I changed my opinion of this long, dense book about eight times over the course of reading it (I'm not sure what this is, this is great, this is a sloppy mess, this is spinning its wheels, this is great, this is good, this is all over the place, this is amazing), and my final determination is that it's a difficult, digressive, virtuosic masterpiece about everything. Some books I think, "Yeah, I can picture the writing process here, the effort, the time, the construction," but this book fills me

elkin's part of the american post modern crew along with dudes like barth and coover and pynchon so like you'd expect from those other authors there's some great prose and some good jokes and a lot of maximalism, but also there's actually quite a bit of carefully observed stuff about race and class in america which i didn't really expect but appreciated.

Review originally written for Amazon in 2013:George Mills is the story of the title character and of his ancestral line, all of whom are named George Mills, and whose destinies, because of fate or fortune or bad luck or genes or the weight of all those other George Millses before them or just from general inclination, has been consignment to the role of the nobody, the character actor, the serf, the hack driver. From a stable boy in the first crusade--whose horse leads the first George to servit...

I am here to say, point blank, without any fear I may be overstating it: Stantley Elkin is a devastatingly great writer, a giant giant giant, the definition of humbling. This is only the third of his novels I have read (after commencing w/ a certain esteemed collection of early short stories). I was completely knocked out by the last one, THE DICK GIBSON SHOW, instantaneously rendered a gaga in-it-for-life acolyte. It was simply one of the finest novels I had ever read, as formidable a literary

Every novel of reputed worth, no matter how much I may or may not like it, has something of merit to recommend it. The pleasures I derived from this one, however, were woefully out of proportion to the time I spent with it.Thirty years ago I had read "The Dick Gibson Show", and nothing except disappointment sticks with me. At the beginning of the year, I read "The Living End", and I was again puzzled by and disappointed. After finishing Marilynne Robinson's Homecoming, I waded into what some hav...

A wholly unique and ambitious novel. Largely plotless, meandering between rich scenes and setups. The language is as verbose and rich as any I've encountered, as Elkin tends towards longer sentences that twist and turn.

Tedious is a word that comes to mind to describe Elkin’s novel. There was some good dialogue, but the novel, for me, was off to a disjointed start and never got better. It was an excellent idea, fifty generations of men destined to never rise above their station and remain in some form or another of servitude, but overall I didn’t care for any of the characters. Still, the prose was something to be admired, even if the novel was fragmented in the sense that some elements of the story never came

''Learn this, Mills. There are distinctions between men, humanity is dealt out like cards. There is natural suzerainty* like the face value on coins. ... It's as simple as the scorn in my voice when I talk to you like this, as natural as the italics my kind use and your kind don't. Now do as I tell you, get on your horse.'' 'You've doomed me,' Mills said. 'You've cursed my race.' ''It was so. Mills apologized silently to the sons he was yet to have - if they ever got out of this mess - for the

This book took me six months to read. It had extremely vivid prose (perhaps overly vivid prose), a meandering plot, and a generally morose point of view. It seemed like I couldn't go more than a few pages without drifting away.Still, I never wanted to quit. So many gems! So little impetus to turn the page.

So the description of this book on the site says it's endlessly entertaining, and on my copy there is a quote from Salman Rushdie about how much he liked it...but maybe there's something I missed. I found it hard to follow and it was difficult to connect with any of the characters, as soon as I thought I might like them they we swapped out for a new character. There were some sections that I enjoyed, but many that I was completely bored with. It took me FOREVER to read this book because I wasn't...

This book is really a 3.5 star book, but the fact that I jerked off once or twice while reading it pushes it into the fourth when forced to choose. The first chapter is awful, and then it gets fantastic. Elkin's language is exciting; his plots not to so much. But who gives a shit about plot anyway when he can write about "taut auras", "the feeble litter of the lightly trafficked park", "effluent participatory chivalry" etc.

Stanley Elkin begins from afar, from the First Crusade, when the first George Mills founded a dynasty of Millses – yeomen, servants and blue collars for a thousand years.Some are born to rule and some are born to serve… “Some are born to endless night…”Cursed were the meek. He knew that. So be it. The last would never be first. He knew that. He knew everything, his low-born essence, his unswerving blue obedience and commissionaire’s style – everything.The little man’s tragedy is a widely known g...

With this, I've now read every Elkin novel. This one won a critics award the year I was born and has seemingly fell victim to a cruel, capricious oblivion. That fate, and all Elkin, is droll and lachrymose. He is not more widely read, I suspect, because writers know that to read him is their ruin, while readers know he ruins so many other authors. Yet you, too, should read every Elkin novel anyway. There was a plot of some sort--behind the brilliant pretext of a millennia of runners-up--but that...

Elkins was extolled by critics in the 60's-80's. but seems forgotten today. George Mills is not surprisingly about generations of George Millses, representing the nameless poor, those who do the menial tasks, fixed in class, fixed in poverty, expecting nothing and getting nothing. The Mills curse takes on mythic proportions and even smacks of Greek tragedy. It deals with issues like death, spiritualism, loyalty, marital fidelity, exploitation of the poor and mental illness. At the same time it's...

Thank you, John Keeney, for introducing me to one of the great American authors and novels.

I thought writing while under the influence of hallucinogens went out of practice in the late sixties. Guess I was wrong.

Never using one adjective when he could use three or more, Elkin's book was just not appealing to me. It starts with an interesting premise, following the men of the Mills line for a thousand years, each succeeding generation with a son named "George" and each generation cursed to a life on society's outskirts, 50 generations of futility as laborers and n'er do wells until the current George Mills, who works as a mover for a business that evicts the poor from there homes in St Louis, decides it'...

On hearing one time too many that "less is more" Mr. Elkin was quoted as saying that "less is less, more is more, fat fat and thin thin and enough is enough." After reading 4/5ths of this novel, and very much enjoying a good deal of what I read, the splendid avalanche of Elkin's prose and characters, I'm afraid I just reached the "enough is enough" stage.