|
|
|
|
|
The Franchiser: A Novel (American Literature (Dalkey Archive))
| Our Price |
$ 11.88
|
|
| Retail Value |
$ 13.50 |
|
| You Save |
$ 1.62 (12%) |
|
| Item Number |
503025 |
|
|
|
|
|
|
Item Description...
Product Description
Ben Flesh is one of the men "who made America look like America, who made America famous." He collects franchises, traveling from state to state, acquiring the brand-name establishments that shape the American landscape. But both the nation and Ben are running out of energy. As blackouts roll through the West, Ben struggles with the onset of multiple sclerosis, and the growing realization that his lifetime quest to buy a name for himself has ultimately failed.
|
Item Specifications...
Pages 341
Dimensions: Length: 8.5" Width: 5.53" Height: 0.94"
Weight: 0.94 lbs.
Binding Softcover
ISBN 1564783057
EAN 9781564783059
|
Availability 2 units.
Availability accurate as of Feb 09, 2012 02:56.
Usually ships within one to two business days from La Vergne, TN.
Orders shipping to an address other than a confirmed Credit Card / Paypal Billing address may incur and additional processing delay.
|
Product Categories
Similar Products
Reviews - What do our customers think?
 | Elkin at the height of his art Aug 29, 2005 |
At one point in the Franchiser, the book's central character, Ben Flesh, says with a whimpering exhale: I want my remission back. Ben's flesh, literally, and Ben's small empire of franchises face imminent death in a 1970s America of rolling blackouts and gas shortages. Ben has been diagnosed with Multiple Sclerosis; his franchising fund, controlled by his godcousins, has been diagnosed sub-performing and unfit.
The back-story of Ben's franchise building ability is laid out in a wonderful early chapter, but what draws us to Elkin, and why we'll read anything he wrote is the language-writing that is grabbed by the jugular and dragged like prey across the page. Like all his characters, those in The Franchiser speak in a colorful and idiosyncratic vernacular, and in Ben's case the dogmatisms of business school and manias of endless entrepreneurship. If you are a Midwesterner, especially one from Kansas City, you will smile at Flesh's analysis á la Roland Barthes of the Crown Center Mall. Read Elkin's Franchiser: laugh, cry, and marvel at it all. | | | | This is the most accurate Bicentennial picture of America. Feb 6, 1998 |
| You won't come acoss a more side-splittingly funny portrait of America in 1976 than what Elkin gives us here. I don't know which is the more: the humor in America that is depressing or the depression that is humorous; in any event, the book is a must for anyone who likes his or her humor bitersweet, his or her prose lush, and his or her mind to be stimulated and entertained! | | | Write your own review about The Franchiser: A Novel (American Literature (Dalkey Archive))
|
|
|
