When I started to write the book, I did not know that was what the book was going to be about, but indeed that is precisely what the book gets to be about as I learned what Dick Gibson’s life meant. Dick Gibson goes on to say that he had believed that the great life was the life of cliché. Is this a convention-which we’ve just been talking about-or something very basic to your whole view of life?ĮLKIN: It is something very basic to my view of life, but in the case of that character it becomes the initial trauma which sets him going.

You have Dick Gibson say, “The point of life was the possibility it always held out for the exceptional.” The heroes in your novels have a tremendous need to be exceptional, to transcend others, to quarrel with the facts of physical existence. INTERVIEWER: I have some questions now about themes or ideas I find in much of your fiction. My assumption is it’s likely that anyone interested enough in a review of The Dick Gibson Show has probably already read Elkin’s Paris Review interview, and would probably prefer, like, something new on the novel. Look, I went to school for reading books, I learned about the goddamn intentional fallacy and la mort de l’auteur and all that jazz, and I know that the author isn’t supposed to be the goddamn authority on his own work, I know that what follows isn’t a proper review-but I don’t care. What follows are selections from the interview in which Elkin kinda sorta analyzes The Dick Gibson Show, providing what I take to be a Very Good and Fascinating Review of the novel. I want to write something about these novels, which seem of a piece to me, but I also wanted to get a bit more context first, and the most basic of internet searches led me to Elkin’s 1974 interview in The Paris Review with Thomas LeClair. I read The Dick Gibson Show immediately after finishing Elkin’s 1976 novel The Franchiser. note: I finished Stanley Elkin’s 1971 novel The Dick Gibson Show a few days ago.

The Dick Gibson Show by Stanley Elkin