A Poet of Profit and Loss

By R.Z.S.

THE FRANCHISER

by STANLEY ELKIN

342 pages. Farrar, Straus & Giroux. $8.95.

Stanley Elkin is one of the perennial bridesmaids of American fiction. Part of the problem is that the styles Elkin employs are beginning to show their age. His prose is creased by the crow's-feet of '50s black humor, it shows the slight stoop of Jewish realism and the weird droop of the surreal as well. There is no denying, though, that when Elkin puts them together--as he did in Boswell, A Bad Man, The Dick Gibson Show and now The Franchiser--the results are fresh.

Elkin is a professor of English literature at Washington University in St. Louis. He writes about people caught in the heavy traffic of American life. Many of his heroes are businessmen whose urges go beyond a Cash McCall drive for power and money. They see business as part of a cosmic magic show, an exuberant prestidigitation of goods and services. Emotions, like capital, can be risked for big gains or hoarded at little or no interest. The world, for all its misery and flyspeck existence in a galaxy of countless dead stars, is something very special. Here, for example, is Ben Flesh, "the Franchiser," on the energy crisis: "There isn't enough in the world to run the world. There never was. How could there be? The world is a miracle, history's and the universe's long shot. It runs uphill."

Flesh sees America closer up, as a traveling businessman constantly criss crossing the country and sampling its incredibly juxtaposed variety. An on-the-road hero, he is a type basic not only to the American economy but to its literature as well. His story moves like his life, from one picaresque adventure to another.

Flesh has the profile of the Indian on a nickel and a degree from the Wharton School of Finance. He is also the owner of a Fred Astaire Dance Studio, a Travel Inn, a Kentucky Fried Chicken outlet, a Cinema I, a Cinema II, a Mr. Softee ice-cream stand and a Fotomat -- "a Checkpoint Charlie, a Mandelbaum Gate thing, a booth in the open center of a shopping mall."

Conscious Hero. These are the chains that bind. To Flesh they give some kind of saving shape to the amorphous idea and energy of America. As he visits these franchises in his baby-blue Cadillac, he can hear them "speaking some Esperanto of simple need." His understanding of that need turns him into a poet of profit and loss. He knows, for example, how to turn a dollar from "the jetsam set," those people who lust for cut-rate, damaged merchandise: "Bang the canned goods, put little holes in the shirttails," he tells the manager of his Railroad Salvage store. "Dent the toasters, nick the toys. Give them train wreck, give them capsize, give them totaled, head-on and what's spilled to the road from the jackknifed rig."

Flesh never does anything in a small way. When he gets sick, even his sclerosis is multiple. Characteristically, misfortune only intensifies his awareness of an America where executives carry attache cases "like adult pencil boxes," where a trip through an automatic car wash seems like a sea storm by Joseph Conrad, where professors of English name their dogs Hemingway and stockbrokers name theirs Florida Power & Light.

Ben Flesh may be corruptible, and Author Elkin's spendthrift talent some times threatens to knock the bottom out of the word market entirely. But 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.

R.Z.S.

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