Well, here come some desperate Japanese to the is land of Mauritius seeking a long lost dodo bird through which they hope to avert impending national de feat.

The station just de clines and disappears.ĭuring World War II he gets haz ardous duty transmitting reports di rect to the generals so they can get the true picture. But, if they're even listening, he never gets a rise out of them. When the hero's powerful employers at KROP (The Void of Wheat) insist that in his bulletins he make bad news sound better, his initial subservience turns into a weird contagion of feigned emotion then he finds him self driven by his employers° silence to veer off into invented ekposés of their private lives. Elkin can beam into his narrative endless jokes, lives and professional lore-which I may add make this book wonderfully diffi cult to summarize-while he dials his hero through dozens of small town jobs in Texas, Pennsylvania, Kansas, Nebraska-a poignant geog raphy trapped in the ubiquitous stu dio where a man listens to his own voice occurring “in silence.” That silence is Mr. To achieve the perfect radio show, he undertakes a self ‐ conscious and strangely transcendental apprentice ship. Its many‐aliased announcer‐hero has had intimations of a special destiny ever since as a child he dis covered America coming in from stations all over the continent. Catch a late‐night panel of radio voices discussing Esperanto or the earth's flatness, or better still listen to those phone‐in programs on which the caller's hang‐ups and heartburns are broadcast to the world yet sealed off in person‐to person privacy-and you'll have some idea of the staggering national resource from which Stanley Elkin has created “The Dick Gibson Show.” This is his third novel and his best- a funny, melancholy, frightening, scabrous, absolutely American com pendium that may turn out to be our classic about radio.

The Dick Gibson Show by Stanley Elkin