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Overview
In The MacGuffin, Elkin narrates with accustomed panache the mysterious events that take place in something under forty hours in the life of Bobby Druff, City Commissioner of Streets, aged fifty-eight, whose ordered world of avenues and roads seems suddenly a rather more complicated maze than he remembers. Events, in fact, conspire against him, and his wife, his son, his new-found lover, even his chauffeur, appear to be in on it. The novel combines a sort of tough-talking, laugh-out-loud humor and that odd, amusing, under-the-breath revenge of the powerless with the twists and killer thrill rides of a plot to rival Hitchcock's.Synopsis
In The MacGuffin, Elkin narrates with accustomed panache the mysterious events that take place in something under forty hours in the life of Bobby Druff, City Commissioner of Streets, aged fifty-eight, whose ordered world of avenues and roads seems suddenly a rather more complicated maze than he remembers. Events, in fact, conspire against him, and his wife, his son, his new-found lover, even his chauffeur, appear to be in on it. The novel combines a sort of tough-talking, laugh-out-loud humor and that odd, amusing, under-the-breath revenge of the powerless with the twists and killer thrill rides of a plot to rival Hitchcock's.
Thomas R. Edwards
By now it shouldn't be necessary to insist on the importance of [Elkin's] work: a list of the American novelists who have mattered over the last three decades would be a pitifully short one if it left him off. . . . He is a sublimely funny writer, an inspired stand-up performer. . . . Druff is gifted, like other Elkin protagonists, with almost miraculous verbal energies. . . . Elkin's whole representation of the American here and now is what deserves most praise. . . . Elkin clearly has just about all of us in mind, and the loving generosity of his wonder of things as they are, and as they might become, is as essentially American as anything in Emerson or Whitman. We owe him thanks again.
Thomas R. Edwards, The New Republic, 5/20/91
Editorials
Lorrie Moore
In The MacGuffin, that mad Joycean poetry is still there. . . . The sentences are long riffs of jazz; the words swarm and lather; the prose is exuberantly betroped, exhilaratingly de trop. . . . Elkin is brilliant.Lorrie Moore, New York Times, 3/10/91
Michael Dirda
Elkin is one of the grand originals of American fiction--as death haunted as Samuel Beckett, as funny as S. J. Perelman. . . . Elkin simply cannot bear to produce a lifeless sentence . . . The MacGuffin is wonderfully funny. . . . Most readers will want to say, again and again, "Mr. Elkin, sir, you are one hell of a writer,'"Michael Dirda, Washington Post Book World, 3/10/91
Thomas R. Edwards
By now it shouldn't be necessary to insist on the importance of [Elkin's] work: a list of the American novelists who have mattered over the last three decades would be a pitifully short one if it left him off. . . . He is a sublimely funny writer, an inspired stand-up performer. . . . Druff is gifted, like other Elkin protagonists, with almost miraculous verbal energies. . . . Elkin's whole representation of the American here and now is what deserves most praise. . . . Elkin clearly has just about all of us in mind, and the loving generosity of his wonder of things as they are, and as they might become, is as essentially American as anything in Emerson or Whitman. We owe him thanks again.Thomas R. Edwards, The New Republic, 5/20/91