The Franchiser: A Novel (American Literature Series) [Paperback]

Stanley Elkin (Author), William H. Gass (Foreword)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1, 2001 | Series: American Literature Series

"Sentence for sentence, nobody in America writes better than Stanley Elkin."—The New Republic

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.

Editorial Reviews

Review

The Franchiser has what few novels have any more: the ability to astonish and delight and a totally conscious hero who proves that the unaudited life is not worth living. (Time )

In his principal character, Elkin represents the tragic panorama of an ailing America reaching out for stabilizers that aren't there; and the void beckons. (Booklist )

Crowded with cunning shifts of meaning and extravagant deployments of wit. (The Nation )

The Franchiser is a fine portrait of America today with insights that are humorous, significant, and poignantly real. (Best Sellers )

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

Elkin takes an almost tactile pleasure in language, piling up words and phrases, reaching for every available joke and pun, until his sentences threaten to topple of their very weight. (Washington Post )

The prevailing dialect of The Franchiser is Ben's own free-wheeling and exuberant Jewish-American—a tribal dialect in which Elkin can achieve effects worthy of S. J. Perelman and Wallace Markfield. (The New York Times )

About the Author

Stanley Elkin—a two-time recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award—is widely regarded as one of America's most important contemporary writers. During his lifetime he wrote more than a dozen novels and short-story collections, including The Magic Kingdom, The Franchiser, and The Dick Gibson Show.

William H. Gass—essayist, novelist, literary critic—was born in Fargo, North Dakota. He has been the recipient of the first PEN/Nabokov Award, the PEN/Spielvogel-Diamondstein Award for the Art of the Essay, three National Book Critic Circle Awards for Criticism, a Lannan Foundation Lifetime Achievement Award, the Award for Fiction and the Medal of Merit for Fiction from the Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters, and fellowships from the Rockefeller and Guggenheim Foundations. He lives in St. Louis.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 342 pages
• Publisher: Dalkey Archive; 1st Dalkey Archive ed edition (September 1, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1564783057
• ISBN-13: 978-1564783059
• Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,079,352 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Stanley Elkin (1930-1995) was an award-winning author of novels, short stories, and essays. Born in the Bronx, Elkin received his BA and PhD from the University of Illinois and in 1960 became a professor of English at Washington University in St. Louis where he taught until his death. His critically acclaimed works include the National Book Critics Circle Award-winners George Mills (1982) and Mrs. Ted Bliss (1995), as well as the National Book Award finalists The Dick Gibson Show (1972), Searches & Seizures (1974), and The MacGuffin (1991). His book of novellas, Van Gogh's Room at Arles, was a finalist for the PEN Faulkner Award.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Elkin at the height of his art, August 28, 2005

By 

B Brown (Portland, OR) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Franchiser: A Novel (American Literature Series) (Paperback)

At one point in the Franchiser, the book's central character, Ben Flesh, says with a whimpering exhale: I want my remission back. Ben's flesh, literally, and Ben's small empire of franchises face imminent death in a 1970s America of rolling blackouts and gas shortages. Ben has been diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis; his franchising fund, controlled by his godcousins, has been diagnosed sub-performing and unfit.

The back-story of Ben's franchise building ability is laid out in a wonderful early chapter, but what draws us to Elkin, and why we'll read anything he wrote is the language-writing that is grabbed by the jugular and dragged like prey across the page. Like all his characters, those in The Franchiser speak in a colorful and idiosyncratic vernacular, and in Ben's case the dogmatisms of business school and manias of endless entrepreneurship. If you are a Midwesterner, especially one from Kansas City, you will smile at Flesh's analysis á la Roland Barthes of the Crown Center Mall. Read Elkin's Franchiser: laugh, cry, and marvel at it all.

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars First Stanley Elkin and won't be the last!, April 13, 2011

By 

A. C. Frye "internet only shopper" (Boston) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Franchiser (Kindle Edition)

I read an interview with Stanley Elkin where he mentioned William Gass as one of the writers he admired and as a result I went and bought a copy of the "The Tunnel" completely forgetting Stanley Elkin. Luckily I retraced my steps and have discovered a new slippery slope to slide down. It is funny in a dark way and a light way and is written at many different levels, but Elkin digs deep into the American way of life and the pursuit of happiness and writes beautiful prose. I read a lot of books at one time because I have a wide variety of tastes and with Kindle keeping track for me can peruse my reading list like a kid in the candy store. But once in a while there is that book that just grabs my attention and I drop everything else, not being able to put it down. I look forward to no doubt a few more thousand miles in the Franchiser's Cadillac and enjoying every minute of the ride.

15 of 15 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars This is the most accurate Bicentennial picture of America., February 6, 1998

By A Customer

This review is from: The Franchiser (Nonpareil Books) (Paperback)

You won't come acoss a more side-splittingly funny portrait of America in 1976 than what Elkin gives us here. I don't know which is the more: the humor in America that is depressing or the depression that is humorous; in any event, the book is a must for anyone who likes his or her humor bitersweet, his or her prose lush, and his or her mind to be stimulated and entertained!