The Dick Gibson Show by Stanley Elkin
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

American Obsession

In 1970 Jerzy Kosinski published his novel Being There, a sarcastic critique of the media culture of the West. Its protagonist is Chauncey Gardiner, described as “a man without qualities”. As a servant in a mansion in which he has spent his entire life, Chauncey has learned about social interactions primarily through television. Although no one is quite sure what he means, his responses appear sage and meaningful. He becomes a respected advisor to governments and business.

The point of Kosinski's piece is the danger posed by the media in creating not just individuals like Chauncey but whole societies that consider him to be normal and even intelligent. In a time of Donald Trump the message of Being There is clearly relevant. [It is also interesting to note that as this review is being written, Glen Newey of the London Review of Books has just described the recently resigned MP David Cameron as “a man with no qualities”.] Being There was made into a film starring Peter Sellers in 1979, thus assuring its place in cultural memory.

In the same year that Being There appeared, Stanley Elkin produced his novel The Dick Gibson Show. Also about the media and its effects, Elkin has a very different and, in light of its Trumpian relevance, a rather more prescient point to raise. Elkin doesn’t use sarcasm; he is far too empathetic an author to trash his characters. And his medium of interest is not television but that somewhat archaic technology of AM (medium wave) radio, a technology which was giving way when he wrote to FM and ultimately to the internet. What Elkin writes about, moreover, is not the effect of mass media on society but the effects of society on those involved in mass media – the corruption flows from the latter to the former. This makes for a rather more interesting tale of moral development.

Elkin is prescient in several ways. He anticipates first of all the transformation of AM radio into so-called talk-radio, one of the most important political forces in the US today – mostly right wing and often, like The Trump-boosting Brietbart, important electoral vehicles. In addition, the form of the Dick Gibson show that evolves during the book is a sort of emulation of the internet before anyone is likely to have even considered it as a possibility.

The Show is a telephone interaction between individual listeners and the eponymous Dick Gibson from midnight to dawn. There appear the now familiar proto-internet types - trolls and cranks, frauds, purveyors of pornography, and exhibitionists - calling into the show. But the main content of the calls Dick receives are expressions of misery, unhappiness, confusion, pain and a general inability to deal with life. In short, what anyone with an internet news feed receives daily. This, Dick considers, is a general malaise of obsessiveness that exists in American society and is revealed, not created, by the media. A rather different point than Kosinski’s

Much like Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts, the sheer weight of misery and obsession in human lives – his own as well as other people’s - drives Dick to contemplate murder. The fact that he doesn’t carry out the thought but finally takes responsibility for his own life provides a conclusion more satisfying than Kosinski’s if markedly less well known.

Could it be that Trump is really a victim rather than a manipulator of the media? It would explain much if he were. Like his apparent inability to discern reality yet still maintain some sort of 'connection' with those who think reality can be found on Fox and Brietbart.

View all my reviews