Volume 29, Number 20 · December 16, 1982
Variety Shows
By Josh Rubins
George Mills
by Stanley Elkin
Dutton, 508 pp., $15.95
The Names
by Don DeLillo
Knopf, 339 pp., $13.95
This hasn't been a good year, by any reckoning, for the epic, fantastical strains—absurdism, fable, surrealism—in American fiction. The late John Gardner's Mickelsson's Ghosts, John Barth's Sabbatical, Bernard Malamud's God's Grace, Kurt Vonnegut's Deadeye Dick: violently dissimilar in other respects, they all suggest the fatigue (or uneasiness) that dogs most recent attempts to reach beyond life-sized storytelling. Even the year's most energetic exercise in the fanciful, D. Keith Mano's Take Five, was tenuously grounded (and largely ignored). And, in these two novels by writers whose work has often embraced the not-quite-real with purpose and authority, the leaps to metaphor and macrocosm seem half-hearted, arbitrary, sending up central images that don't earn their keep. 'The Names' (a cult) is the weakest notion in The Names, Don DeLillo's stately yet fractured meditation on terrorism, semantics, and Americans abroad; George Mills (an Everyman) is the weakest character in George Mills, Stanley Elkin's lavish yet unsatisfying anything-goes-in variety show.
Review, 2629 words
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