THE LIVING END

God is a stand-up comic. Jesus is a surly, ungrateful kid. Hell is "the ultimate inner city." And Stanley Elkin is still the most mordant, acrobatic phrasemaker around: his savage ironies rat-a-tat-tat through these three interrelated stories, all about death and religion (a freeform Judeo-Christian mix), and the lousy way God has arranged things. There's simply no justice—as Minneapolis liquor-store owner Ellerbee discovers when he's killed in a hold-up and finds himself in Hell after a brief glimpse of pearly Heaven. True, Ellerbee was generous, kind, and decent, but God ("Hi. . . . I'm the Lord. Hot enough for you?") gets him anyway on various technical infractions. After a few decades down Below, Ellerbee strikes up a chumship with a newcomer—one of the holdup men who killed him. . . and went on to a long, healthy life. And the third disgruntled resident of Elkin's Hell is a cemetery groundskeeper outraged to be struck down: "I take low-cal minerals, I'm strictly salt-free. I eat corrective lunch!" And so it goes, with Elkin toying fiendishly with religious myths, ideas about death, Bible stories, Dante, and all—culminating in God's explanations of Everything ("He explained why children suffered and showed them how to do the latest disco steps") and with the revelation that Goodness has nothing to do with the way history has been arranged. Why, then, is everything the way it is? "Because it makes a better story is why"—God's an artist in search of the perfect audience. If you have a feeling that all this irreverent stuff has been done before, you're mostly right—for example, there's Bruce Jay Friedman's play Steambath (with God as a Puerto Rican bath attendant). And Elkin can't resist easy jokes (that Woody Allen makes better), can't break some of his stylistic tics that have become self-parody, and can't put his fragments together in a way that really builds up a satisfying whole book. But his imagination is often a creepy marvel—especially in a voice-from-the-grave cemetery sequence—and his wordplay at its best is both thought-provoking and hilarious. Spotty, minor work, perhaps—but flash after flash of real brilliance.