The MacGuffin
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
A municipal employee sets out to unravel a murder—and save himself from the split personality that is pushing him to the brink
At age fifty-eight, Robert Druff's destructive alter ego has begun to take over his life. Frustrated with his job as Commissioner of the Streets and desperate to protect his aura of power, Druff injects himself into the middle of a conspiracy revolving around the death of his son's girlfriend—and everyone, from his employees to his mistress, seems to be complicit in the plot.
Deeply humorous and engaging, The MacGuffin is a striking exploration of obsession and the imaginative story of a man struggling against his own frailty to regain control of his life.
This ebook features rare photos and never-before-seen documents from the author's estate and from the Stanley Elkin archives at Washington University in St. Louis.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this exuberant, offbeat novel, the wildly inventive Elkin ( George Mills ) unleashes a Hitchcockian MacGuffin (the narrative spirit) which takes over the ebbing life of Bobbo Druff, 58, the fairly honest but bribable street commissioner of a mid-size American city. Kafka-esque unseen enemies and their supposed spies, perhaps including Bobbo's newly acquired mistress, Meg Glorioso, may be trying to nail him for an unspecified crime linked somehow to the hit-and-run death of the Lebanese Moslem Shiite girlfriend of his son Mikey, a 30-year-old ninny. Bobbo winds up talking to the MacGuffin and eventually locks him out of his house. Elkin's imagination flags toward the end, but he has rewarded us with many comic turns, including the courtship of Bobbo and his future nagging wife under Hays Office rules: Bobbo has had to keep one foot on the floor at all times. First serial to Playboy.
