The Dick Gibson Show
by Stanley Elkin
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A National Book Award-winning author, Stanley Elkin creates novels that are tapestries of humor, satire, and caricature. In books like Mrs. Ted Bliss and The Living End, he offers wry visions of contemporary culture. The Dick Gibson Show is a hilarious panorama of the world of talk radio. At night, a little boy listens to radio stations from Detroit, Memphis, and New Orleans. When he grows up, his first job is with a tiny station in Butte, Montana. But one night, when a transcription error show more silences the regular program, he stands in front of the microphone to make an announcement. As his voice fills the airways, Dick Gibson is born. Dick Gibson's love affair with radio will carry him on a collision course with station executives and bizarre talk show callers. His passion for air time is unquenchable. As narrator George Guidall highlights the layers of wit, The Dick Gibson Show takes on all the snappy energy of a live broadcast. show lessTags
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Dick Gibson’s radio career takes him around the country and gives Stanley Elkin the opportunity to riff on the foibles and foolery of 20th-c. USA in a text that is virtuosic, wacky, and darkly poignant.
It did no good to change policy or fiddle with format. The world pressed in. It opened your windows. All one could hope for was to find his scapegoat, to wait for him, lurking in alleys, pressed flat against walls, crouched behind doors while the key jiggles in the lock, taking all the melodramatic postures of revenge. To be there in closets when the enemy comes for his hat, or to surprise him with guns in swivel chairs, your legs dapperly crossed when you turn to face him, to pin him down on hillsides or pounce on him from trees as he show more rides by, to meet him on the roofs of trains roaring on trestles, or leap at him while he stops at red lights, to struggle with him on the smooth faces of cliffs, national monuments, chasing him round Liberty’s torch, or up girders of bridges, or across the enormous features of stone presidents. To pitch him from ski lifts and roller coasters, to Normandy his ass and guerilla his soul. To be always in ambush at the turnings in tunnels, or wrestle him under the tides of the seas. Gestures, gestures, saving gestures, life-giving and meaningless and sweet as appetite, delivered by gestures and redeemed by symbols, by necessities of your own making and a destiny dreamed in a dream. To be free—yes, existential and generous. show less
It did no good to change policy or fiddle with format. The world pressed in. It opened your windows. All one could hope for was to find his scapegoat, to wait for him, lurking in alleys, pressed flat against walls, crouched behind doors while the key jiggles in the lock, taking all the melodramatic postures of revenge. To be there in closets when the enemy comes for his hat, or to surprise him with guns in swivel chairs, your legs dapperly crossed when you turn to face him, to pin him down on hillsides or pounce on him from trees as he show more rides by, to meet him on the roofs of trains roaring on trestles, or leap at him while he stops at red lights, to struggle with him on the smooth faces of cliffs, national monuments, chasing him round Liberty’s torch, or up girders of bridges, or across the enormous features of stone presidents. To pitch him from ski lifts and roller coasters, to Normandy his ass and guerilla his soul. To be always in ambush at the turnings in tunnels, or wrestle him under the tides of the seas. Gestures, gestures, saving gestures, life-giving and meaningless and sweet as appetite, delivered by gestures and redeemed by symbols, by necessities of your own making and a destiny dreamed in a dream. To be free—yes, existential and generous. show less
Hilarious. Ingenious. A great meditation/appreciation on/of radio. Part Arabian Nights, part Chaucer in the endless spinning of great stories.
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Author Information
34+ Works 2,655 Members
Stanley Elkin was an American Jewish novelist, short story writer, and essayist. He was born on May 11, 1930. Elkin steadily and quietly worked his way into the higher ranks of contemporary American novelists. He was born in Brooklyn, New York, but grew up in Chicago and has spent most of his life since in the Midwest, receiving his Ph.D. in show more English from the University of Illinois with a dissertation on William Faulkner. He was a member of the English faculty at Washington University in St. Louis from 1960 until his death, and battled multiple sclerosis for most of his adult life. Reviewers found Elkin's first novel, Boswell: A Modern Comedy (1964), the story of an uninhibited modern-day counterpart of the eighteenth-century biographer, hilarious and promising, while the stories in Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers (1966) established Elkin as a writer capable of writing short stories of textbook-anthology quality. The ironically entitled A Bad Man (1967) is about a Jewish department store magnate who deliberately arranges to have himself convicted of several misdeeds so that he can experience the real world of a prison and carry on his own war with the warden in what takes on the dimensions of a burlesque existential allegory. The Dick Gibson Show (1971) uses the host of a radio talk show as a way of showing fancifully what it means to live "at sound barrier," and both Searchers and Seizures (1973) and The Living End (1979) are triptychs of related stories verging on surrealism. The Franchiser (1976), generally considered Elkin's best novel before George Mills, uses the story of a traveling salesman of franchises to show the flattening homogenization of American life. But as usual, what happens in this Elkin novel is less important than the way in which the story is told. Elkin won the National Book Critics Circle Award on two occasions: for George Mills in 1982 and for Mrs. Ted Bliss, his last novel, in 1995. The MacGuffin was a finalist for the 1991 National Book Award for Fiction. Although he enjoyed high critical praise, his books never enjoyed popular success. Elkin died May 31, 1995 of a heart attack. His manuscripts and correspondence are archived in Olin Library at Washington University in St. Louis. (Bowker Author Biography) show less
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Common Knowledge
- Original publication date
- 1971
- People/Characters
- Dick Gibson; Professor Behr-Bleibtreau
- First words
- When Dick Gibson was a little boy he was not Dick Gibson.
- Quotations
- As he left Union Station and looked up Mellon Boulevard at downtown Pittsburgh, he was tremendously excited. He perceived with a sovereign clarity, shipping impression like a lovely cargo, and what he saw was to stay with him... (show all) all his life as the very essence of the city. He admired the black, thick buildings, the dark windows like glass postage or framed deep water. There were high projecting cornices at the top stories like the peaks of caps, and he tried to look in under them to the careful scrollwork, distinctive as the flow of a hairline.
Though he resisted, Dick felt himself drawn deeply into the performance. By his father's gesture - his face had now gone blank and he was vaguely chewing, sucking his cheeks and exploring the flaws in his teeth with his tongu... (show all)e like a nightwatchman aiming his flashlight at doors - the two of them had become partners in some nightshift enterprise, men in a boiler room, say, among complicated machinery, in a mutual vacuum of the night and labor, a half-hour till one of them has to check the dials again.
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- Members
- 198
- Popularity
- 161,132
- Reviews
- 2
- Rating
- (3.28)
- Languages
- English
- Media
- Paper, Audiobook, Ebook
- ISBNs
- 11
- ASINs
- 1
