Irritated, though I really shouldn't be, at the other reviews of this book. Elkin does not write in a stream-of-consciousness style. Elkin uses plenty of punctuation, and he uses it aptly. A paragraph that is half a page or even a full page is not long--no longer than, say, a paragraph of Dickens, Melville, James, Austen, Eliot, etc.. Let's take a paragraph at random (page 176 it is):
"Though he didn't really believe in the possibility of a terribly premature death. Not really. Benny was a gambler, wise to the ways--at least he thought so--of house odds. Certainly fifteen-year-olds died. They died in car and plane wrecks, they were picked off by snipers, battered about by crazies in the streets, and some of them, he supposed, succumbed to Gaucher's disease. Ashkenazi Jews. But what even was an Ashkenazi Jew? Other than somebody who came from central or eastern Europe, he wasn't sure. His family had been in the U.K. for almost two hundred years. Benny wasn't even bar mitzvah. Whatever Ashkenazi acts, whatever Ashkenazi practices, whatever indigenous Ashkenazi dyes in the clothing and prayer shawls or Ashkenazi nutrients hung about in the Ashkenazi diet ought surely to have bleached out by now. Which was, Benny figured, where the house odds came in. Because after almost two hundred years surely it would have boiled down to half-life. What, hoisted by some already rare, already attenuated and degraded and deflated gene? Snagged on some pathetic scrag of theological, geographical one? Not, for all his symptoms, for all his great liver and burgeoning spleen, not, for all the high sugar content in his cells, the sweet deposits there lining his blood like dessert, not, for all his bruised and brittle bones, bloody likely!"
What difficulties could appear to the reader of this paragraph word-wise? Ashkenazi is defined (albeit loosely), as is Gaucher's disease (although by this point in the text a remotely attentive reader already knows what it is), "attenuated" is maybe the most difficult word in the passage, but context clues! It is a good paragraph! It is even a clear one!
I don't think this is a perfect book by any means, but it is bizarre to me to see it here being so poorly reviewed, so five stars it is simply for the offsetting.
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