Mrs. Ted Bliss

Dorothy Bliss is a widow in her early eighties living alone in a condominium tower overlooking Biscayne Bay, where she and her husband Ted retired from Chicago. Born in Russia, she came to America as a small child after her mother bribed an immigration officer and falsified her age so that she could work on the Lower East Side. Ted kept a butcher shop in Chicago, they raised three children, their eldest son died young of cancer, and then cancer took Ted too. What is left is a life of cards, food, television, jai alai tickets, obsessive cleaning, and a ledger in which she records every gift to every grandchild so that no one can accuse her of favoritism.

Into this comes Alcibiades Chitral, a Venezuelan neighbor who pays five thousand dollars over the odds for Ted's 1978 Buick LeSabre and is soon in federal court on drug and money laundering charges, with Dorothy subpoenaed as a witness to a business she does not begin to understand. Other men circle: Hector Camerando, a big player in jai alai and greyhound racing; Tommy Auveristas, who calls himself an importer; and Junior Yellin, Ted's onetime business partner, who once made a pass at her in the butcher shop and turns up decades later as her recreational therapist. None of it adds up to a plot in the usual sense. The book closes with Dorothy refusing to evacuate as Hurricane Andrew comes ashore; the power fails, she believes the tower deserted, and then Louise Munez, the building's guard, appears on her rounds and the two women sit out the storm hand in hand. Kirkus read the scene as the Götterdämmerung of the Jewish American mother.

Elkin's style is the reason to read him: long, extravagant, comic sentences that pile clause on clause and prefer character to story. Kirkus was honest about the cost, finding the repetitive, seemingly trivial anecdotes grating at first, and then, through the long poetic sentences, watching Dorothy become mythic; its verdict was a fiendish and, by the end, thoroughly engrossing life study. Publishers Weekly said Elkin was at his best here, blessed with the gift of one liner insight, and that countless American retirees would recognize themselves. It is under 300 pages, slow to start, and best for readers who like a voice more than a plot and who have known a Dorothy.