Van Gogh Bedroom

When Stanley Elkin's health deteriorates, he returns to that form Henry James called "blessed," the novella. After his multiple sclerosis was diagnosed, Elkin published the brilliant Searches and Seizures. As that illness worsened in the seventies, he completed his controversial "triptych" The Living End, its hero a capricious, omnipotent God and one victim a modern Job. Now wheelchair-bound, Elkin has published a new collection, Van Gogh's Bedroom at Arles, demonstrating again that his novellas are valuable resources.

It's in the form - like golf or tennis. Elkin's verbal gifts tend to the excessive and intense, so he generally avoids writing short stories, which cramp his expansive, eclectic style with minimalist t(r)endencies. He's after MORE: more puns, more metaphors, more spins on the tale, more pushes of the envelope. The novella showcases Elkin's talents because it is paradoxically compact and expansive. Although the tight plot encourages appreciation of Elkin's rhetoric, there is room(van gogh bedroom painting name) in novellas for linguistic bravura and protracted curiosity about our flawed, failed, sometimes wonderful human condition.

Elkin has always been fascinated by the several million things that can go wrong in van gogh room painting. His masterpiece, The Magic Kingdom, explores what dignity terminally ill children can maintain while subjected to a do-gooder's "dream vacation." The semi-autobiographical hero of the first novella synthesizes Elkin's concern with assaults on our cells and neural systems and the theme that the world we live in so frailly is, well, so fascinating: "Once you got into it, it was a waste, a waste and a shame, thought Schiff, to be crippled-up in such an interesting place as the world." Similarly Elkin identifies the world's intrinsic interestingness as the writer's principal responsibility:

that's precisely the writer's job, his only politics . . . to legislate the infinite details of the world, to inventory the vast holdings of van gogh the bedroom painting and work its combinations like a safecracker, giving everyone, everyone, the best lines . . . pleading the case of the guilty as well as the innocent, as if literature were a sort of litigation, due process, le filibuster juste if it comes to that. . . .

All three novellas in Van Gogh's Room chronicle with mirth and energy diff