Elkin's aim was to restore to literature the primacy of style and rhetoric. Respected poetry critic Helen Vendler and novelists as diverse as William Gass, Robert Coover, and Cynthia Ozick have praised the exuberance and originality of Elkin's prose. He joked once that he would "rather have a metaphor than a good cigar" and that fiction "gives an opportunity for rhetoric to happen." It is as a wordsmith, a crafter of syntax and a fracturer of readers' expectations, that Elkin made his most powerful impact on his fellow writers and on general readers. In his early novels he was willing, and at times eager, to subordinate all the traditional elements of fiction--plot, characterization, setting, even verisimilitude--to the exigencies of rhetoric. As his art matured and his vision deepened, he came to value ideas and themes in his fiction, but even as late as Van Gogh's Room at Arles: Three Novellas (1993), the rhetorical energy often pushed aside the more orderly elements of plot and characterization.
Elkin published only one volume of short stories, Criers and Kibitzers, Kibitzers and Criers (1966), and that was early in his career.
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