484
PARTISAN REVIEW
His new novel,
The MacCuffin,4
as he explained to an interviewer, is
his eccentric way of flouting this longstanding reproach. "That's why I
was so careful to put all of the structure in
The MacCuJfin
-
to show
them, 'Look! I can do structure.' " Yet it perhaps comes as no surprise
to find that Elkin's idea of narrative structure is more than mildly id–
iosyncratic. The title borrows the term Alfred Hitchcock used for a de–
vice, of no importance in itself, that gets a story moving. But exactly
how Elkin defines a MacGuffin for his purposes is hard to comprehend,
since the book is long on elaborately wrought self-scrutiny by the
melancholy protagonist, Robert Druff, and largely without what one
can reasonably call a plot.
In
all his work, Elkin has been drunk with language, and we must
track this story through the dense thicket of his winding and sinuous
sentences and paragraphs bulging with lengthy parentheses. But we can
never be sure what is happening - if anything
is
actually happening out–
side his character's fantasies. As we struggle through Elkin's irrepressible
and acrobatic contortions of language, only gradually can we more or
less begin to guess what the book is about.
The story: At fifty-eight, Robert (Bobbo) Druff, the Commissioner
of Streets in a nondescript middle-sized American city, feels ready to pack
it in. He's constipated, has had lung and heart surgery, is erratically im–
potent, and is sure he's affiicted with "the beginnings of senility." His
soul, like his body, is exhausted; he feels threatened by his political ene–
mies, and his dimwitted son is driving him crazy. All told, Druff knows
he's on "the downhill of destiny," his life in dangerous disarray.
Enter the MacGuffin, which Elkin seems to envision as a variety of
whimsical urges and impulses, and which Druff variously identifies as "the
spirit of narrative in his life (sort of)," or "these sort of guardian angels .
. . tests from God. Little blessings blown on not-quite-good-or-interest–
ing-enough lives," or the revival of his ability to survive with some sem–
blance of hope and good will. The MacGuffin, we can dimly begin to
perceive, is everything that forces Druff to confront his drab self, find a
way out of the slough of despondency, and face up to the future. As
Druff is stirred by this imp of tricks, illusions, and a skewed form of hope,
he picks up a tough-talking sportswear buyer and has a few reassuring
hours in her bed. The next morning he wanders through the streets that
he oversees as Commissioner in his "rather backwater city" and gnaws at
an unsolved mystery that keeps turning up like a lost penny throughout
the novel. Some months earlier his son's girlfriend, Su'ad, a devout Shiite
Muslim enrolled at the local university, was killed by a hit-and-run driver.
But we never do find out who killed her, or why Druff is obsessed by
4The MacCujJi'l.
By Stanley Elkin. Linden Press. $19.95.
