George Mills

There has been a George Mills in every generation for a thousand years, and not one of them has got anywhere. The first sets out on the First Crusade in the train of his lord Guillalume, gets lost somewhere in the Netherlands, and ends up working a salt mine in Poland while Guillalume dispenses lessons in life. Another, whom George IV hails as George the Forty third, is noticed by the king, sent on a diplomatic errand to Constantinople, joins the Janissaries and finishes doing the housework in the Sultan's harem before escaping to America. Each Mills learns, in turn, that his fate was settled long before he was born, and each finds himself powerless to alter it. That is the curse of the Millses: blue collar servitude handed down like a title.

The present day George Mills lives in St. Louis and moves furniture. Elkin gives him the longest stretch of the book, and its heroine: Judith Glazer, a rich woman dying of cancer who hires him as her caretaker and takes him with her to Mexico. She dies there, and George attends her funeral with her family, an outsider still, wondering whether he might be the last link in the chain. The novel runs to five parts and 508 pages, moves between centuries without apology, and, Elkin said, borrows several sections from Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!

Elkin is a comic writer at the sentence level, and reading him is like being talked at by the most eloquent man in the bar. Kirkus called the book a leaky collection of parts rather than one whole strong book and still required reading for connoisseurs of comic fiction; Brad Owens in The Christian Science Monitor thought its energetic entertainment sometimes overpowered its serious intentions. Both are right. Best for readers who value voice over shape and want Elkin at full stretch.