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Title: A Bad Man by Stanley Elkin, David C. Dougherty ISBN: 1-56478-332-4 Publisher: Dalkey Archive Pr Pub. Date: September, 2003 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $13.95

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Average Customer Rating: 3.5 (2 reviews)

Rating: 2
Summary: Starts off promising...
Comment: This book started out very well, with the interesting premise of a properous businessman who grows more and more unscrupulous and eventually winds up in jail. The early details of the man's youth with his mentally unbalanced, emigrant merchant father are very entertaining, and the details of the man's unsatisfactory homelife are often very funny. However, the surreal nature of the prison life and the magical realism that the author indulges in are overdone, too detailed and ridiculous.

The author seems to be trying to say that the businessman's corruption stemmed from something in his soul, and that the prison with its psuedo-psychologist warden and its crazy rules is there to address this part of the man's character, but in the end it's all a tedious mish-mash and the speeches all go on for too long. The book collapses under the weight of this surreal, oddball device.

Rating: 5
Summary: A Bad Man
Comment: Do not let this book, this great book, gather dusk on remainder shelves. Do not let this name, this great name, dissolve, turn phosphorescent. Elkin explains, in difficult topsysturvy sentences, why life is funny, why life is worth living despite itself. Elkin shows how life is black yet burnt bright with light.