Stephen Elliot

I've been looking forward to writing about Looking Forward to It: or, How I learned to stop worrying and love the American electoral process for a while. It's pretty great! Also great is the cover of it, of a crowd of a political supporters with weird-looking tree men in suits interspersed, all carrying signs with question marks on them. (A funny contrast to a book edited by Stephen Elliot I read recently, called Stumbling and Raging: More Politically Inspired Fiction, on the cover of which a similar rally crowd holds signs, one of which says, "Edited by" and another, "STEPHEN ELLIOT." So I guess some voters know what they want.)

It opens via a picture of Elliot, a soda drink, and Howard Dean half-turned in the background, and it begins wonderfully, "It's been a long, boring summer and it's only July. July 2003, to be exact, nearly a year and a half before two people you would never invite over for dinner, and probably wouldn't even want to live in your town, will come head to head in the 2004 presidential election." The book continues in similar fashion - funny, inquisitive and based in a personal perspective you rarely find in writing about politics.

Now, when I say "personal," I don't necessarily mean Elliot's. I'm still on my way to reading his other books, which it seems are in part autobiographically based, but this novel makes such a point of being Elliot's as narrator's account of his travels around the country tailing various presidential candidates and their campaigns (well, his acquaintance with George Bush is masterfully fearsome but at best long-distance) that I immediately began to search for the fictional margins of this travel tale.

A first hilarious piece of proof comes on p. 2, when Elliot meets a photographer who'll accompany him on the trip. "Stefan's smiling a little because he lives in Washington, DC, and probably knows how all of this is going to turn out. What he doesn't know is that I'm writing for a magazine that doesn't carry photographs."

I probably also had this reaction because his writing reminded me a lot of Sergei Dovlatov's, who wrote all his books from a first-person who continually changed between the different books, losing wives, picking up dogs and children, perhaps a labor camp warden while in the army, perhaps escaping the army by being a champion boxer. This technique, though it was probably more than that, and added a layer of estrangement that was a unique means of writing about the unexciting predictable perversities of Soviet life. And by binding all of Dovlatov's writing into a single continuing work, it allowed uncertainty and a multiplicity of perspectives into fiction when un-straightforwardness wasn't exactly in demand. Moreover, Elliot's and Dovlatov's humor is uncannily similar.

It seems there are a number of purposes in the book. One is to give an actual picture of some of the candidates, mainly on the liberal side, and see what game it is they think they're playing and how they try to win. Another is to give a sketch of the clusters of different voters, and why the game plays out as it does. There is some analysis of the electoral institutions like caucuses and how to talk about health care (yes, I'm using the word institution lightly.) And last but not least, there is the theme that is Stephen Elliot, an itinerant writer for magazines, easy going and charming but afraid of and bothered by the people he's interacting with in his pursuits, with a violent girlfriend named Wilhelmina somewhere which may be his home.
TBC