In the novel George Mills, which Elkin consistently called his personal favorite, and the one critics have seen as his most challenging and problematic, a concern with historical determinism is articulated through the artist's hyperbolic figure of a family's fortune over a millennium, during which each generation bears one male descendant named George Mills. Much of the novel revolves around the apparent inevitability of each generation's being trapped in an evolutionary lock the author describes as "yeomanized a thousand years." Thus a primary issue of this breakthrough novel is the degree to which we choose our fate and the degree to which we are prisoners of what could be called "historical inevitability."

Although Elkin does not paint the contemporary Mills, a St. Louis furniture mover, sympathetically, he intends his readers to question the justification of those who are well-to-do and condescending — such as the cantankerous...