Stanley Elkin’s novel “Magic Kingdom” provides an interesting contrast to “Operation Wandering Soul.” Magic Kingdom is about a man who is determined to take a bunch of terminally-ill kids to Disney’s Magic Kingdom, partially in penance for his own failure to provide some magic moments of relief to his own son during his early, painful death. Elkin is a misplaced American master who wrote send-ups of American phenomena: prisons, radio talk shows, hotel chains, condominiums and gangsters’ wives. Elkin is bleak and sorrowful, but he twists the basic realism of his stories a notch or two so that most of it comes out wildly funny. It’s the black, funny streak in American fiction that has its source in Melville, as refined by Mark Twain, spattered indiscriminately by William Faulkner, and broadcast widely by the likes of Elkin, Joseph Heller, Philip Roth, Kurt Vonnegut, Joan Didion, and Didion’s late husband, John Gregory Dunne, especially in his last novel, “Nothing Lost,” in which everything is.

Elkin struggled with multiple sclerosis, so the pain he wrote through was real, not attitude, and, leavened by his humor, his stories are black, but somehow thoroughly redeeming. This dark dark Mississippi-wide channel in American Lit is for those of us who take some satisfaction in the bitter, who are determined to find the pearl of joy buried in the blackness.