The Franchiser by Stanley Elkin

First published: 1976

Type of plot: Picaresque

Time of work: The mid-1970’s

Locale: Various and scattered locations in the United States, from Ringgold, Georgia, to Colorado Springs, Colorado

Principal Characters:

• Ben Flesh, the protagonist, a franchiser who spends his days visiting his various enterprises throughout the United States
• Julius Finsberg, his godfather and mentor
• Patty Finsberg, one of Julius Finsberg’s eighteen children and the most visible of Flesh’s paramours
• Tanner, Flesh’s roommate during a prolonged hospital stay in South Dakota

The Novel

The protagonist of The Franchiser suffers from multiple sclerosis, a disease that deteriorates the nervous system. Between attacks of the disease, Ben Flesh roams the American landscape, “the packed masonry of states,” looking after the massive network of franchises he has built upon an inheritance from his godfather, Julius Finsberg, an industrial kingpin. What Ben inherits from Finsberg, who has cheated Ben’s father out of his share of a successful business, is not a substantial sum of money but the prime interest rate—“Not money but the use of money.” With the low interest rates of the preinflationary 1960’s, Ben is able to build up a financial empire consisting entirely of franchises—Fred Astaire Dance Studios, Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurants, Baskin-Robbins Ice Cream parlors. In fact, Ben has his hand in literally every franchise in the United States. Along with the interest rate, Ben has inherited a responsibility for Finsberg’s children, eighteen in all. Like Ben, each of the Finsbergs suffers from an incurable disease, which is their physical inheritance from old Julius, bearer of bad genes. As he invests their money in his franchises, Ben becomes a lover to each of the Finsberg daughters and a confidant to each son, so that, between Ben and the children, business and familial relationships are interchangeable.

As the novel begins, Ben’s health is failing badly, but no more badly than his franchises, which are losing money because of the rising interest rates of the mid-1970’s. Consequently, the Finsberg children have lost faith in Ben’s financial abilities and are considering pulling their money out of his concerns, even as they begin to die off, one by one. In a series of flashbacks, Ben recalls his last meeting with Julius Finsberg, when he gained his inheritance, his hilarious encounter with a fraudulent Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant, his stay in a South Dakota hospital where his disease was diagnosed, and visits with the various colorful figures who operate his many franchises. Indeed, the entire novel might be seen as a patchwork of retrospective scenes which, mosaiclike, together reveal the progress of Flesh’s “career.” One extended recollection, for example, is given over to Ben’s attempt, as he drives cross-country, to escape the consequences of a massive heat wave that has caused a succession of power blackouts. Symbolically, this episode represents Flesh’s attempt to stay alive in a dead landscape, ironically made so by the power shortages of an energy-hungry America.

The episodic structure of The Franchiser holds for most of the novel; its scattered scenes, while unrelated in a strict chronology, follow the uneven pattern of Ben’s disease in its attacks and remissions and cumulatively represent the failing resources of the protagonist and his country. In a last-ditch effort to save his empire and the Finsberg fortune, Flesh pours all of his resources into the construction of a Travel Inn in Ringgold, Georgia. Flesh picks this location because he estimates that it is a logical stopover point between several major American cities and Disney World in Florida. “But that,” he discovers too late, “was before the Yom Kippur War, that was before the oil embargo, that was before the energy crisis, that was before the 55-mile-an-hour speed limit had been imposed nationwide.” People stay home, two-day trips become three-day trips, and Flesh’s last franchise fails, but not before he overhears a “conversation of lovers” as he listens at the doors of the few guests who stop at his Travel Inn. Ben celebrates this discovery of eros over the Inn’s telex, thus generating a wave of conversations about lovemaking from Inn-keepers all over the country. The novel concludes with a final scene of Flesh still traveling. Seemingly, a momentary vision of life gains a temporary, fragile foothold over the powers of death and decline in contemporary America.

The Characters

In a sense, there is only one character in The Franchiser, Ben Flesh, and he only a voice in the novel’s continuous monologue. Elkin’s novel is composed of transcriptions of Flesh’s conversations and his rambling meditations on life, death, and the landscape as he travels America. Though Flesh encounters a large variety of other characters, they are, for the most part, interlocutors or, in the case of the Finsberg children, diseases with human names, collections of oddities and symptoms. There is, for example, Flight Lieutenant Tanner, Flesh’s hospital roommate, who suffers from “Leukopenia,” a rare disease that gives the victim the appearance of sweating blood. Clearly, Tanner is a Christ figure, and in his conversations with Flesh, he helps Ben to come to terms with death and suffering. Tanner is also two-dimensional; he is a sign of Ben’s growing awareness of his own mortality rather than a fully developed character as such.

In his ramblings, Flesh might be seen as a reader and interpreter of cultural signs. He observes the minute phenomena of the human world and attempts to make connections between the scattered manifestations of life and death. Ben spends a lot of time with Patty Finsberg, who refers to herself as “The Insight Lady” because she is obsessed with the parallels to be drawn among disparate cultural events: “Chandeliers must have come in with the development of lens astronomy at the beginning of the seventeenth century. I should think it was an attempt to mimic rather than parody the order of the heavens, to bring the solar system indoors.” While some of her insights are breathtaking, it is clear that Patty is paranoically concerned with “connections.” From her, Ben learns that there is order in disorder, contradiction in synthesis. Flesh as a character is, then, like a reader of his own novel, who interprets his life and observations as a commentator might discuss the patterns and repetitions of a fiction. Then, too, Flesh is like a writer: As a franchiser, he both organizes and disseminates the separated units of his financial network. Almost continually in physical discomfort and confronting the visible evidence of his own death, Flesh looks outward, on life, for the external order that will confer meaning upon his existence.

Critical Context

To the general reading public, Stanley Elkin’s work is still largely unknown, though with the publication of The Franchiser he began to gain some well-deserved recognition. Elkin’s fiction is regarded by some critics as difficult and, at times, as lacking in form and control to the point of self-indulgence. These judgments might be countered by a knowledge of Elkin’s work as it has evolved from his first novel, Boswell (1964), to The Magic Kingdom (1985). Elkin has always been interested in the exaggerated peculiarities of the individual vision and voice; he is a master of intonation and nuance. Perhaps no other contemporary writer has so successfully captured the varied lifestyles and patois of contemporary Americans as they have been affected by the avid consumerism of their culture.

In The Franchiser, his most successful novel thus far, Elkin brings all of his talent for mimicry to bear on the shaggy-dog story of Ben Flesh’s travels, where life and death are held in a tenuous balance. The maintenance of that balance is the real story that The Franchiser tells, as it is the story of Elkin’s fiction in general. Thus, Elkin joins those other major contemporary writers—John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, John Hawkes, Saul Bellow, John Updike—who discuss, in their diversity, man’s chances for survival in an illusory world of accidents and orders beyond his control.

Bibliography

Dougherty, David C. Stanley Elkin. Boston: Twayne, 1990. A series of critical essays that cover Elkin’s major works and offer insight into his primary themes. Includes a helpful bibliography and index.

Elkin, Stanley. “A Conversation with Stanley Elkin.” Interview by David C. Dougherty. Literary Review 34 (Winter, 1991): 175-195. Elkin discusses the influence of Saul Bellow on his writing, the various inspirations for many of the characters in his novels, and his attitude toward certain critical responses to his work. He briefly talks about how his experience with multiple sclerosis influenced the way he wrote some of the scenes in The Franchiser.

Elkin, Stanley. “ A Hat Where There Never Was a Hat’: Stanley Elkin’s Fifteenth Interview.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 15 (Summer, 1995): 15-26. Elkin discusses why he would prefer not to write mystery or detective novels, the benefits of a word processor, the impact of fiction on a reader’s life, and victimization in relation to his protagonists. Although he does not talk about his novels in depth, his views as revealed in this interview are reflected in his work.

Saltzman, Arthur M. “Stanley Elkin: An Introduction.” Review of Contemporary Fiction 15 (Summer, 1995): 7-14. A solid overview of Elkin’s work. Saltzman examines the metaphorical and poetic narrative voice that Elkin uses, the criticism of Elkin’s style, and the significance of obsession and humor in Elkin’s work. His analysis includes specific examples from Elkin’s writings.