Stanley Elkin's novels celebrate the extravagance of language and the persistence of appetite, and The MacGuffin finds his characteristic style applied to a municipal official experiencing a midlife crisis. Bob Druff is the Streets Commissioner of an unnamed Midwestern city, responsible for potholes and traffic lights, increasingly convinced that conspiracies swirl around him. His mind invents a MacGuffin, Hitchcock's term for the object everyone in a thriller pursues, and projects it onto his mundane circumstances. Elkin, who taught at Washington University until his death in 1995, was celebrated by critics and fellow writers while never achieving wide readership. His sentences spiral outward in riffs and digressions, piling clause upon clause, driven by a manic verbal energy that either delights or exhausts readers. Druff is dying, his body failing, his marriage stale, his importance diminished. He responds by imagining himself at the center of intrigues that probably do not exist. The novel becomes a meditation on aging, irrelevance, and the stories we tell to make ourselves protagonists. Elkin wrote with the desperation of someone for whom language was both curse and salvation; he suffered from multiple sclerosis for most of his career and wrote through pain about characters who suffer and persist. Readers who appreciate prose as performance, sentences as spectacle, will find The MacGuffin a demanding and rewarding experience.