SOURCE: A review of Van Gogh's Room at Arles, in The Yale Review, Vol. 81, No. 3, July, 1993, pp. 128-30.

[Prose is an American novelist, short story writer, critic, and educator. In the following excerpt, she argues that Van Gogh's Room at Arles is Elkin's best book.]

Stanley Elkin writes fiction that veers into manic lyricism while maintaining—Elkin insists on it—absolute precision of language. By now readers have learned to so value the rhythms of Elkin's sentences that they may find themselves moving their lips when they read, just as they were always taught not to. Van Gogh's Room at Arles, a trio of novellas, has passages of description so classically and recognizably Elkin that one can imagine some poor (or lucky) student in the future asked, on a multiple-choice exam, to identify where this pizza comes from:

The tops of the pizza boxes had been torn from...