The short and simple annals of the poor have often been the starting point for Stanley Elkin's wild, raunchy imagination. George Mills is no exception, but Elkin strains the rather plot-less framework of the novel by interpolating two long chapters that tell the stories of two historical George Millses: the first, who accompanies his noble master on the First Crusade and does some time in a Polish salt mine; and the forty-third, who (by chance) makes the acquaintance of King George IV and is sent on a diplomatic mission to Constantinople, where he happens into becoming a janissary and lives in a state of arrested horniness in the harem of Yildiz Palace. These two sections are not historical pastiche but contemporary Elkin, whether George Mills I is talking to his horse in the salt mine or George Mills XLIII is being fed a kosher lunch by the British...