The Rabbi of Lud - Stanley Elkin

As a rabbi, I'm a sucker for jargon, the sense it gives of community, solidarity. Or I might have been touched by my own, or all our distance perhaps. I was a long way from far-off New Jersey and I had a sense that they were even farther than I was. They were telling each other (and themselves, too, I thought) of their areas of expertise, throwing around the names of the various equipment they were checked out in, the rigs they were qualified to drive, the lengths of the fuses they were permitted to light, the tonnages they were ordained to bring down with dynamite, the acetylene power they were certified to spark, speaking of all their graduated tolerances as of recently inspected elevators, their earned sufferance and lenities--all their official documented powers and strong suits, gifted in trowelers and dozers and yard loaders, the teamsters' knacks, the oilers' and operators' known ropes, their competencies and aptitudes, métiers and flairs, green-fingered in black top and carpentry and all the alchemies of poured cement. Yet a curious, even cynical subtext underlay their conversation. Much was bluff and some implied consent that it was all right to bluff. It had to do with the nature of the enterprise, as though they were enlisted men in furious us/them contention with Authority.
-pg 98

 As a writer, Stanley Elkin's a sucker for jargon, for the vocabulary of vocation, all the catchphrases and customary utterances that are found in every profession, be it disc-jockeying, franchising, shit-shoveling, God-fearing, or, in this case, this book's particular obsession, the burying of Jewish dead. The speaker in the above passage is Jerry Goldkorn, the puppet through which Elkin's voice moves like that first, animating Word, the not-rabbi rabbi of the not-town of Lud, a community buried in a vast Jewish graveyard in New Jersey, which consists primarily of an ever-growing population of dead people and the few residents and businesses required to service the needs of the recently deceased. As far as being a rabbi goes, Goldkorn is sub-par, his calling to the service of God more an accident than some conscious decision; his Hebrew is so bad, his grasp of ritual and custom so tenuous, that to become ordained he was forced to go to an offshore yeshiva on a small atoll in the Maldives. The plot, such as it is, centers around Goldkorn's insistence on living in Lud and his daughter Connie's insistence that they leave. He likes the life; it's easy, he makes decent money, he has few responsibilities. She hates the life; she has no friends, the surrounding grave haunt her dreams. When she demands that the family leave the place and Goldkorn insists that they stay, Connie fabricates a silly story that rocks the community with outrage, and then she runs away. The Rabbi of Lud then enters a crisis of his curious, failed faith, examines his motivations for shying away from the world in a city of graves, and, in the end, the family, once again reunited, decides to stay.

There isn't much about the story that moves, per se. In this, it is perhaps one of Elkin's weakest books. All of his stories are animated by his distinctive voice; in the weaker ones every character seems infected by the mind of Stanley Elkin--they all speak the same way. For lovers of dramatic arc and emotional denouement, probably fifty percent of his books will rub them the wrong way. But that voice! It deserves reverence; listening to it as it infects your inner ear, like some virus, like, as in The Living End, the sweet impregnating song of God, is like entering a mind that has a vocabulary that multiplies the reader's by fifty times. And sometimes it's enough. But here, as in some of his other books, it's not. Despite the fact that Elkin has produced books moved solely by language and succeeded, where gimmicks and gags are piled up and pushed forward by an engine of stellar prose, some of his books end up as failures, too. The failures end up leaving the reader flat, wondering what, after the laughs, after all the fun, the point of it all was; whereas the successes leave the reader agog at the possibilities of language, how it can create and sustain a convincingly absurd world and deliver a hefty dose of pathos in the process. George Mills, perhaps his best book, which shares many of the themes of The Rabbi of Lud (and some some similarities of structure), is an example of a much better story, chock full with gags and gimmicks and wildly inventive narrative twists and turns, and it also has the benefit of having a level of language that is rarely equaled and perhaps never surpassed. This book, in comparison, seems a second-rate effort. But, keep in mind, second rate for someone who is undeniably a master.