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The Macguffin
A seriocomic masterpiece from the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning author of George Mills. Here Elkin is true to form, narrating with his accustomed panache the mysterious events that take place in a few short days in the life of a city commissioner of streets, and combining laugh-out-loud humor with plot twists that would make Hitchcock proud.
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First published January 1, 1991
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About the author
Stanley Elkin
53 books126 followersStanley 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."
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."
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Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews
January 21, 2018
Motivational People
What is the relationship between literature and life? Or for that matter between spirit and matter? Is the answer a critical philosophical one or a doctrinal religious one? And do these questions and answers intersect with what most of us would call reality? If you’re more or less permanently high on coca leaves like the protagonist of The MacGuffin, both the questions and the answers as well as reality get a bit fuzzy, producing a kind of anti-Freudian psychology which doesn’t so much provide a theory of the case as describe the complexity of the situation.
The MacGuffin is Alfred Hitchcock’s term for the motivating force of a story: The non-existent George Kaplan for whom Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) is mistaken in North by Northwest, the eponymous Maltese Falcon, and Scottie Ferguson’s (Jimmy Stewart’s) vertigo in the film of the same name. Although central to the narrative plot, the MacGuffin becomes subordinate to character and action in the story, a hidden force located outside the lives of those touched by it.
The MacGuffin, however, is something more than a literary device. In Elkin’s construction it offers a kind of worldview which is fundamentally opposed to that of the modern world, particularly the world of psychoanalysis. Unlike the Freudian id, the MacGuffin doesn’t arise from within, it arrives from elsewhere like a Lutheran vocation.
The MacGuffin has a life of its own that may come and go and mutate without permission or license. It can even become an interlocutor with whom to consult and negotiate if we take it seriously enough. In short we, as human beings, are its partner rather than its Freudian slave. It is a friendly force, there for us to make sense of our lives but it doesn’t demand or force action on its own behalf. And it of course collides frequently with other MacGuffins.
So, Bob Druff, City Commissioner of Streets in a medium sized, undistinguished American city, husband of the physically flawed but loyal Rose Helen, and father to the autistic but loving 30 year old, Mikey, sets forth on his MacGuffin-led adventures. Channelling both Homer’s Ulysses and Homer Simpson, Druff investigates the hit and run death of his son’s purported girl-friend, the apparent MacGuffin of the piece.
But as Elkin reminds us frequently: “life goes on, even during the chase scenes.” So the MacGuffin has to contend with all sorts of memories, neuroses, and physical failings. The most important contribution of the MacGuffin is to get Druff to stop thinking about himself, or at least to stop thinking about the world in terms of himself. Since “You learn fast or die when you have a MacGuffin”, Druff learns, but not about some sort of psycho-analytical core of himself; rather he learns how he fits in the scheme of things – family, history, career. There is no fixed point to ‘himself’ because there is no stable scheme in which he, or anyone else lives.
Elkin concludes on a note that is both theological and psychological:
Not a bad alternative starting point really to an alternative theology and psychology.
What is the relationship between literature and life? Or for that matter between spirit and matter? Is the answer a critical philosophical one or a doctrinal religious one? And do these questions and answers intersect with what most of us would call reality? If you’re more or less permanently high on coca leaves like the protagonist of The MacGuffin, both the questions and the answers as well as reality get a bit fuzzy, producing a kind of anti-Freudian psychology which doesn’t so much provide a theory of the case as describe the complexity of the situation.
The MacGuffin is Alfred Hitchcock’s term for the motivating force of a story: The non-existent George Kaplan for whom Roger Thornhill (Cary Grant) is mistaken in North by Northwest, the eponymous Maltese Falcon, and Scottie Ferguson’s (Jimmy Stewart’s) vertigo in the film of the same name. Although central to the narrative plot, the MacGuffin becomes subordinate to character and action in the story, a hidden force located outside the lives of those touched by it.
The MacGuffin, however, is something more than a literary device. In Elkin’s construction it offers a kind of worldview which is fundamentally opposed to that of the modern world, particularly the world of psychoanalysis. Unlike the Freudian id, the MacGuffin doesn’t arise from within, it arrives from elsewhere like a Lutheran vocation.
The MacGuffin has a life of its own that may come and go and mutate without permission or license. It can even become an interlocutor with whom to consult and negotiate if we take it seriously enough. In short we, as human beings, are its partner rather than its Freudian slave. It is a friendly force, there for us to make sense of our lives but it doesn’t demand or force action on its own behalf. And it of course collides frequently with other MacGuffins.
So, Bob Druff, City Commissioner of Streets in a medium sized, undistinguished American city, husband of the physically flawed but loyal Rose Helen, and father to the autistic but loving 30 year old, Mikey, sets forth on his MacGuffin-led adventures. Channelling both Homer’s Ulysses and Homer Simpson, Druff investigates the hit and run death of his son’s purported girl-friend, the apparent MacGuffin of the piece.
But as Elkin reminds us frequently: “life goes on, even during the chase scenes.” So the MacGuffin has to contend with all sorts of memories, neuroses, and physical failings. The most important contribution of the MacGuffin is to get Druff to stop thinking about himself, or at least to stop thinking about the world in terms of himself. Since “You learn fast or die when you have a MacGuffin”, Druff learns, but not about some sort of psycho-analytical core of himself; rather he learns how he fits in the scheme of things – family, history, career. There is no fixed point to ‘himself’ because there is no stable scheme in which he, or anyone else lives.
Elkin concludes on a note that is both theological and psychological:
"If MacGuffin was the principle of structure to Druff, of pattern, of shading, and all the latent architecture of the old man’s life, what was Druff to MacGuffin? Why, raw material like pitch, like tar, like clay or sand or silica, like gravel and the trace elements of all the asphalts."
Not a bad alternative starting point really to an alternative theology and psychology.
May 17, 2010
The MacGuffin started off strong, but somewhere along the way either he or I, or maybe both of us, got a little tired of the story and lost interest. I thought this might be a failing of the book, but I'm thinking now that it might have been an (un)intentional literary device. I won't explain this one, but read on and maybe you can forget I said it!
The MacGuffin is a book about a middle level government bureaucrat (the Commissioner of Roads to be exact), in a small city who begins to believe he is entwined in an intricate plot of conspiracies and deception that involves everyone in his life, from his limo drivers (his job seems to mostly entail riding around in a limo, this is explained in the book) to the woman he ineptly takes as a mistress, to his Rainman like son, the Shiite woman his son hangs out with, his wife and a host of other people all of whom the main character weaves into a complicated mess of intrigue. The guy knows that it's all bullshit, the whole web he's weaved, he knows that this is all in his head, that he's making this all up.
Why would someone make all of this up?
Why would someone goto all the trouble of creating a very complicated and very time consuming alternate 'existence' (this isn't the best word, but I couldn't think of anything better as i sucked down cranberry juice and stared at the screen for a minute) and then insisted on living his life as if everyone were really involved in a grand conspiracy that might think it necessary to kill him?
Basically because this guys life is so boring, he's a middle aged guy who is slightly successful, but not very. His health is in decline, he's never had a sex life he's enjoyed, his son is weird, and he's something of a pedantic blow-hard so he creates an exciting life as a substitute. Even though it's nothing but a story of nothingness that he is creating in the spaces of any intersubjective relationship where ambiguity dwells.
Stanley Elkin is a great writer. And somewhere I kind of lost interest in this book, but that's ok I don't hold it against him. I'm fairly certain that this would be a later book (it is, it is, I was right, it's his penultimate novel). There is something resigned in it, like he should have been more than he turned out to be. Not that it is his fault, he just happened to be one of those really great American writers that fame sort of eluded, stuck somewhere between the mainstream fame of the less funny Jewish writer Philip Roth but not quite reaching into the cult / nerdboy land of someone like Thomas Pynchon. From the novels I've read they have all been a) darkly funny and b) satirical portraits of America, but not the haughty New York City / Day of the Locust type of American satire, but a heartland type satire, but a weird heartland type satire sort of like if Garison Keilor were forcibly compacted into Woody Allen and then kicked off the fucking lake, but continued to live somewhere in those places planes fly over between the cities where celebrities do late night TV.
The MacGuffin is a book about a middle level government bureaucrat (the Commissioner of Roads to be exact), in a small city who begins to believe he is entwined in an intricate plot of conspiracies and deception that involves everyone in his life, from his limo drivers (his job seems to mostly entail riding around in a limo, this is explained in the book) to the woman he ineptly takes as a mistress, to his Rainman like son, the Shiite woman his son hangs out with, his wife and a host of other people all of whom the main character weaves into a complicated mess of intrigue. The guy knows that it's all bullshit, the whole web he's weaved, he knows that this is all in his head, that he's making this all up.
Why would someone make all of this up?
Why would someone goto all the trouble of creating a very complicated and very time consuming alternate 'existence' (this isn't the best word, but I couldn't think of anything better as i sucked down cranberry juice and stared at the screen for a minute) and then insisted on living his life as if everyone were really involved in a grand conspiracy that might think it necessary to kill him?
Basically because this guys life is so boring, he's a middle aged guy who is slightly successful, but not very. His health is in decline, he's never had a sex life he's enjoyed, his son is weird, and he's something of a pedantic blow-hard so he creates an exciting life as a substitute. Even though it's nothing but a story of nothingness that he is creating in the spaces of any intersubjective relationship where ambiguity dwells.
Stanley Elkin is a great writer. And somewhere I kind of lost interest in this book, but that's ok I don't hold it against him. I'm fairly certain that this would be a later book (it is, it is, I was right, it's his penultimate novel). There is something resigned in it, like he should have been more than he turned out to be. Not that it is his fault, he just happened to be one of those really great American writers that fame sort of eluded, stuck somewhere between the mainstream fame of the less funny Jewish writer Philip Roth but not quite reaching into the cult / nerdboy land of someone like Thomas Pynchon. From the novels I've read they have all been a) darkly funny and b) satirical portraits of America, but not the haughty New York City / Day of the Locust type of American satire, but a heartland type satire, but a weird heartland type satire sort of like if Garison Keilor were forcibly compacted into Woody Allen and then kicked off the fucking lake, but continued to live somewhere in those places planes fly over between the cities where celebrities do late night TV.
April 24, 2018
We do not owe the genesis of the concept of the MacGuffin to Alfred Hitchcock, only its popularization. The MacGuffin is of course a fixture in storytelling (generally stories of suspense). It is essentially a quasi-absurd non-thing thing that is convenient to the establishment of parameters and the propulsion of narrative. Hitchcock at one point explained it as the thing the spies are after that the audience doesn't care about. In what may be the be-all-end-all novel of the freewheeling paranoia of the coca leaf chewer, Elkin takes the MacGuffin, the masterpiece named for it, and repurposes it (at first vaguely, always flexibly) as something like the germinal kernel of a logistics psychosis (and eventually an actual admittedly-immaterial character). On the final page he pins it down deftly and it is so splendid I shall (who's to stop me?) call it an immortal gesture. Stanley Elkin has been one of the major discoveries of my adult life. And I'm only four novels and a story collection in. With a great shimmery expanse laid out! I put him near the very top of the short list of greatest 20th century American writers, which would consequently put him not too far from the top of a list of the world's. He is lauded for his humour, lauded for his language, always good for a frolic. He is a mind like a teeming impossibly busy bionic ant colony. He is a great many machines working super crazy perilously fast all at once with the wheels seeming always about to come off. He sets up a joke, launches a riff, rides shtick, and suddenly comes around through the back door and knocks you on your ass. And he does it again and again, like Muhammad Ali toying with you. As though it were a piece of cake. Do you write? Fancy yourself pretty darn good at it? Want to be crushed and humbled with a big shit-eating grin nonetheless pasted to your mug? Then Elkin, my man, is your man. THE MACGUFFIN is super cool because it takes the form of an outright madcap spree. There are no chapter breaks or even breathing breaks. This is a full-on overdrive coming-undone everything-akimbo meltdown that suddenly, in the denouement, realizes an uncanny focus. Ferocious, slapstick, and naturally featuring superlative language pyrotechnics. It is also a dizzy, psychotic (again, pretty goddamn literally), and druggy (coca leaves!) detective story, increasingly so. There were a couple moments (especially, as I recall, the recounting of a dawning stuporous realization regarding the provenance of an Oriental rug in a rabbi's lavatory) where I seemed to hear Joanna Newsom's voice in the precise manner it was utilized to VO-relay some of Pynchon's doper's blues in Paul Thomas Anderson's adaptation of INHERENT VICE. So so so. Is MACGUFFIN the greatest novel ever ever ever? I don't know, man, I'm reluctant to say it is, but, shit, man, maybe.
June 20, 2022
I actually did not finish this. The writing is excellent for the style that it is. The way this guy puts together a sentence is something to behold. But I never got into the story and I never cared for the characters.
Also, color me stupid, but I like chapters. It is a subjective thing I know, but I like them.
Also, color me stupid, but I like chapters. It is a subjective thing I know, but I like them.
May 4, 2008
I like this guy's essays and that he was born in Brooklyn, but moved to St. Louis and died there. As for this book, it was okay. It's not something I would recommend to anyone not familiar with Stanley Elkin, as I think it's hard for most people to relate to the story: a city commissioner in his late 50s seemingly losing his sanity over the course of two days while trying to figure out exactly what happened to him (a scandal involving his son and his son's fiancee). It certainly had a strong voice to the characterization of the main guy, but I eventually found it sort of tiresome. I give it 3 stars because it referenced several times the St. Louis Blues' possible move to Saskatoon, Canada back in the early 80s. How often does a novel do that?
January 24, 2012
What a ride. I'd call this a madcap comedy. Definitely impressive, and not, I'd say, for someone not interested in meandering language and anecdotes. Feels a bit old-school Philip Roth at times, but is mostly classic Stanley Elkin. Better than Dick Gibson, I'd say. I'll have to read this one again, as it's the sort of book that would benefit, I think, from knowing what's going to happen as you're reading. Plus I felt a little rushed. The way it all comes together at the end, too. Pretty incredible. Not literally.
July 3, 2015
The title serves as the main framing piece in this alltogether ambitious novel by Elkin. His trademark jazz-riff sentences are on full display here, with another protagonist caught swimming in a current. I greatly enjoyed sections of the book but felt, in large part because of it's macguffin-radical structure that it didn't succeed as well as a whole.
December 26, 2014
If you have a spouse that talks in their sleep, this book has some extra meaning. One of Elkin's better works.
January 16, 2017
An enjoyable romp through two days of an asshole's midlife crisis. Funny stream-of-consciousness.
October 27, 2025
"This is a ridiculous conversation," the mayor said in a normal voice unaided by the speaking tube.
My second try at an Elkin book - The Franchiser is brilliant but I found the subject matter tired and the whole affair a bit too breathless. This book is better, and I was surprised to find it's considered one of Elkin's minor works. It's engaging, surprising, and the narrative just whisks you along through a few days in the life of Bobbo Druff. Margaret Glorio is a full-fledged character, as opposed to Patty Finsberg of Franchiser, who was basically a rhetorical device.
It's just a lot of fun - there are some very funny and convincing exchanges of the denizens of Druff's world.
My second try at an Elkin book - The Franchiser is brilliant but I found the subject matter tired and the whole affair a bit too breathless. This book is better, and I was surprised to find it's considered one of Elkin's minor works. It's engaging, surprising, and the narrative just whisks you along through a few days in the life of Bobbo Druff. Margaret Glorio is a full-fledged character, as opposed to Patty Finsberg of Franchiser, who was basically a rhetorical device.
It's just a lot of fun - there are some very funny and convincing exchanges of the denizens of Druff's world.
February 1, 2018
The MacGuffin is a motivating force, and in this darkly comic novel, it is like an external force opposed to the right order of things. The novel follows a commissioner of streets and events that surround him over the course of a few days as he tries to determine what has happened. Reality is more than he remembers, and he becomes paranoid of a conspiracy against him. Unfortunately, I just did not find the comedy to my taste, and without it, the novel dragged for me. Not my favorite, despite the clearly excellent writing.
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See my other reviews here!
June 8, 2023
Elkin is an interesting writer and this book starts off with promise.. But as another reviewer here said, the book loses its way. I found the no-chapters, no-pause experiment exhausting. The main character seems to learn nothing and never changes. I gave up 3/4 through.
September 16, 2019
nicely written, enjoyable narrator, but really dated and the core character is a lump.
May 26, 2020
I read about 2/3 of the book and just couldn’t finish. It goes on and on and on. Started out okay but got boring and couldn’t hold my interest.
January 11, 2025
This wasn't an enjoyable read, primarily because it's repetitive, meandering, and positions itself as far funnier than it actually is.
November 4, 2025
"Follow-along-with-me" through sex, scandal, etc. in the vein of Cosmopolis or Day of the Oprichnik, but the trials and tribulations are a bit more anxious middle class.
Displaying 1 - 16 of 16 reviews