The Magic Kingdom

There's nothing quite like the experience of readiing a Stanley Elkin novel. The bizarre events, the over-the-top characters, and the sentences -- long, winding sentences filled with tangential details and parenthetical clauses, sentences which tumble and turn, drunk on themselves, but which somehow by the end all manage to add up.The Magic Kingdom has all of the virtues of Elkin's other great books, as well as an irresistible premise: a man who mourns his dead son by taking a group of terminally ill children to Disney World. It's as unsentimental as such a story could possibly be, and though the characters all certainly have annoying qualities, by the end the children possess a nobility which is far truer than the superficial good intentions of the adults around them.Certainly, this will not be a book for everyone. If you only want a straightforward story with sympathetic and coherent characters, look elsewhere, for The Magic Kingdom is a sort of cross between Virginia Woolf and Monty Python. If, however, you are able to keep your imagination open, appreciate wild flights of language, and don't mind moments where you aren't sure whether to laugh, cry, or throw up, then this book is for you.

If you want sentimental garbage about dying kids and them being perfect little angels, don't buy this book, watch Oprah. On the other hand, if you want a book that is totally unsentimental, yet extraordinarily heartbreaking, about dying kids who are fatally human, not angels, then get this one and quick!

The Magic Kingdom should be required reading for _anyone_ interested in language or writing. It's about a fateful trip that 7 terminally ill children take to Disney World, and Elkin renders each character's consciousness with wild imagination and a perfect lack of sentimentality. This is a tour de force from the fiercest imagination this side of the twentieth century.