Mrs. Ted Bliss /

When Elkin died earlier this summer, we lost one of America's most original and perceptive voices. A great critic of society, Elkin created a host of vivid and compelling characters, and his final heroine, the unflappable Mrs. Ted Bliss, may well be one of his most enduring. Elkin was always fascinated by the conflict between brain and heart, between what we think and what we feel, yet in Dorothy Bliss, he forged a consciousness notable for its steadfastness of spirit. A Russian Jewish beauty who immigrated to America in her early teens, Dorothy married a butcher, had children, and elevated cleanliness to an art form. Her carefully circumscribed life was all about duty. We meet the immaculate and sweet-natured Mrs. Bliss just after the death of her husband. Alone now in her Miami Beach condo and nearly deaf, Dorothy has to learn how to do basic things like write checks. When she sells her husband's car (she never learned to drive) to a handsome South American neighbor, she soon finds herself in some rather odd company. The neighbor turns out to be a drug dealer, and Dorothy helps the state put him in jail. With each page, our admiration for Dorothy grows. Amused by the bluster of men and surprisingly sanguine for a gal enamored of pastel polyester, Mrs. Bliss is wise beyond her sphere. Elkin's heartbreaking last lines reverberate like an epitaph for both character and author: "Family, friends, love fall away. Even madness stilled at last. Until all that's left is obligation." (Reviewed August 1995)0786861045Donna Seaman

The title of Elkin's latest could not be more apt: it refers to the book's main character and, with a minimum of fuss, connotes a good deal of the woman's identity, self-image and history. Dorothy Bliss, a Russian-born Jew whose mother bribed an immigration official to add three years to young Dorothy's age so she could get work on Manhattan's Lower East Side, married the butcher Ted Bliss and lived a full life in Chicago: ``She was a mother, she and Ted had married a daughter, bar mitzvahed two sons, buried one of them.'' And now she has buried a husband. When the book opens, Ted has died of cancer after their retirement to Miami, and thus begins the last stages of Mrs. Ted Bliss's life on earth, a lonely but spirited, comic existence in a condominium overlooking Biscayne Bay. Elkin (George Mills) is at his best here, blessed with the gift of one-liner insight and a definite, if reluctantly exercised, ability to tug on a reader's heartstrings. His Dorothy Bliss is an unreflective woman wholly mundane in her ways, and therefore an outrageous subject for a novel: she likes cards, food‘``Supper, coffee, dessert. Cooking.''‘and television. ``What she remembered of being a kid,'' observes the narrator, ``was what she remembered of being an adult: her family.'' And the family is as ordinary as they come, replete with the kind of dramas that fill lives commonly enough, but seldom live in books. If T.S. Eliot saw a modern alienation being measured out in coffee spoons, Elkin's Mrs. Ted Bliss measures hers out in perceived slights and jai alai tickets. This is not to say there is not at least the threat of exoticism in Dorothy's waning years‘her condo neighbors are a colorful lot, including some shady South American gents. But as they age, they seem as defanged as Dorothy is resigned to the dimming light of her world. In the end, it is the trenchant quips about the way of all flesh, and memory, that will give Dorothy Bliss a life after death: ``The same thing that gives us wisdom gives us plaque,'' she observes. Countless retirees in America‘Jewish and otherwise‘will recognize themselves and people they know in Dorothy Bliss. But finding her in a novel‘Who would have thought? 1500 signed copies of limited edition as ABA giveaways; author tour. (Sept.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

After her husband's death, Dorothy Bliss stays on alone in The Towers, their Miami Beach retirement condo. Everyone continues to address her as Mrs. Ted Bliss, as if she had no identity of her own. But Dorothy adapts quickly to change, and soon she is on The Towers's A-list, hobnobbing with "Tommy Overeasy," an elegant South American drug lord, and the building's chief engineer, a Yiddish-speaking Aztec. By the time Hurricane Andrew bears down on southern Florida, a fully self-sufficient Mrs. Bliss simply barricades herself inside and rides out the storm. Elkin has a highly developed sense of the absurd and a wonderful ear for spoken language. Multicultural Miami Beach provides him with plenty of comic material. However, as in his heartbreaking Magic Kingdom (LJ 4/15/85), death is such a strong presence that the comedy comes across as gallows humor. Still, Elkin's many fans will be waiting for this posthumously published final novel. For larger fiction collections.‘Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law Sch. Lib., Los Angeles (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

An extremely vexing if entertaining novel about an 80-year-old Jewish widow, by the late master of obsessive dark humor (Van Gogh's Room at Arles, 1993, etc.). Dorothy Bliss is a recent widow who moved with her husband to Miami after he retired as a butcher 20 years ago. Through the course of the story Elkin reveals in great detail every nuance of the rather dull life of Mrs. Bliss, a devoted homemaker who never dared to ``color outside the lines.'' We learn of her two living children and numerous grandchildren and other minor relativesMrs. Bliss keeps careful records of how much money she gives to each of them on every holiday, making sure that no one gets more than any of the others. We hear of the trauma of her oldest son's death from cancer at an early age. And we learn all about her fastidious cleaning habits. She leads such an ordinary, predictable life that her drug-smuggling South American neighbors conspire to use her and her dead husband's car as a front for their operation. But the amusing drug-running bit is only a ruse to tease you into thinking there's a plot. In fact, there's isn't so much a plot as an accumulation of detail about Mrs. Bliss. At first the repetitive, seemingly trivial anecdotes are grating, but Elkin's long poetic sentences about seemingly mundane minutiae subtly compound, and his central character gradually takes on a profound weight. By the end, when she's alone in her condo waiting for the killer hurricane that is bearing down on Miami, Mrs. Ted Bliss seems like a mythic character, the scene the Götterdämmerung of the Jewish-American Mother. A fiendish and, by end, thoroughly engrossing life study. (Author tour)