What do You think about The Magic Kingdom (2000)?
A reviewer in TIME magazine called Elkin "the grown-up's Vonnegut." Well, I think Vonnegut was pretty damned grown-up in Slaughterhouse Five and Galapagos. The bottom line is the old apples-oranges deal: Vonnegut wrote tragedy in a satiric vein, Elkin wrote it in a comic one. That noted, The Magic Kingdom is divine. A comedy about seven British children with terminal illnesses travelling on a last-wish junket to Disneyworld? No, a tragedy with comic overtones about seven children with terminal illnesses. There are no winners in this novel, only grudging survivors. And the seeming villain--a Pluto/Mickey Mouse wannabe--also winds up only grudgingly surviving. Elkin's prose is fantastic. It's also fantastically dense at times, so be prepared for some alert reading. The ending(s), ah la, are not to be missed. Boo-hoo, smile, boo-hoo.
—Joe
THE MAGIC KINGDOM is a comic novel by Stanley Elkin, which is comic to a degree, but very novel. The story of taking terminally ill children on a dream vacation to Disney World is a premise that didn't hold much promise for me, it seemed like a gangster going to a therapist or cops and robbers, but then THE SOPRANOS and THE WIRE are two of my favorite recent TV series. And like those shows, plot is not the engine driving this book. It's the style of the writing and the characters, who are written like black holes in which Elkin's manic prose spirals around and digs down to the core of their experiences in dizzying bouts of dense paragraphs made up of rhythmic sentences that either wowed me or lost me. I do wish someone would write a comic novel that was funny. Jack Handey's THE STENCH OF HONOLULU was one of the few that made me laugh out laugh. But then humor, for me, is best seen not read. I need a pie in the face, which looks a lot funnier than it sounds, so someone out there write a pie in the face so I can taste the cream and humiliation.
—Peter Landau
Yeah, it was a weird book.It was about weakness in the face of a finite life, and for this Elkin used terminally ill children and their caretakers.Of course Elkin never wrote a child character in his life, so the children are these wizened little goblins and elves, sometimes spouting more wisdom and displaying more reason than the adults, which is to say: Any at all.The adults in the book: A father obsessed because of his son's death from a rare untreatable disease, a compulsive masturbating nurse whose womb can only bear monsters, a doctor obsessed with the "fact" that life's natural state is disease, and who is deeply distracted when confronted with a perfect specimen of the human body, which is in the person of another (male), homosexual nurse, who steals the blueprints for Disney's "It's A Small World" animatronic display for his partner (a wax museum curator) via an illicit tryst with the hot attendant at the haunted house.This one is genuinely comic. It's not like those Roth books that are called "comic genius" but which are actually only mildly funny, and that only occasionally, but are called comic because their irony is painful and thick. No, this book is hilarious. But it's also depressing, deeply, and revealing of human nature (if you buy into the author's thinking--I do).Elkin finds his love of humanity in observing our predictable reactions to a life too difficult to bear sanely.
—Jeremy
