The Franchiser - Softcover

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0374158339 ISBN 13: 9780374158330

Synopsis

Ben Flesh is one of the men who made America look like America, who made America famous. He collects franchises, traveling from state to state, acquiring the brand-name establishments that shape the American landscape. But both the nation and Ben are running out of energy. As blackouts roll through the West, Ben struggles with the onset of multiple sclerosis, and the growing realization that his lifetime quest to buy a name for himself has ultimately failed."

About this title

Review

The Franchiser has what few novels have any more: the ability to astonish and delight and a totally conscious hero who proves that the unaudited life is not worth living.

In his principal character, Elkin represents the tragic panorama of an ailing America reaching out for stabilizers that aren't there; and the void beckons.

Crowded with cunning shifts of meaning and extravagant deployments of wit.

The Franchiser is a fine portrait of America today with insights that are humorous, significant, and poignantly real.

A frenzied parable, rather as though the Wandering Jew and Willy Loman had gotten together on a vaudeville act.

Elkin takes an almost tactile pleasure in language, piling up words and phrases, reaching for every available joke and pun, until his sentences threaten to topple of their very weight.

The prevailing dialect of The Franchiser is Ben's own free-wheeling and exuberant Jewish-American a tribal dialect in which Elkin can achieve effects worthy of S. J. Perelman and Wallace Markfield.

The Franchise

Edition details

• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0374158339
• ISBN 13: 9780374158330
• Binding: Paperback