Bad Man

by Stanley Elkin, David C. Dougherty (Introduction)

Breaking the law in a foolhardy attempt to accommodate his customers, unscrupulous department store owner Leo Feldman finds himself in jail and at the mercy of the warden, who tries to break Leo of his determination to stay bad.

Genres: Fiction, Novels, Literature, American, 20th Century, United States, Literary Fiction

336 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1968

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

[BlackOxford · Rating 4 out of 5]

Vendibility

In that mysterious place between the conscious and unconscious, that murky reality after sleep but before waking, that long lonely road... well, from the Lower East Side of Manhattan across the Brooklyn Bridge to Williamsburg, there writes Stanley Elkin. A Bad Man is Elkin at his most outrageous and surreal best. A comedy of crime and punishment in which the latter literally fits the former like a suit of ill-made clothes.

Elkin’s prison is a “guilt factory” in which those who are resistant to the significance of their various immoralities are educated by a complex, perhaps incomprehensible, system of procedures and traditions to recover their lost humanity, including ill-fitting parodies of their civilian attire. Both the reader and the book’s characters are in the dark about why. “The oldest lifers are still learning. Not even the warden knows everything about it.” This is a slapstick version of Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading. Or, equally possible, a parody of Freudian psychotherapy. A master class, perhaps, in how to be goy; or how to be Jew, or that particular Jew, Jesus, who of course annoyed a great many people by performing a great many unauthorised and illegal favours for his friends.

Leo is the bad man in question. The son of a schiksa and an itinerant Jewish seller of schlock who spent his life trying to be the only Jew in town, Leo must learn that he is bad. “In this prison, in this small cell no bigger than the rooms where he had slept out his childhood, guilt came as hard as righteousness.” But so did identity. After all “As far as he knew he had never seen a Jew except for his father.” Is the guilt he is meant to have about being a criminal, or about being Jewish; or for that matter about not being Jewish enough? Life is complicated.

Leo’s climb out of the gutter had not not been without adverse consequences. Despite legitimate commercial success, he does a Bernie Madoff and scams, defrauds and cheats everyone he knows. Or perhaps, like Bernie, he was merely meeting customer expectations. Or were the rules rigged to begin with? In any case, rehabilitation beckons. Will Leo be able to welcome guilt into his heart? Will he earn an indistinctive prison uniform? Will he become just one of the gang of reforming inmates? Or will he set up a new Ponzi scheme inside the walls?

According to the warden, “Crime is a detail-evasion technique.” But Leo is certainly a detail man. He doesn’t avoid it, he cherishes it. So it’s an even bet on which way the prison will go. Especially since the warden lets him in on a trade secret: “civilization is forms.” Leo can only try to follow his father’s laconic advice: “Everything is vendible. It must be. That’s religion. Your father is a deeply religious man. He believes in vendibility.” So why not rules and regulations... and forms? As vendible as anything else one supposes.

A Bad Man provokes me to wonder what’s happening with Bernie Madoff in his North Carolina federal prison. Bernie’s 150 year sentence gives him plenty of room to set up some pretty snazzy deals. If I were warden there, I’d keep an eye on his prison-library withdrawals. Anything by Elkin should mean immediate solitary.

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 3 out of 5]

Last 45pp unread. No more please. Another virtuoso performance, with Elkin’s logorrhoeic shtick restrained for the first one hundred until his momentum builds and we have the unstoppable torrent of another fast-talking moral vacuum protagonist, and that maxi-prose with its descriptive prattle pumped to eleven until the skimming and eye-rolling begins. This novel is (for the first 200pp), a captivating and blackly comic romp inside a surreal prison, less interesting when depicting the protagonist’s obnoxious antics outside—Elkin falls into the “dated humourist” camp again with these sections. As it happens, The Magic Kingdom is an absolute masterpiece and one of the finest American novels, so we forgive his transgressions, and we forgive that missed 45pp at the end. More Elkin? Not probably.

[Josh · Rating 5 out of 5]

An intimate epic of tragic hilarity. Elkin knows that the worst parts of us are hopelessly fused to our vigor and essence, and he writes about this sad, ridiculous truth with such understanding, empathy, pleasure, and dark humor. His exaggerated, impulsive characters and settings somehow avoid caricature and come much closer to our actual emotional lives than a lot of realist fiction. If my blather is not specific or concrete enough, I'll make a limited comparison. This book, in tone and style, would pair up nicely with an imaginary Kafka adaptation by the fantasy duo of Mel Brooks and John Cassavetes.

"Like acid on bourbon." - Hacky J. Fakecritic

[Lemar · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a really ambitious novel. That can mean a slog but in this case, minor slogging but primarily unexpected detours into in the sure hands of a good writer. As he talks about growing up in the midwest on the edge of the diaspora, his father selling reclaimed items from a pushcart, attempting to sell the "unsalable" item", he is able to express a moment that textbooks would fail to. The book is often funny and extremely odd as he uses the main character's year in prison to bring out what it is to hold oneself accountable, to defend, one's actions of a lifetime. Elkin is unflinching in this quest and it makes for an exciting read. The book is odd in that it takes the reader a while to get his bearings and in that it reminded me of a modern The Trial.

[Bill · Rating 3 out of 5]

strange - exuberant language wedded to what is ostensibly a prison and punishment story, but in which the prison exists in no real space or time, and which appears to be really a story of guilt and retribution related to the satisfaction of needs and desires. Almost a cross between Flann O'Brien and Philip Roth.

[Leonard Pierce · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'd never heard of Elkin when I first read this book. He's now one of my favorites, and this book is hilarious and well-written.

[Cassandra Ridenhour · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a very strange book! At first I thought I didn't like it, but the author had me laughing out loud more than once at this strange nonsensical story about a man who goes to prison and figures out just how bad he really is...sort of...I think...not sure, but it's definitely entertaining...sort of.

[Mark Holtzen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Amazing writer. Another master of setting and plotline - I hadn't read any of his stuff before. Saw it on Writer's Almanac e-mail.

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

Must be a classic of what was then known as black humor. I do wish I had run across Elkin already back in the day when Vonnegut und Heller were staples of my diet.

[Derick · Rating 3 out of 5]

"i've been moved, roused. lumps in the throat and the heart's hard-on. i'm telling you something."

[Alan Newman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Part of the Jewish Renaissance in literature in the 60's , Elkin is rarely talked about today--which is unfortunate. He is a great comic writer, a moralist, and most definitely worth reading. Here his protagonist is a true antihero, a man imbued with the vitality of the second generation Jewish Americans, but who is unabashedly perverse and self interested, his life an act of anger at society. He is the anti-Augie March-- and Elkin more a precursor to Roth than a successor to Bellow. Not my favorite of his books--but this is not a writer who should be forgotten

[Sam · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read most of this but put it down and forgot about it. It was a good read for the most part. I will update the review if I ever finish it.

[notgettingenough · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this when I read it, but I can't remember why. It's still on my shelves because I thought I'd read it again, but I'm a bit scared I'll change my mind about it. So it waits.

[Heronimo Gieronymus · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have fallen head over heels for Stanley Elkin the past four years or so, and having now completed the man’s second novel, 1967’s A BAD MAN, I find myself with but one novel and a collection of novellas to go. I am so big an Elkin fan at this point that you had might as well go ahead and appoint me president of the Elks Club. (Rimshot.) We cherish Elkin for his rollicking tragicomic mien, this first and foremost a matter of his prodigious capacities as regards language, its manipulation, its incipient mania, its roiling inborn malevolence. Elkin is often compared to the circuit-circulating vaudevillian, your more gifted stand-up comics, and jazz soloists whose wild virtuosity distinguishes them. I’ve got a yen for this sort of thing, and nobody does it in literature quite like our dear Stanley E. In my last Elkin review, this being my review of THE LIVING END, I mentioned that the master’s two proper novels of the 1970s, THE DICK GIBSON SHOW and THE FRANCHISER, maintain a special place in my heart, presenting themselves, I think, as emblematic, as in each of them the fusillade of language serves to support embedded, performative consideration of America’s zeal for sales and the communications industry. This is a tendency already fundamental to A BAD MAN, itself prefigured to a certain extent by the early story “Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers,” with which a collection of Elkin’s early short fictions shares a name. The early Elkin stories were not nearly so positively looney in their outlandish word splurge as the novels would very quickly become, but Jake Greenspahn, the Jewish supermarket owner at the heart of that early comparatively naturalistic story, foresees Leo Feldman the larger-than-life Jewish department store owner who serves as the not-especially-morally-exemplary protagonist of A BAD MAN. Elkin’s second novel is engineered, like THE DICK GIBSON SHOW and GEORGE MILLS, around a redoubtable campaign of temporal transversality. Telling the story of a year in the life of Leo Feldman, imprisoned in a state institution as a result of having run a shady below-board black-market-type operation out of the basement of his department store, the narrative itself is not properly linear, regularly doubling back to detail Feldman’s origins, his relations with others, and the development of what we might call his general, ultimately compromising animus. The prison story is in large part an extremely rich Kafkaesque farce, but the novel is itself more fundamentally a character study in which the prison, a liminal setting, comes to figures as a fascinating and determinedly multivalent locus for one antisocial (yet almost effortlessly social) man’s encounter with comeuppance. We might start by saying that this is a novel about a man uncommonly good at using language for purposes of deflection who is backed into a series of corners. The State here represents the society of one’s fellows, the relationship between the man and his fellows inherently adversarial, and the way the man comes to be symbolically castrated is by way of political machinery set on confusing, belittling, and confounding him, the more absurd the means the better. When the world teaches us how absurd it can be, how arbitrary its application of law and of bylaw, it is well on its way to neutralizing us. Where does that leave us cunning wielders of language? Squirming, doubtlessly, upping our game, hopefully, evading the pincers to the best of our ability, backed into a corner or not. In his introduction to the 2003 Dalkey edition of A BAD MAN, David C. Dougherty is, as a matter of course, compelled, as are we all when addressing Elkin, to pay service to the master’s staggering command of language. One sterling bit of nearly throwaway pun stands out for Dougherty, put in service as said pun is to Leo Feldman’s very amusing self-aggrandizement: “I am master of all I purvey.” It is a line that frames potency around things, their possession and the trading of them, and what Leo “purveys” are the things in his department store. He is a God, per his own vantage, of merchandise and the malarkey & mischief required to move the merchandise. There is another beautiful bit of punning in the book that Dougherty does not mention, so loaded, to my mind, that we may well nearly find ourselves dealing with dialectic. Behold: the curious homophony of Cell vs. Sell. A fissure opens between these two words that is not only eminently dialectical, but one that might well find us musing on the double helix, the genetic building blocks of this very great social comedy of the 1960s. To Sell is above all to use language in order to exercise potency. It is a kind of irony, because it only means what it says tactically. A Cell is the corner into which your fellow man may very well feel inclined to back you, establishing systems, structures, and institutions in order to maximize efficiency, to streamline the keeping-everybody-in-his-place modus. In some sense, then, as per Elkin’s schematics, the man of brains, too hip to buy into horeshit pieties, too ironic to have an “actual” position, faced with the necessity of thriving inside a “society,” may exist in a condition of quasi-permanently Selling his way out of his Cell, this ultimately being very clearly what Elkin has fielded Leo Feldman in order to experimentally “perform.” Because the novel keeps doubling back, it is only toward the very end of the book that we come to have anything like ample sense of who Leo Feldman is and how he came to be who/what he is, though this shall naturally remain a little muddy seeing as the man is principally an ironist of sales. Much, of course, hinges on the question of how Feldman came to be arrested. How did he go too far? Why the recourse taken? First: what was going on in the basement of the department store? Feldman had set up a clandestine support network, essentially, procuring abortions for the desperate, fixes for the dopesick, liaisons for the degenerate; he was a sub rosa middle man for the needful, he himself considering the whole enterprise “the true pulse, perhaps, of the economy itself.” We might see this as something like the space-age entrepreneur having gotten a little too close to the sun. It is not until quite late in the book that we are exposed to significant elucidations concerning how Feldaman sees or saw his basement racket, himself “a realist who surrendered quarter where it was due and would never be a pusher, but merely sin’s friend downtown, a doer of favors, crime’s wardheeler, transgression’s lousy legman, wrong’s cop and felony’s cabbie giving directions to the conventioneers.” Feldman, Master of Clandestine Sales, came to know that his potency was prefigured by the inherent vulnerability of his fellows, the Law of Demand its very self: “that everyone had already been tempted, that everyone had already succumbed, had had those things happen to him which he wanted to have happen, and was looking for them to happen again. Seduction was routine; yielding was; everyone had a yes to spend and spent it.” It is precisely this knowledge—let’s even call it gnosis—that first stratifies the mark (the buyer, the sold) and ultimately makes Feldman a marked man, a threat. He needs (or needed to be) put back in his place, right-sized, the Seller Celled. Again, the political machinery of the State becomes simply the de facto agency of one’s rankled fellows, but key here, insofar as concerns A BAD MAN, is the Warden of the fantastical absurdist prison wherein Feldman finds himself, prison combing elements from Kafka and Jeremy Bentham and Frank Tashlin. This is how the Warden introduces himself: “I’m Warden Fisher, a fisher of bad men.” There is a doubled Christian mythological resonance is this declaration (invoking the Fisher King as well as Christ holding court before his disciples), and these are both addressed by David C. Dougherty in his introduction. Warden Fisher isolates the Jewish (!) Leo Feldman as a “bad man,” one of a good number of such “bad men” within the greater prison population, such men subject to enhanced scrutiny and immediately identifiable by virtue of their being made to wear, instead of the conventional prisoner uniform, shoddily-manufactured carnivalesque parodies of their street clothes (what individuates them ultimately what makes them clownish whipping boys). There is no discernible logic behind who is classed as “bad,” a fact emblematic of a societal microcosm whose rules and regulations are inscrutable at best, random and calculatedly absurd at worst (productive, within the prison population, of what Elkin at one point calls, to paraphrase, Talmudists of obscure regulations). Much comedy is mined within the prison setting from insane and ever-variable complications relating to the random enforcement of illogical, mad, or outrageously cruel strictures of discipline and punishment, often appearing to be made up off the cuff. Of course, and this mustn’t be lost on us, the creation of a subaltern class of inmates, the “bad men,” along with the maintenance of a general condition of tense paranoia, means that Warden Fisher has created something like an authoritarian utopia. We all know, don’t we, how reactionary forces weaponize factionalism, tribalism, the segmentation of “us” and “them.” Part of what a campaign of targeted humiliation and paranoiac sensitization is intended to provoke, in the case of Leo Feldman, is the destruction of his shield of ironic salesman remove. Interestingly, Feldman’s irony already has origins in his own earlier experiences of dehumanization and hardship. “If their impotence taught them tolerance, it taught Feldman that the emotions were the first to go. There was comfort in this. Was that good?” The push and pull instituted by a specific exaggerated form of institutionalized subjection, by the Warden Fisher’s methodology of controlled destabilization, is marked in the inner life of Feldman, giving us a direct sense of what exactly is at stake: “He was lonely. What he missed, he supposed, was the comfort of his old indifference when nothing counted and madness was all there was. Now there was a difference. It was because he counted; his life counted. It always had. How could it be? It didn’t make sense.” These sentences present us explicitly with irony itself appraising its own crisis. My contention would be, however, that Leo Feldman, consummate prick though he inarguably is, remains a hero rather than an antihero precisely because even faced, in the final pages of A BAD MAN, with the fateful inevitability of mob justice’s last resort, his ironic remove is not altogether suspended, literally withstanding the ultimate blows. I think a case could be made for irony—at its best, its most indefatigably efficacious—representing a jouissance of the inner life. Readers of French theory steeped in the psychoanalytic tradition will be familiar with the word “jouissance.” Lacan, Kristeva, that sort of stuff. Let me make the case here that we might define a “jouissance of the inner life” as simply an “almost complete absence of neurosis.” Irony can be a tool of jouissance, and I know this, because it’s one I use all the time. I know very well that at the end of the day, in terms of the ultimate accounting, I am no better or worse than anybody else. It’s essentially a fact. Yet, to enjoy my time on earth, day to day, I like to pretend that the ignominy and imbecility of the people around me is charming, sort of adorable, and that I am myself something like an exiled aristocrat from another planet, just essentially chilling out with no greater purpose, and relishing this baleful realm to which I have been banished. Why do I do this? It is simple and should be obvious: it makes being alive more fun. This is, I think, pretty close to the lesson of Leo Feldman’s warts-and-all heroism. A BAD MAN culminates in a kangaroo court, a persecutory mob scenario we might say is a bit (only a bit, because it is so much more) like the penultimate sequences of Fritz Lang’s M reinterpreted by the Marx Brothers. It is a berserk and very fun social comedy, courtroom psychodrama gone bananas, the social domain abstracted in such a way as to elevate it to something close to Universal (quasi-Platonic). And this persecution, the tribalism and all that, is far more Universal than we might like to admit. The main reason we might not want to admit to the Universality of the matters under consideration is because, ultimately, this would seem to suggest something close to permanence, intractability, as such more or less short-circuiting any theoretical formulation of any halfway worthy utopia whatever. Again, if utopia is off the table, irony once again starts to look pretty good. There is also, it bears mentioning, reference to Shakespeare’s Shylock in A BAD MAN. You know the guy. Victims of Venice’s antisemitism first, and then, over and over, history’s. It would no doubt be sound to consider the kangaroo court and Leo Feldman’s maintaining-my-bemused-individuality-of-mind in the face of brute collective force in terms of an explicitly Jewish reading. Again, this reading would likely establish Feldman as a hero. A BAD MAN is a novel that can be read as addressing antisemitism, sure. But no doubt more purely it is a novel about the extraordinary, odds-defeating resilience of, you know, the chosen people.

[Jim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Stanley Elkin came recommended for in-depth character writing with an edge, and that was true. He’s a name I was unfamiliar with, he’s not a Bellow or Malamud his literary comparison, on ocassion he’s comparable to some Vonnegut dialogue. Stanley Elkin tried to go somewhere in the Nelson Algren human sociologist zone, but he is too much of a quirky detailed writer. I didn’t get that this was going to be a reflective and moody prison piece, you expect a successful merchant to hold his own in a low security prison. You imagine Feldman, the prisoner as someone whose wise and adaptable nature could easily adjust, you learn quickly that he’s the atypical prisoner, he’s better at acting repentant than most prisoners, intent on working the angle of a prison run by a controlling warden. This wasn’t exactly Cool Hand Luke or In Cold Blood Blood material, but it was written somewhere in that time frame. Elkin seems to enjoy detailing the perverse logic of Feldman and the Warden. I don’t appreciate the length of the novel, it easily could’ve been condensed to a tighter work.

This video reminds me ov Feldman’s first job in the prison.
https://youtu.be/pkYNBwCEeH4

[Peter Arsenault · Rating 3 out of 5]

Has some racist language in it (published in 1967), so I wouldn't necessarily recommend it-- but something about Elkin's writing keeps me coming back. "The Magic Kingdom" was excellent, and "A Bad Man" has some really interesting ideas in it. It's a bit like Kafka's "Trial" except it turns out that the protagonist maybe deserves his ordeal, or at least some degree of punishment. I think it's a good example of an unreliable narrator.

[michal k-c · Rating 2 out of 5]

2 stars for the style — Elkin writes solid sentences — but the admittedly funny premise is stretched so wildly thin that it feels like a bit of a slog. I feel like there’s a masterpiece in Elkin’s oeuvre though so I’m gonna keep reading him

[Bruce · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fable, an allegory plumbing guilt, punishment, Judaism, and human wants. Set in a fantastic prison setting with a wayward warden who makes up the rules as he goes along, the protagonist stumbles through punishment that he doesn't understand, and that seems arbitrary. The setting, though not meant to be realistic, is dark and anxious, even paranoid. But the plot is so deliberately ridiculous and over-the-top that it isn't depressing.

Elkins is a tremendous writer with a striking talent for observation, phrasing, and vocabulary. Even though the plot sometimes feels muddled and disconnected, the tale is great fun to read because of the author's language and black humor, which is sometimes hilarious in a dark way.

In its exploration of guilt and consequences, its brooding style, and its craftsmanship, the book reminds me of a Pink Floyd song.

[Nigel Carroll · Rating 1 out of 5]

stopped at 20%. bored wasnt the word.