SOURCE: "Twilight of a Baleboosteh," in The New York Times Book Review, September 17, 1995, p. 7.

[Goodman is an American journalist and critic who frequently writes on television for The New York Times. In the following review of Mrs. Ted Bliss, he argues that, though it is not Elkin's best work, it is characteristically intelligent and funny and parts of it will "stay with you after you've given up on the plot."]

Has any reviewer faced with a Stanley Elkin novel not tried to describe its intoxication with words, a River Joyce springing from the incidental, swelling through the uncharted, anticlimaxing in the unexpected? The high-flying riffs, the virtuoso vaudeville shticks, the shameless clichés, the daft dialogue, the obsessively accurate lists of everything and anything, the unsettling mix of the funny and the fraught? Readers exasperated with the patchy plots and mistrustful of characters who are the author's mouthpieces...