Living End

by Stanley Elkin, Curtis White (Afterword)

A quintessential Elkin protagonist, Ellerbee is a good husband, a good employer, a good sport who cares greatly about his fellow human beings―until he is killed during a senseless liquor-store hold-up. Suddenly smote by a deity as indifferent as history, Ellerbee is off on a whirlwind tour of a distressingly familiar theme-park Heaven and inner-city Hell―to learn, along with his late coworkers and a marvelously vivid cast of characters, that much of what they’ve always heard about God’s love, God’s wrath, and the afterlife is, unfortunately, quite true.

Genres: Fiction, Literature, Novels, Humor, Religion, Jewish, American

144 pages, Paperback

First published June 12, 1979

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 4 out of 5]

If Dante Alighieri wrote the sad Divine Comedy then Stanley Elkin contributed the hilarious Divine Tragedy. The merriment is on the black side of mirth though.
The first part of the book, The Conventional Wisdom is simply brilliant but further on The Living End becomes a bit inconsistent and uneven. 

Hell was the ultimate inner city. Its stinking sulfurous streets were unsafe. Everywhere Ellerbee looked he saw atrocities. Pointless, profitless muggings were commonplace; joyless rape that punished its victims and offered no relief to the perpetrator. Everything was contagious, cancer as common as a cold, plague the quotidian. There was stomachache, headache, toothache, earache. There was angina and indigestion and painful third-degree burning itch. Nerves like a hideous body hair grew long enough to trip over and lay raw and exposed as live wires or shoelaces that had come undone.

Just one circle of such Hell is enough for anyone. And, of course, there is God in Heaven – omnipotent and omniscient as it was promised in the Bible.

He had smote the Egyptians, knocked off this tribe or that. Well, it was the worship. He was a sucker for worship. To this day a pilgrimage turned His heart, the legless, like athletes, pulling themselves up the steps of great cathedrals, the prostrate humble face down in dog shit.

The problem of this world is that we have our own notion of sins and virtues and God has his own. And those notions seem to differ radically.
Even if you don’t believe in God, worship him anyway.

[karen · Rating 4 out of 5]

years ago, during the height of oprah's book club reign of terror, greg proposed that i start my own club at our store, in which i would create a series of stickers to be put on books, larger and more offensive than oprah's, showing my feelings about the book.

basically - a thumbs-up for books i loved



a thumbs-down for books i hated:



and something like this:



for "who knew i would like this book with such an awful cover and not-very-interesting premise even though both greg and tom have been telling me for years to read stanley elkin because i would like him and it turns out i do??"

it was a complicated system.

and, naturally, we never actually did anything towards this plan, but if we had, i am sure i could have toppled oprah off her couch.it was only a matter of time.

and it was only a matter of time before i finally read a stanley elkin novel. and i am so freaking glad i did. it is my understanding that this is one of his "lesser" works, and that's fine. i think it is a good starting point - i got a sense of his humor, his language, the clarity of his vision, and his comedic irony. and i liked it. truthfully, i liked the first part best. i was hooked by the third paragraph, and i fell in love with ellerbee; a good man who always tries to do the right thing learns, after his untimely death, that god really does mean all that fine print. i thought it was perfect. the rest of the book was also good - a sort of riff on dante that goes to some extremes dante would not have touched with a barge pole, but my heart belongs to ellerbee.

and i vow to read at least two more elkin novels before the end of the year.*

you heard it here first.

watch your back, oprah.



*edit - i did not keep this vow. i am the worst.

come to my blog!

[BlackOxford · Rating 4 out of 5]

Miracle Was My Metier

Watching the new Sherlock Holmes series on the BBC last night, I was intrigued by the script's repetition of the Americanism "It is what it is" as a designation of inevitability and fatefulness. C.S. Lewis had used the phrase in his 1943 Mere Christianity, possibly for the first time. But its origin is much more ancient. It is one of the many possible translations of one of the biblical identifiers of God. Hebrew is inherently metaphorical and has only limited ways to express past, present and future tenses. Yahweh, ehyeh asher ehyeh in Hebrew, one of the principle biblical names of God, can alternatively be translated as "I am Who I am," "I will be What I will be," "He is What he is,"or indeed, at a stretch, "It is What It is."

"It is what it is" could well be the catch-phrase for Stanley Elkin's The Living End. Its protagonist is a divine being who as inexplicable as the phrase implies. From the point of view of the world this unpredictable being has created, the theme could be "No good deed goes unpunished". Or less laconically but more philosophically, "A good man in an evil world is a misfit and deserves some form of punishment." Elkin's principle human subject, Ellerbee, is just such a man. And Elkin's God has few scruples about making his life and everyone else's not only a misery but also a complete waste of time.

Despite being condemned to the hell of Hell, "where even the disciplined reflexes of martyrs and stylites twitched like thrown dice", Ellerbee, a man of remarkable charity while alive, can't stop trying to make even the lives of the damned better. He digs channels to drain vomit and puss. He tries to organise community.

Until he discovers that it is precisely the need to socialise, to make contact with those in similar agony by projecting their own images into others that is the motive force, the engine, of Hell. Heaven on the other hand is filled with all manner of "high-echelon" celebrities, the Elect. A reversal that's a bit much to digest, even for a saint.

Ellerbee, like the biblical Job, can only pray in a blasphemous litany to the "Lord God of Ambush and Unconditional Surrender...Power Play God of Judo Leverage, Grand Guignol, Martial Artist...Browbeater...Bouncer Being, Boss of Bullies... Old Terrorist, God the Father, God the Godfather." Accurate names, if not particularly praise-worthy.

More insistent than the biblical Job, Ellerbee demands an explanation even after an attempt by God at intimidation. Ellerbee is informed that, although he did indeed act decently and humanely throughout his life, he technically had broken many of the commandments - keeping his shop open on the Sabbath, blasphemous usage of the divine name, and participation in various other suspect activities like dancing, driving automobiles, and smoking cigarettes.

Although more than a bit burlesqued, the God that Ellerbee confronts is no more insane than that described in the Bible, even if He is a bit more inventive. Turns out there are worse places than Hell, as Ellerbee's murderer, and lately pal in the nether regions, Ladlehaus, finds out when he sasses the Almighty. A place not of pain but of utter aloneness, one's earthly grave, from which one can plead with a completely unresponsive living world for succour.

Except eventually there is a response: from a sadistic paedophile, Quiz, who takes acute pleasure in feeding Ladlehaus misinformation about what's happening in the world. Quiz also schools his young victims in how to be interlocutors with the interred Ladlehaus, but even this concession is withdrawn by the Almighty for no apparent reason.

Ladlehaus's experience of this Hell beyond Hell is one of uncertainty, half-heard conversations, and constantly dashed hopes - more or less life without the worst parts. Until, provoking God to precipitous lethal action, he causes Quiz's death. Not bad for a twice-damned wraith.

Quiz, the paedophile, is outraged, "I make no charges, I've got no proof, but a thing like that, all that wrath, those terrible swift sword arrangements, that's the M.O. Of God Himself! ...I was Pearl Harbor'd ...December Seventh'd by the Lord." Surprisingly, this rage surprises even God. First He is surprised that he is surprised; then he is surprised that upon reflection, He thinks he might have over-reacted in killing Quiz.

God then goes into conference with Christ, His Son, to thrash out, apparently for the first time, some old, unresolved issues - like the Father's throwing the Son under the bus in Jerusalem. Christ clearly has a smouldering grudge, but not against humanity. "What did those poor bastards ever do to me?", he says. It's Pa he's got the grudge against.

Christ quickly gets to the point he's been brooding on for eternity. In a tone of "rage cornered" he says: "Absolve Me, shrive Me, wipe My slate, Put me on your tab, pick up My check. Carry Me. Forgive Us Our debts as We forgive Our debtors, Luv." Pa, however, remains implacable.

But lo and behold the juice of Hell gets turned down, perhaps even off. Behind the scenes, possibly, the woman with the "fruity womb", Jesus's virginal mother living in a sort of heavenly house arrest, has been inserting some rationality and common sense into the divine thought processes. Whatever the motivation God turns down the heat.

Respite gives those in the nether world time to consider their situation. The meaning of death for example, about which some can wax philosophical: "Death made no sense but it meant something." And the meaning of death? "The meaning of death is how long it takes."

This and other secrets, like the name of Kennedy's assassin as well as the mysteries of suffering and divine retribution, are revealed by an increasingly (and suspiciously) avuncular God. And why exactly did God engage in a creation in the first place given the all-round misery it has caused? God finally comes clean: "Because it makes a better story is why."

With that revelation, the dead of all ages begin to rise from the ground and the depths. "Like elopers they left their burials." But there is no general joy and jubilation. There are complaints. The world is cold after the fires of Hell, amputees and organ donors are left at a disadvantage, the stench is overwhelming.

But no matter. God assembles everyone and everything for a universal pow-wow. His final announcement is explicitly theatrical. "I never found my audience.", He repeats over and over to Christ, the angels, Mary (now divinely expecting once again) and the assembled masses. And then he inexplicably and summarily... extinguishes it all. He annihilates everything that exists. Including Himself.

Omnipotence is tiring after all. And it is what it is: A story. And stories must indeed have an audience.

So perhaps there is/was/will be (to be a bit Hebraic) such a God and we are but his thoughts, as some philosophers have surmised. And perhaps such a God can learn, that is, become self-reflectively conscious of his own thoughts, as he appears to do in the Bible. Is that really such a good thing? His very consciousness of Himself and the somewhat random nature of His thoughts might just be enough to provoke an Elkin-like implosion. The last unfortunate miracle.

[Tony Vacation · Rating 5 out of 5]

A compact triptych of divine comedies that were first published separately in various literary journals, The Living End may not have the tight abs of a hardbody novel, but what it lacks in soundly structured narrative Elkin more than makes up for in prose that launches off the page like vitriolic V-2s of satirical wrath, all of which are target-locked onto the great Emperor of Ice-Cream in the sky, Mr. G Himself. In Elkinland, Heaven's a plastic theme park, Hell a purulent undercity, and sandwiched in-between is the waking world: the place where you and I eagerly await our eternal desserts as dubiously determined by the fine print found interleaved among the billion pages of that book people love to talk about but hardly ever read. Part One finds a decent, long-suffering man given an eternal shafting on account of a few pedantic quibbles brought up by our loving Lord (a “goddamn” muttered in a moment of distress, making ends meet by working on Sunday); Part two runs a gag on the Lazarus parable by presenting how much of an “oops” it would to be to resurrect someone buried six-feet under dirt in a wooden box; Part three hits all caustic cylinders with a panoramic view of the never-ending domestic passive aggressions among the very dysfunctional Holy Family, as lorded over by a juvenile, irrational windbag of an Alpha and Omega. While considered a lesser title of Elkin’s, The Living End is my first dip into the author’s works and I very much enjoyed the linguistic swim. Recommended for literature lovers who have a beef with the irredeemably incongruent nature of the “greatest story ever told”; Burpo believers should read elsewhere.

[Graham P · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the afterword of 'The Living End', critic Curtis White pretty much nails what Elkin does in this indulgent, painfully brief yet hilarious short novel:

"Artists like Elkin want to tell you something that makes no sense, not even to themselves, but it is precisely because they have given up on the truth that they are burdened by and free to say this crucial thing-that-makes-no-sense."

An acidic ramble about God and his children, Heaven & Hell, redemption and suffering. I never read a novel so close to a Looney Tunes cartoon, and this, despite its upending (yet playful) spite is really a sad novel about existence, all done in the reversal of fates, the heavenly hierarchy framed with the brevity of a sitcom. Mother Mary, the reluctant mother; Christ, the crippled hippy; Joseph, the Jewish uncle questioning fate; and the devil, no where in sight. A frustrating novel because you want it to be so much more, but in the end, the polarities of Heaven and Hell are just the same as a street corner and the nearest alleyway, and the brevity of absurd parable is what makes 'The Living End' so very worthy. I'd love to see this on a syllabus for theological fiction. But sadly we probably won't see that.

[Jonathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

While its satirical targets may be a little dated, and a little unsubtle, there are enough flashes of brilliance and paragraphs of perfectly polished prose to make this well worth reading. A minor work by Elkin, to be sure, but a fun ride. I found the first section to be the least successful, so keep going if that does not float your boat...

[Mark · Rating 2 out of 5]

3.5/5

Well that was different. If The Living End were a mathematical equation, it would look something like this:

Bible + (Voltaire / Postmodernism) x The Master and Margarita = The Living End.

Lots of linguistic gymnastics. A couple funny moments (not enough). Characterization all over the map (some good, one great, most plastic chess pieces).

You could look at this as an early entry in the bizarro genre. If you're a fan, you may find this at least a four star read.

For me, the most interesting aspect was the alliterative passages (there were many). When I get to a PC, Goodreads review box, I'll add some. (I do appreciate you being nice, not crashing as I 2-thumb this.)

But first, listen (I won't say which of the three chapters this is from so as not to post a spoiler since it's kinda long but gives such a nice intro to Elkin's deluxe style):

Because it was the fate of the damned to run of course, not jog, run, their piss on fire and their shit molten, boiling sperm and their ovaries frying; what they were permitted of body sprinting at full throttle, wounded gallop, burning not fat—fat sizzled off in the first seconds, bubbled like bacon and disappeared, evaporate as steam, though the weight was still there, still with you, its frictive drag subversive as a tear in a kite—and not even muscle, which blazed like wick, but the organs themselves, the liver scorching and the heart and brains at flash point, combusting the chemistries, the irons and phosphates, the atoms and elements, conflagrating vitamin, essence, soul, yet somehow everything still within the limits if not of endurance then of existence.

Isn't that fun!? I like language, but over the last several years I've become a more character-oriented reader. If, from the beginning, the characterization had been as dense as the language, this would have been an easy 4-stars for me.

Did I mentioned it is organized as a triptych? Like Bosch and Bacon, only in a written work.

As the novel opens, we meet Ellerbee and his nagging wife. Throughout the opening chapter I had a problem connecting with Ellerbee. He seemed no more than a chess piece for Elkin to play around with. Everything about him screamed stock!!. I should qualify that by saying that I'm not the biggest fan of satire for this reason. The characters are usually just vacant pods the author uses to prove a point. Some authors go out of their way to make an interesting character or characters with which to make their point. Tom Wolfe's The Bonfire of the Vanities springs instantly to mind. All of Wolfe's characters had robust lives. They felt real. In Elkin's opening chapter, Ellerbee felt like a third-string cartoon character from Warner Bros.' back lot.

Something peculiar happens to Ellerbee and from there the story begins to get interesting. Ellerbee finds himself in Hell. The Hell. Literally. We meet more folks in Hell, several of whom eventually take center stage. Ellerbee is jettisoned to the back lot where he belongs.

For satire, I found only one or two scenes chuckle-worthy. Either Elkin and I have different senses of humor, or this shit isn't meant to be funny, just scathing.

It was kind of a mish-mash too. While it's fun to never know what to expect from a novel, quite a lot of the scenarios in The Living End were so far out of left field if felt as though Elkin were making this up as he went along, no rhyme or reason, only bothering to edit the language of the sentences, not what they said. That kind of thing is fun for a while, but over the course of an entire novel--even one a mere 144 pages--it grew tiresome.

A couple times there were some embarrassingly dated instances of Seventies slang.

This is a nice image, though. Let's read it together:

Ladlehaus remained motionless, motionless, that is, as possible in his steamy circumstances, in his smoldering body like a building watched by firemen. He made imperceptible shifts, the floor of Hell like some tightrope where he juggled his weight, redistributing invisible tensions in measured increments of shuffle along his joints and nerves. All he wanted was to lie low in this place where no one could lie low, where even the disciplined reflexes of martyrs and stylites twitched like thrown dice. And all he could hope was that pain itself—which had never saved anyone—might serve him now, permitting him to appear like everyone else, swaying in place like lovers in dance halls beneath Big Bands.

Man, if he had put as much thought into the characters as he did crafting pretty-sounding sentences, he and I could dig on some things together.

If you're a language fan, definitely give this a look. If you're more in to character, prolly not worth the trouble.

[Justin Evans · Rating 4 out of 5]

The best satire is beautifully written (thus, consign almost all 'satire' to the garbage can); it can be enjoyed by people who disagree with the author on large matters (a religious person should enjoy The Living End, because they will agree on the smaller absurdities that Elkin deals with so well, and his treatment of God is nuanced rather than new-atheistical); and ultimately is less about what the book hates and more about loving something (here: humanity) that the object of hatred seems to be inhibiting.

And The Living End is very good satire indeed. I hear that this is 'minor' Elkin, which makes me very excited to read his other works, but also apprehensive. 'Minor' in what way? Because it's short (usually a good thing)? Because it's weird (again, a good thing)? Because it's unclear whether he's using religion as an allegory for literature ('God,' who is supposedly an object of satire, seems very much to be Stanley Elkin by the end of the book) or literature as an allegory for religion? Because it's three interconnected stories rather than one novel? Because Joseph speaks cod Yiddish?

I do not know, and won't know until I read the rest of Elkin, which I certainly plan to do now. Funny but serious authors are ridiculously scarce (there is surely an essay waiting to be written about 'literary fiction,' grief-porn, memoir, post-New-Yorker short fiction, America, and the scarcity of serious writers who are funny). Elkin writes beautiful sentences when he chooses to, and doesn't choose to all the time, because it's easier to be funny when your sentences aren't funny--but he also chooses not be funny all the time. It's this sense that he's choosing what to do that sets him apart as a serious author. Elkin has not found his 'voice.' He gets to decide what voice he writes in. Also, I could write a dissertation about theology, literary criticism, and this book. Anyone who reads it as straightforward and easy satire on Christianity is missing *a lot*.

[Bandit · Rating 1 out of 5]

Every so often there is just a book that profoundly doesn't work for you. This is one of those books. And it's frustrating, because judging by reviews this is a much loved and appreciated work from a much loved and appreciated author and the description was propitious and the first third of the book was too and then...it just sort of dissolved into a stylistic language exercise on eschatology. William Gass (the perfectly named critic) once compared Elkin's writing to jazz riffing and it's actually a perfectly apt comparison, I seem not to care for both. This is a short novel and it took just over an hour to read, but it was neither enjoyable nor rewarding, maybe only good for ruling an author out of a reading repertoire. It's the sort of thing that definitely has its audience, much like jazz, but not for me, cover and description promise aside. Lesson learned.

[Leo Robertson · Rating 3 out of 5]

The first story/ chapter, The Conventional Wisdom, is gruesome, absurd, cool, enormously evocative, insightful, essential reading. Here it is! (probs no more than half an hour, so if you see this link, grab a coffee and read it- you won't regret!) http://www.ivampiresbook.com/Fantasy/...

The second and third stories/chapters are re-hashes of the first's world-building, not that interesting, tiringly riff-packed and dialogue is mostly weak ripostes.
- Oh yeah?
- Who says?
- I'm God!
- You're a God? (haw haw haw. You know this crap. You type long enough and it comes out and it appears to have a witty back-and-forth effect but it's actually tedious!!)

[Rand · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hell of a read.

Give me an atheist's depiction of the afterlife any day ±this one condenses the entire gestalt of the Divine Commedia into one snappy refusal to submit to the stricture of belief for the sake of belief. This is belief for the sake of life, for the sake of death, for the sake of cognition, for the sake of meaning, for the sake of meanness, for the sake of an inconvenient trip to the convenience store and a freak off-ing, an offering to all that is and was and ever could be to remember that every moment is a sacred act—that the essence of being is part and parcel with every absent thought or action, from attempting to purchase a pack of smokes to asking WHY???

[Gabriel · Rating 4 out of 5]

A big book succinctly told (only 143 pages in my edition). Don't be fooled by the "Inferno" references-- less and less about life and the living than about the metaphysics of death (there is a great collection of philosophical essays by this title, by the way) and consolation for those who think that the whole Santa's village aspect of Heaven is likely to bite them in the ass when they pass. Elkin's God is Old Testament/authorial, aware of his mistakes, and His creatures are all cranks and Augie Marches, looking for an angle or a grift.

[Josh Friedlander · Rating 3 out of 5]

Minor work by a great author. A good man dies and ends up in Hell, a no-goodnik escapes hell only to be trapped in the grave, and - well, summarising the plot here would hardly be to the point. There's probably some sort of theological argument going on, but...mainly Elkin is a dark humourist who wields language like a juggler; his characteristic sentences running on breathlessly with streams of synonyms, hecatombs of higher language, whizzing energetic rushes of Elkinese that meld a Yiddishy Jewish-American dialect with an astonishing vocabulary and an ear for the right word, peculiar but somehow perfect authorial tics, sentences that beguile and pull you along, and then finish abruptly with an unexpected joke. It is hard to summarise without verbatim quotes, and this is a short book, so just go read it!

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5 stars

[Steven · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wonder, as Elkin's God does, about the audience for this book. It is a reductio ad absurdum of the biblical worldview. Elkin doesn't stop with the book being a reductio, a vast percentage of his sentences are reductios—that seems the main narrative strategy. Take a position and then keep piling on. He does a good job of exposing the absurdity. I wonder if he needed this much space, if it could have been done shorter, but then it is hard to take on eternity with a few short words. So who's the audience? Is he trying to sway fundamentalists? They just burn the book. And non-beleivers? For them he's preaching to the choir; it's right-on and ha-ha and give it to 'em. The mass in the middle then? Or is he just strutting his stuff for his fellow academics? The ending is quite fitting. God as an artist. Making a mess of things because it makes a better story that way. And given a second chance at creatio ex nihilo, a chance to make things, perhaps, better, God chooses to annihilate everything. This really is a beautiful example of how to start with a hallowed belief, take it seriously, follow it all the way through until it implodes upon it's inherent absurdity, and finally tumbles into farce. Elkin does this best in the Hell section—how long could you burn anyway? For eternity? Really? Well let me just riff on that for awhile and we'll see what that would be like. That strategy works well following the realistic beginning, Ellerbee's hell on earth as it were. Almost as if Elkin is saying, You think it can be worse than this? Let's see what Heaven and Hell have in store. After all, you can't write about the Void; just circle it the way Beckett did.

[Alasse · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is Dante's The Divine Comedy on acid. Lots of acid.

It starts out with Mr. Ellerbee, a kind-hearted man who, after getting shot at his own liquor shop, gets sent to hell for thinking that Heaven looks like a theme park. Part II follows Ladlehaus, one of Mr. Ellerbee's assailants, as he gets relocated to a Purgatory of sorts for putting God in the uncomfortable position of making a mistake. Finally, part III features Quiz, a groundskeeper who is randomly killed by God because he wouldn't let him concentrate. It all comes together in a rather bizarre Last Judgement scene.

It's funny how down to earth (tee hee hee) everyone is, though. God is a bit of a loser, Jesus whines, Mary feels her privacy has been violated, and Joseph wonders when he'll be allowed to shag her already.

Dark and absurd and priceless stuff. It's also amazingly well written, in case anyone cares.

[Andrew]

There was an article not too long ago in our alternative paper out here in Seattle saying that the sign of a good bookstore is how many Stanley Elkin novels they stock. Beautifully laconic, this is a Divine Comedy for the David Foster Wallace set. Very funny, very Middle American, and very elegantly cynical.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

I really have to say that I liked this one. The overall plot was a bit strange, but the writing was excellent. You have to love Elkin's wit. It might even be my favorite Elkin so far, though I've only read this and "Criers & Kibitzers, Kibitzers & Criers." It isn't exactly the most complex book I've read, but it was a lot of fun to read. High weirdness.

[Ethan Ksiazek · Rating 2 out of 5]

Pretty stiff humor-guy in Hell trope that just kinda circles its own tail here. Pretty lackluster unfortunately, read on a plane and opted for something else brief in. Yet, you can tell that Elkin paved the way for some fuckn hilarious modern satirists like Lipsyte.

[David Brooke · Rating 2 out of 5]

The first 50 pages are great...then he goes to Hell and it's a bore.

[Mac · Rating 3 out of 5]

I had high expectations for “The Living End” – Elkin is a writer whose name I hear now and again in good contexts, and whose stories I’d enjoyed in the past, and the novel (or triptych, if you prefer the cover’s diagnosis) was on NPR’s desert island books thing a few years back, with a convincing essay about its greatness prompting me to pick up a copy.

So I was a little let down when I read it. It’s not bad, in any way, but it isn’t great, either. The premise – a Hieronymus Bosch-like trip through three experiences of heaven and hell – is fine, but not forehead-smackingly good, and the satirical stuff is only really funny if you’re truly desperate to laugh at the irreligious. That is to say, I would have absolutely loved its blasphemy as a teenager.

That’s its main problem – it’s trying very hard to be funny, and it’s never fun to spend time with someone who has decided he’s funnier than he really is. The NPR endorsement convinced me I’d be rolling on the floor, bothering the hell out of fellow commuters as I read, but it didn’t work. The humor is too connected to its own sense of outrageousness – can you believe he really said that? (yes, I can) – and if you’re not shocked by the content, it’s not going to be terribly funny. So there are a lot of well-crafted sentences making not particularly surprising jibes at religion, at least to this cynic.

However, this is not a bad book – in fact, it has a very interesting idea at its center, one that is repeated a few times: Everything is true. This is a discovery made by one of the poor souls who populate this world, and the exploration of this idea, that everything you could possibly think of is true, is actually quite interesting. And, in a novel about the afterlife, this “everything is true” idea encompasses quite a lot.

It would also be silly not to say something about the language Elkin uses here – his jokes may fall flat from time to time, and he may not be blowing my mind the way he thought he was, but the poetic quality that many of the passages take on is quite something. Another comparison to Bosch may be in order – beautifully rendered grotesqueries abound.

So “The Living End” didn’t jump to the top of my stack of favorite books, but it did have some interesting aspects to recommend itself. If nothing else, that a book can have its jokes falling flat and still manage to make for a good read is quite an accomplishment, though not necessarily one to be proud about.

[Jack Wolfe · Rating 5 out of 5]

Ya don't hear much about Elkin these days-- something about being a Dead White Male, probably, and something about how his Dead White sector, I mean the "American Jewish comedian prose stylist master guy" sector, is already inhabited by a few other Dead White Males (Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, etc) who also seem to be falling out of favor-- and I'm ready to say, based on "The Living End" alone, that that's a goddamn crime and a shame. This book is like an unholy mixture of Roth and Kurt Vonnegut: funny as hell, but also very, very angry. Angry at God, angry at man, angry at the world and heaven and hell. Angry... But with some shockingly sympathetic character sketches thrown in (Elkin's Jesus and Mary are, in their absolutely pitiful states, probably the best argument I've ever seen against the contemporary Christian reading of the New Testament), and some absolutely beautiful sentences. Like the Book of Job that probably inspired it (and which Elkin takes a few swipes at), the book is short, poetic, brutal, and wise. I sorta love it. Gotta find me some more Elkin!

[zim · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was very, very disturbing and upsetting, but it sticks with you and makes you think about it, and I guess I see its purpose now. It takes commonly held religious beliefs and explores what the world would be like if they were literally true. (If you sin at all you go to hell, even if you're overall a good person and the 'sins' are petty and stupid, like taking names in vain, and hell is a burning fiery pit of eternal torture, etc etc etc.) I guess I would recommend this book because, after reading it, you *know* that these things cannot possibly be true, because if they were, life would be pointless and horrible, God would be petty and cruel, and all of existence would be an abomination.

[Brent Legault · Rating 2 out of 5]

An excuse to speechify, if you ask me. Wasn't the Catholic Church (and all its spawn) already a parady of itself -- even in nineteen eighty-whatever? Did Elkin really need to launch this rather limp missle? Had it not been for so promising an opening paragraph,* I would never have laid eyes over so unnecessary a novel as this.

*Ellerbee had been having a bad time of it. He'd had financial reversals. Change would slip out of his pockets and down into the crevices of other people's furniture. He dropped deposit bottles and lost money in pay phones and vending machines. He overtipped in dark taxicabs. Etc.

[Jacob Howard · Rating 4 out of 5]

the section where the dead guy keeps harassing the fat guy from his grave is really funny

[Jeremy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the book that makes me want to write.

This is the perfect entry point into Elkin, a book that shows writers it's possible to write about EVERYTHING with humor, cynicism, and grace.

God is here, but he's an angry clown. The important players are like all of us, powerless in the face of steamroller life, but struggling through anyway.

After all, what other honorable choice is there?

A beautiful book.

[Greg · Rating 4 out of 5]

this was lent to me after I browsed Elkin's short stories. it's deadpan humor reminds me of Vonnegut but lacks the cute-ness of Kurt's stuff. I laughed out at a few points, which rarely occurs when I'm reading.

I gave Elkin a try after reading Sam Lipsyte is a fan of him...

[Cait · Rating 3 out of 5]

This reminded me of a shorter and smarter version of a Christopher Moore novel (no disrespect intended; believe me, Moore is no dummy). Only 3 stars because I thought it was strongest in the beginning and weakened a bit as it progressed.

[Richard · Rating 3 out of 5]

At times this is truly beautifully written with a genuine love of language and wordplay. It's just a shame that the characters are somewhat simplistic and the gleeful tales of the afterlife tend to degenerate into incoherent rants....

[Jim · Rating 2 out of 5]

Published in 1978 and described as a contemporary version of Dante's Divine Comedy, this short but difficult novel is my first exposure (other than a short story) to Stanley Elkin. The writing is brilliant but overdone, like being hit in the face, again and again, with a banana cream pie.