Stanley Elkin once described his literary taste as delicatessen rather than haute cuisine. "It's that yen for the salami sandwich at the gourmet dinner … it is for the disheveled, what the cat dragged in, the rumpled in spirit," he wrote….

Elkin's taste, of course, is not as lowbrow as he claims. His greatest strength is the ability to combine high art and pop culture without shortchanging either one. His frequent subject is the regular guy with an all-American dream of making it big, but his sentences are often convoluted enough to give a Jamesian pause. This density of language may have kept Elkin off the best-seller list, but his natural audience is the one that appreciates John Irving and Kurt Vonnegut.

George Mills is not his most affecting book, and certainly not his funniest, but it is quintessential Elkin in style and substance. His five previous novels and...