The Magic Kingdom
by Stanley Elkin
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Eddy Bale's twelve-year-old son died after a terrible, drawn-out illness. Now, determined to help alleviate the suffering of other sick children, Eddy plans to take a group of seven terminally ill youths on a dream vacation to Disney World. Accompanied by four eccentric chaperones, Eddy and the kids embark on what is meant to be a magical retreat that quickly devolves into a series of disasters when the kids turn out to be more full of life than anyone expected. Written with deadpan humor show more and poignancy, The Magic Kingdom is a striking and honest portrayal of life and death - and the trouble that ensues when one attempts to master either. This ebook features rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author's estate and from the Stanley Elkin archives at Washington University in St. Louis. show lessTags
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Elkin's premise is daring: a quirky group of terminally ill British children are escorted on a "dream vacation" to Disney World by an equally quirky group of adult caretakers. Much grim (and very funny) humor results, but ultimately the novel collapses under the weight of its own conceits and the elaborately freighted prose that expresses them. Situations straight out of the farce tradition flounder by being forced to carry more emotional baggage than they can bear. Elkin's magnificently complicated prose (and improbably rhetorical dialogue) can be admired for its own beauties, but, alas, gets in the way of the story he is telling. This novel, with its satirical treatment of death and dying, and its frequent graphic sex scenes show more (especially one women's addiction to masturbation) will not be for everyone's tastes. show less
After reading "Mrs. Ted Bliss" by Elkin, I was ready for a slog through his dense (yet engrossing) prose. That is not the case here. "The Magic Kingdom" is cut to the bone; there is not a wasted turn of phrase or bit of dialogue anywhere. The book is dark and yet a splendidly crafted piece of satire from a man who understood the experience of being terminally ill.
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Canon de la narrativa universal del s. XX (cicutadry)
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Author Information
34+ Works 2,650 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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- The Magic Kingdom
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- Reviews
- 2
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- English, French, Italian, Spanish
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- Paper, Audiobook, Ebook
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- 15
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- 5
