkin had multiple sclerosis, as does the protagonist of The Franchiser, Ben Flesh. Detailed portrays of disability in fiction are hard to come by. Too often, disability is treated superficially as a quick and easy symbol that embodies society’s ableist prejudices. Even with the rise and success of the disability rights movement in the last 50 years, it is is still difficult to find a fulsome portrayal of disability in fiction. What Elkin achieves here is a fulsome portrayal of multiple sclerosis, which he integrates with character development, the plot arc as well as commentary on American society in the third quarter of the twentieth century. Elkin bridges the reality of MS with its potential as literary signifier. "The Franchiser" is one of the best pieces of disability literature that I have read, maybe the best.

Elkin has a facility with language–words, with words–that can best be compared to Henry James. While James portrays well-to-do Americans and Europeans in the 19th and early 20th centuries, Elkin uses the same kind of linguistic facility for ordinary Americans in the third quarter of the 20th C. But while James is serious, in "The Franchiser" Elkin readily turns to humor, most often black, especially given the often keenly uncomfortable impact of the narrative. The protagonist, Ben Flesh, shares Elkin’s linguistic facility, for he too can take the wealth of knowledge, intelligence, and observation sitting in his head and quickly turn it into words. This facility manifests Flesh’s extraordinary talents, and it functions as a sad (tragic?) subversion of those talents as well.

The Franchiser seems a very American story, a cross between "Death of a Salesman" and Katherine Dunn’s "Geek Love," while also reverberating with Theodore Dreiser’s work and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s "The Beautiful and Damned." The book begins with Ben Flesh as a young man attending the Wharton School on the GI Bill. He has done well in school. His parents were killed in an accident, though, he is distant from his younger sister, and he doesn’t know what to do with his life. Fortuitously, on his deathbed Ben’s wealthy godfather gives Ben access to his wealth through his progeny (18 children), who take Ben under their collective wing as their godcousin. He has family, access to finances, and they give him the idea that gives his life direction: to become a franchiser. He buys a variety of diverse franchises all across the country and travels constantly in a late model Cadillac to maintain them. His only home, his only real anchor, is the godfamily’s house in Riverdale, NY, and he integrates into their lives financially, emotionally, and sexually. While on the road and looking after his business interests, he searches out authentic connections with others while also trying to improve the prospects of his many businesses. In both cases, he uses his facility with language. He is like an artist looking for creative, meaningful connections. Initially, Ben succeeds. His words are fast, and they are powerful. He seems to read people well, and they respond to him. But then he pushes things too far; his words go off the rails, things get strange, and he alienates himself from others. It is as if he loses the ability to read others, read social cues; it is almost like he is on the autism spectrum (but Elkin makes no mention of autism). Whenever Ben’s language heats up, and ideas, insights, sales pitches come faster and faster, things go off the rails. Nonetheless, Ben is smart and resourceful, and the Wharton School experience pays off: he makes money.

Multiple sclerosis and disability. There are two interwoven threads here. On the one hand, Elkin tracks the progress of Ben’s MS over decades as it appears, goes into remission, and returns more powerfully. Ben becomes hyper-aware of the symptoms and their manifestations in his body. He is aware that he is slowly losing control of his body and, by extension, his life. He conducts his business and travels through the distractions and pain of the MS; he would keep them separate, but he cannot, and the MS impacts how he does business, how he interacts with others. His language, even when running hot, cannot shield him or the world from the MS. On the other hand, the 18 siblings, born in sets of twins and triplets, are all disabled in some way (physically, emotionally, intellectually). This extended disabled family reminds me of Geek Love but without the intentionality, extremes of disability, or the weird cultish vocation. Just as Ben’s MS progresses in a downward spiral, so do the siblings disabilities: they function as a chorus. In response to his increasing disability/lessening abilities, Ben trims his franchises, trims his financial and business responsibilities. As the godcousins sicken, they trim their financial and familial connections with Ben. Disability leads to isolation and alienation, even despite the cohort of characters who might produce a sense of support and belonging. The self, one’s life, inexorably shrinks, just like the 1970s stagflation economy. This book was written well before the ADA and before the disability rights movement became a force in the US. It’s a sad story, accurate though.

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

William Gass remembers Stanley Elkin (audio).

[Erik F. · Rating 4 out of 5]

A dazzling wordsmith and satirist.

[Reet · Rating 1 out of 5]

I guess I don't need to read about another 1%er who helped make the united states the messed-up place it is today.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

9.5 / 10

Even an introduction from William H. Gass didn't quite prepare me for the insanity in here. I've had a feeling for a while that I would really connect with Elkin's writing, but this was so up my alley I couldn't quite believe it. At its best, the language here is just unbelievable, exploding with creativity and this palpable love of language. Elkin must be an all time great writer of lists, and The Franchiser is absolutely full of them. But as much as I love some other writers who could probably be described similarly in terms of language used, I'm not sure that any of them come close to Elkin as a comedian. Not all of the comedy lands — not even close, really — but it's the energy of it all: the madcap unpredictable sketch-like craziness that he's using to deliver some of the most wonderful sentences that I've read in some time. It's not a combination I would have expected to work, but it's just great.

There are definitely times where the book feels like it's barely hanging together as an actual novel rather than just a bunch of individually great sections, but I can't say I cared in the slightest. I have no idea how this was marketed on release, but I do love the idea of someone buying this based on a blurb trying to market it as a straight comedy and being very confused about what they were reading. A bizarre book that I really, really love.

[Wampus Reynolds · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book from the bicentennial of the US of A undoubtedly has America in its crosshairs, but it has more on its mind. The author recalls Pynchon, Portis, Crews in a way, and even Robbe-Grillet. The main character, who bizarrely drifts from third person to first person a time or two, symbolizes something of postwar America indulging in the glory of corporatization and homogeneity.

There are laughs, mostly cruel ones. And more pages-long monologues than there should be for the casual reader (i.e. me). A plot that doesn’t really propel so what keeps the pages turn is a search for the next laugh, five dollar word or insight to what the world of 1976 was, with scarcely a mention of politics or media.

So 3.51/5

[j · Rating 3 out of 5]

Explores the two-faced nature of ubiquity. A book about a tremendously lonely and paranoid man who lies to himself constantly, and who is both enamored with and disgusted by the things that unite us: death and McDonalds. The novel is episodic, and some episodes tickled me more than others. The bookends are tremendously strong (the introductory page in particularly really sets you up for something astounding, and the final episode of Ben's failed motel opening is delightful). Elkin very peculiarly uses the first person briefly from time to time, in a way that is not at all straightforward and with no clearly telegraphed intentionality. I love deliberately bewitching and befuddling stuff like this.

[Sally · Rating 1 out of 5]

I couldn't finish it. Elkin is very much in a postmodern mood here and uses the character of Ben Flesh, a franchiser of products and properties, to show the emptiness of American society and the words we use. I got the point and then it just went on and on. Sinclair Lewis's Babbitt did it much better.

[Scott · Rating 4 out of 5]

Entertaining and thought provoking in lots of ways – Elkin has a cynical outlook on American culture, big business, and human personality in general. But it’s his way with words and frequently hilarious prose that knock me out – as always, I’m a sucker for a good laugh.

[Babs M · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed it but my father would have really enjoyed it. Kind of my parents era of business. I did relate to the Multiple Sclerosis part since my daughter has been afflicted since she was 18. I look forward to reading some of Mr. Elkin's other books.

[Patrycja]

I know that normally review is about the main text of the book, but that foreword? Chef’s kiss. And that’s how you sell more of your books folks. By writing thoughtful forewords full of deep thoughts.
Foreword? 5 out of 5 stars.

[Tom · Rating 4 out of 5]

A world of neon and numbing nuked food may make happy the many, but we're all the fool.

[Terry · Rating 5 out of 5]

I chortled! Silly, intriguing, fun!

[Noah Roth · Rating 5 out of 5]

Nearly the first and certainly the last book of 2019.

[Jordan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Brilliant. Simple brilliant.