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The Franchiser

Foreword by William H. Gass

Collection Lannan Selections

Paperback
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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.

Read William H. Gass's 1980 foreword, as reprinted in CONTEXT #9

Details

ISBN-10 1-56478-305-7
ISBN-13 9781564783059
Publication Date Sep 2001
Nb of pages 342
Dimensions 5.5 x 8.5 in.

Summary

 

Reviews

Press Reviews

Time
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.

Booklist
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.

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

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

Washington Post
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.

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

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

New York Times
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.

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Genres : Fiction : Jewish-American
Genres : Fiction : United States and Canada
Countries : United States of America


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