As a novelist, Stanley Elkin has often been too smart for his own good. The outrageous vision … that animates his stories—among the most tightly brilliant published by a contemporary author—has tended to become flaccid over the long haul of a novel. The Dick Gibson Show (1971) offered some hope that Elkin had become able to harness his enormous gifts and deal with the demands of form. But in retrospect, that novel's success seems to have more to do with the accidental confluence of Dick Gibson's performing style and his creator's weakness for spectacular schtickery than with Elkin's learning to provide us with something beyond mere astonishment. That, at least, was the judgment forced on even sympathetic readers by his more recent long work, especially The Franchiser (1976), a lumpily indigestible porridge of small boffos and Big Thoughts. Thus the triumph that is Elkin's The Living End comes at...