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mholtzy's review against another edition
4.0
Amazing writer. Another master of setting and plotline - I hadn't read any of his stuff before. Saw it on Writer's Almanac e-mail.
blackoxford's review against another edition
4.0
Vendibility
In that mysterious place between the conscious and unconscious, that murky reality after sleep but before waking, that long lonely road... well, from the Lower East Side of Manhattan across the Brooklyn Bridge to Williamsburg, there writes Stanley Elkin. A Bad Man is Elkin at his most outrageous and surreal best. A comedy of crime and punishment in which the latter literally fits the former like a suit of ill-made clothes.
Elkin’s prison is a “guilt factory” in which those who are resistant to the significance of their various immoralities are educated by a complex, perhaps incomprehensible, system of procedures and traditions to recover their lost humanity, including ill-fitting parodies of their civilian attire. Both the reader and the book’s characters are in the dark about why. “The oldest lifers are still learning. Not even the warden knows everything about it.” This is a slapstick version of Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading. Or, equally possible, a parody of Freudian psychotherapy. A master class, perhaps, in how to be goy; or how to be Jew, or that particular Jew, Jesus, who of course annoyed a great many people by performing a great many unauthorised and illegal favours for his friends.
Leo is the bad man in question. The son of a schiksa and an itinerant Jewish seller of schlock who spent his life trying to be the only Jew in town, Leo must learn that he is bad. “In this prison, in this small cell no bigger than the rooms where he had slept out his childhood, guilt came as hard as righteousness.” But so did identity. After all “As far as he knew he had never seen a Jew except for his father.” Is the guilt he is meant to have about being a criminal, or about being Jewish; or for that matter about not being Jewish enough? Life is complicated.
Leo’s climb out of the gutter had not not been without adverse consequences. Despite legitimate commercial success, he does a Bernie Madoff and scams, defrauds and cheats everyone he knows. Or perhaps, like Bernie, he was merely meeting customer expectations. Or were the rules rigged to begin with? In any case, rehabilitation beckons. Will Leo be able to welcome guilt into his heart? Will he earn an indistinctive prison uniform? Will he become just one of the gang of reforming inmates? Or will he set up a new Ponzi scheme inside the walls?
According to the warden, “Crime is a detail-evasion technique.” But Leo is certainly a detail man. He doesn’t avoid it, he cherishes it. So it’s an even bet on which way the prison will go. Especially since the warden lets him in on a trade secret: “civilization is forms.” Leo can only try to follow his father’s laconic advice: “Everything is vendible. It must be. That’s religion. Your father is a deeply religious man. He believes in vendibility.” So why not rules and regulations... and forms? As vendible as anything else one supposes.
A Bad Man provokes me to wonder what’s happening with Bernie Madoff in his North Carolina federal prison. Bernie’s 150 year sentence gives him plenty of room to set up some pretty snazzy deals. If I were warden there, I’d keep an eye on his prison-library withdrawals. Anything by Elkin should mean immediate solitary.
In that mysterious place between the conscious and unconscious, that murky reality after sleep but before waking, that long lonely road... well, from the Lower East Side of Manhattan across the Brooklyn Bridge to Williamsburg, there writes Stanley Elkin. A Bad Man is Elkin at his most outrageous and surreal best. A comedy of crime and punishment in which the latter literally fits the former like a suit of ill-made clothes.
Elkin’s prison is a “guilt factory” in which those who are resistant to the significance of their various immoralities are educated by a complex, perhaps incomprehensible, system of procedures and traditions to recover their lost humanity, including ill-fitting parodies of their civilian attire. Both the reader and the book’s characters are in the dark about why. “The oldest lifers are still learning. Not even the warden knows everything about it.” This is a slapstick version of Nabokov’s Invitation to a Beheading. Or, equally possible, a parody of Freudian psychotherapy. A master class, perhaps, in how to be goy; or how to be Jew, or that particular Jew, Jesus, who of course annoyed a great many people by performing a great many unauthorised and illegal favours for his friends.
Leo is the bad man in question. The son of a schiksa and an itinerant Jewish seller of schlock who spent his life trying to be the only Jew in town, Leo must learn that he is bad. “In this prison, in this small cell no bigger than the rooms where he had slept out his childhood, guilt came as hard as righteousness.” But so did identity. After all “As far as he knew he had never seen a Jew except for his father.” Is the guilt he is meant to have about being a criminal, or about being Jewish; or for that matter about not being Jewish enough? Life is complicated.
Leo’s climb out of the gutter had not not been without adverse consequences. Despite legitimate commercial success, he does a Bernie Madoff and scams, defrauds and cheats everyone he knows. Or perhaps, like Bernie, he was merely meeting customer expectations. Or were the rules rigged to begin with? In any case, rehabilitation beckons. Will Leo be able to welcome guilt into his heart? Will he earn an indistinctive prison uniform? Will he become just one of the gang of reforming inmates? Or will he set up a new Ponzi scheme inside the walls?
According to the warden, “Crime is a detail-evasion technique.” But Leo is certainly a detail man. He doesn’t avoid it, he cherishes it. So it’s an even bet on which way the prison will go. Especially since the warden lets him in on a trade secret: “civilization is forms.” Leo can only try to follow his father’s laconic advice: “Everything is vendible. It must be. That’s religion. Your father is a deeply religious man. He believes in vendibility.” So why not rules and regulations... and forms? As vendible as anything else one supposes.
A Bad Man provokes me to wonder what’s happening with Bernie Madoff in his North Carolina federal prison. Bernie’s 150 year sentence gives him plenty of room to set up some pretty snazzy deals. If I were warden there, I’d keep an eye on his prison-library withdrawals. Anything by Elkin should mean immediate solitary.
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