![]() ![]() Elkin's second novel, "A Bad Man" (1967), in The New York Times Book Review, the critic Josh Greenfeld called the author "at once a bright satirist, a bleak absurdist and a deadly moralist." His long struggle with multiple sclerosis only deepened his preoccupation with suffering and mortality. Although he paid scant attention to plot and incident, his deliberately preposterous fictional situations led him to explore the pain at the heart of the human condition. Elkin, the author of "Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers," "Searches and Seizures," "The Magic Kingdom" and "The Franchiser," was often described as a clear-eyed realist - even though his work veered toward parody and black humor - and his highly wrought sentences formed a dense, self-contained linguistic world. The cause was heart failure, said his daughter, Molly. He was 65 and lived in University City, Mo. Stanley Elkin, a stylistic virtuoso whose novels, short stories and novellas were at once lyrical, bleak and fantastic, died on Wednesday at Jewish Hospital in St. ![]()
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