Van Gogh's Room at Arles: Three Novellas. - book reviews

Studies in Short Fiction, Wntr, 1994 by David C. Dougherty

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 Room 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 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 our physical and psychological makeup. 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 the human heart 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 differing characters' struggles to define and maintain their dignity.

In "Her Sense of Timing" Claire Schiff leaves Jack just before a party he is giving his graduate students, to fend for himself with his walker, a stair-glide his students break in a drunken prank, and a pushy graduate political geographer Schiff briefly hopes may have designs on him. The evening's assaults on his autonomy destroy his professorial authority and, eventually, his privacy. Elkin concludes the story by sending up a television commercial: Schiff has a security system installed so he can push a button and shout, "I've fallen and I can't get up!" By choosing this as his answering machine greeting, Schiff admits to himself how little autonomy he has left.

"Town Crier Exclusive, Confessions of a Princess Manque: |How Royals Found Me "Unsuitable" to Marry Their Larry" derives from Elkin's fascinations with vocation and royalty. He said in 1989 that his work-in-progress concerned "the vocation of being a princess"; now tabloid journalism scandalizes even pop culture, and Royal Family shenanigans embarrass Her Highness. Only Elkin could bring off this crossover, sending up the tabloids and royal stuffiness simultaneously.

Although the ex-princess promises Town Crier salacious gossip, she is linguistically Vict-rian, using dashes to s-ggest na-ghty w-rds. Prince Larry, one of Elkin's rare saintly characters, sacrifices everything, eventually his love for Louise, to his version of royal duty. The silliness of noblesse oblige in the tabloid era is manifested when Larry repudiates Lulu because she has been intimate with a peer - nouveau riche at that.

The premise governing the title story enables wonderful satire on academic foundations. The protagonist, a community college professor with a "sprained" soul, obtains a grant to research what "faculty at prestigious universities think of community colleges." Miller feels inferior among these endowed-chair holders. Writing his report, he falsifies data and invents sources to disguise how little research he has done, but Elkin suggests by the pretentious topics others study that their awards are equally fatuous. One sets Broadway lyrics to a twelve-tone scale, another proves a dozen cannot exist in nature, one prepares psychological profiles of saints, and Schiff from "Her Sense of Timing" shows why world-class cities are not built on mountains.

At Arles Miller also encounters characters and scenes out of Van Gogh paintings. This never quite connects with the marvelous satire about academics. Miller's breakdown leads to a compassionate look back over "everything unrendered," "untranslated and left unsyntaxed," but Elkin's elements - satire, alienation, and the relation of art to life - are not quite resolved. Then again, asking any writer to compete with Elkin's best is asking too much - even of Stanley Elkin.