Current Reading: Stanley Elkin's The MacGuffin

 

I am currently enjoying reading the work of an experimental novelist I had never heard of until recently: Stanley Elkin. In particular, I am reading his 1991 novel The MacGuffin.

The New York Times, in a review of the book that is much more about the career of Stanly Elkin than it is a review of the book, describes The MacGuffin as follows:

"You have to have room to breathe," Elkin says, "to screw around and have some fun. Maybe it makes for imperfect fiction, but it provides the writer with a kind of joy, of liberation." Still, he's sensitive to "the slings and arrows of this outrageous accusation. That's why I was so careful to put all of the structure in 'The MacGuffin' -- to show them, 'Look! I can do structure.' "

Indeed, his new novel observes almost Aristotelian unities as it follows its protagonist, Robert Druff, through the streets of which he is City Commissioner. Except for one long flashback to Druff's heavy-petting courtship of his wife during college, the action is confined to less than 48 hours, and to the mid-America in which much of his fiction transpires: an unnamed, "middle-sized, rather backwater city, with its good-enough symphony orchestra of the second rank, its undersubscribed newspaper and losing football and baseball franchises."

Aging and ailing, disappointed by the mediocrity of his marriage, his son and his own political career, dependent on coca leaves and stool-softeners, Druff is "on the downhill side of destiny" when he is jolted by a concatenation of coincidences. The hit-and-run death of his son's Lebanese girlfriend, hints of a plot by rival pols to unseat him and a two-night stand with a sportswear buyer jump start "the spirit of narrative in his life" -- Hitchcock's MacGuffin. The extent to which these events occur in actuality or only in Druff's paranoid fantasies is not altogether clear and ultimately as beside the point as the contents of Claude Rains's wine cellar in "Notorious." (A MacGuffin, Hitchcock once told Francois Truffaut, is "the device, the gimmick, if you will," that seems "of vital importance to the characters" in his films but to the narrator is "of no importance.") What matters is that they revive Druff's imagination, his gift of gab, his lust (if not always his ability to consummate it) and, in a tender yet equivocal ending, his love for his family.