Franchiser

Christoher Lehmann-Haupt, New York Times
"Elkin's fiction runs on language, on comic fantasies and routines. Give him conventional wisdom and he'll twist it into tomfoolery."

John Leonard, Saturday Review
"A frenzied parable, rather as though the Wandering Jew and Willy Loman had gotten together on a vaudeville act."

Robert Towers, New York Times Book Review
"Elkin is often drunk with words. . . ."

Nation
"Crowded with cunning shifts of meaning and extravagant deployments of wit."

Book Description
Ben Flesh is one of the men "who made America look like America, who made America famous." He collects franchises, traveling from state to state, acquiring the brand-name establishments that shape the American landscape. But both the nation and Ben are running out of energy. As blackouts roll through the West, Ben struggles with the onset of multiple sclerosis, and the growing realization that his lifetime quest to buy a name for himself has ultimately failed.

About the Author
Stanley Elkin is widely considered one of the most important American writers of the contemporary period, with over a dozen novels and short story collections to his credit. A two-time winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award, and a three-time nominee for the National Book Award, he is regarded as both a great comedic writer and an extraordinary prose stylist. Despite wide acclaim for his work, most of Elkin's novels have fallen out of print since his death in 1995. Dalkey Archive Press began a project in 1998 to restore to print all of Elkin's work and has since published THE DICK GIBSON SHOW, BOSWELL: A MODERN COMEDY, THE MACGUFFIN, CRIERS & KIBITZERS, KIBITZERS & CRIERS, THE MAGIC KINGDOM, and THE RABBI OF LUD, among others.

Excerpted from The Franchiser by Stanley Elkin, William H. Gass. Copyright © 2001. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
Past the organge roof and the turquoise tower, past the immense sunburst of the green and yellow sign, past the golden arches, beyond the low buff building, beside the discrete hut, the dark top hat on the studio window shade, beneath the red and white longitudes of the enormous bucket, coming up to the thick shaft of the yellow arrow, piercing the royal-blue field, he feels he is home. Is it Nashville? Elmira, New York? St. Louis County? A Florida key? The Illinois arrowhead? Indiana as a holster? Ohio like a badge? Is he North? St. Paul, Minn.? Northeast? Boston, Mass.? The other side of America? Salt Lake? Los Angeles? At the botton of the country? The Texas udder? Where? In Colorado's frame? Wyoming like a postage stamp? Michigan like a mitten? The chipped, eroding bays of the Northwest? Seattle? Bellingham, Washington?


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Ben Flesh is one of the men "who made America look like America, who made America famous." He collects franchises, traveling from state to state, acquiring the brand-name establishments that shape the American landscape. But both the nation and Ben are running out of energy. As blackouts roll through the West, Ben struggles with the onset of multiple sclerosis, and the growing realization that his lifetime quest to buy a name for himself has ultimately failed.


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