Sunset Over Miami : When Stanley Elkin, chronicler of the ordinary guy, set down to write about a widow in the Sun Belt, did he know it was his last novel? : MRS. TED BLISS, <i> By Stanley Elkin (Hyperion: $22.95; 292 pp.)</i>

Stanley Elkin died this past spring. He will remain an American writer of the first rank. I’m taking the long view that includes Melville and Twain--by all means Twain--not the myopic squint at who is to be taken seriously this season. Elkin, the funny man, deserves a large and lasting audience--readers who will be rewarded when they buy a ticket to the Elkin Vaudeville Show and find that they also hold a season subscription to the symphony.

“Mrs. Ted Bliss,” Elkin’s last novel, stands as a brilliant end to the long career of a writer who saw the pitch of every assaulting sentence, the shape of each paragraph, as vital to the the moment of his story.

The energy and imagination that Elkin invests in Mrs. Bliss, the most ordinary of women in ordinary circumstances--a Jewish widow living in a Miami condominium, a fixture in the life of family and friends--is extraordinary. A woman as central character is new territory for Elkin, who celebrated the ordinary guy in his stories and novels of hopeful hucksters and flamboyant losers who work the salesrooms of tawdry-yet-wondrous American life.

Elkin’s franchiser, bail bondsman and talk-show host are defined by their professions, as Dickens often defined and limited his memorable comic figures--a Mr. Gradgrind, a Uriah Heep. So what is Elkin doing with this aging beauty who hasn’t worked since she was a girl helping customers zip and button in a dress shop? With this woman addicted to cleaning house and meticulously caring for herself (two showers a day, lotion, talc)? With this harmless plush dinosaur in a pre-feminist landscape? He is working over the passive character, the blank slate, the outer limits of ordinary. With his old magic, he conjures the pathetically amusing Mrs. Bliss, transfiguring her in the course of her final years from bland to bold, from a hoot in pink polyester to a heroine of depth and grace. The naivete of this unenlightened woman is made clear:

“Dorothy had not, beyond the universe of her own family, known all that many men, but even in her family had noticed the tendency of the women to leave the choicest cuts, ripest fruits, even the favorite most popular flavors of candy sour balls--the reds and purples, the greens and oranges--for the men. The most comfortable chairs around the dining room table. The coldest water, the hottest soup, the last piece of cake.”

Mrs. Bliss, seldom called Dorothy, is an uncomplaining product of her narrow society back home in Chicago and in Miami’s Condominium No. 1. Branded as wife and mother, she sees marriage as a trade-off: “Women honored the men who put food on the table, who provided the table on which the food was put, and the men saved them.” Mrs. Bliss feels that she was saved from her dreary job in the dress shop by Ted. As it turned out, she was saved to become a background figure, a leftover who can’t balance a checkbook, never mind the stock emotions of her life.

Mrs. Bliss would seem to be a Jewish version of Evan Connell’s foolishly innocent and touching Mrs. Bridge, save for the fact that Elkin’s Dorothy has large adventures. This isn’t Kansas, folks--it’s Miami, and the condo crowd of retirees is straight out of central casting. What can transpire beyond the next illness, predictable death, visit from the kids, card game, potluck in the rec room? A novel with an amazingly inventive structure in which, for starters, a stranger comes to the door with a proposition for Mrs. Ted Bliss. Unlike Elkin’s criers and kibitzers--men always alive to the scam, whether conning or being conned--Dorothy is a dupe, a sitting duck.

The deal has to do with Ted’s ’78 Buick LeSabre, which Alcibiades Chitral wants to buy (actually, he supposedly wants the parking space in the condo that goes with the car). Chitral is one of the condo’s “Latins.” The Jewish Establishment, “stereotypical down to the ground,” refers to all new neighbors--Venezuelans, Chileans, Colombians, Cubans--as Latins. Life as they have lived it by the pool in Miami is changing, has changed. Chitral turns out to be a drug lord, and his use of the LeSabre to stash his hold is a desecration of that beloved artifact, the family car. Mrs. Bliss sends him up for a mythic 100 years with her testimony.

Elkin has been criticized wrongly for his lack of plot; the fact is that he is not satisfied by a simple anecdotal story with ethnic overtones such as the one he sets up here in the first pages. His interest lies in the consequences of plot, in what happens when the untoward incident disrupts the overly ordered life.

Will Dorothy Bliss now wake from her dull dream? Has she left the door ajar? Is she to be forever condemned to be as dumb as yet another Latino con artist sees her:

“She wasn’t human, she was a cliche quivering in the corner. Of course she was a pillar of love. She was a pillar of love capable of any greed, nastiness, bad manners, gossip, or folly. A patriot only to consanguinity, this cowering special pleader of blood who traded on her revenant, immemorial widowship and mommyhood.”

In Elkin’s best work, the slight of caricature gains the fullness of character. And so the story of Mrs. Ted Bliss goes on, as life goes on to transcend mere plot. In this last-lap-of-the-road Bildingsroman , Elkin explores the afterlife, life after the shocking event--the death of a loved one, the sentencing of the guilty.

The protected life of the survivor, Dorothy Bliss, is seemingly without dimension--without reference to mass death and mass guilt. Writ large in Dorothy’s story, however, are the undercurrent of her insufficiency and the struggle to overcome her innocence. The discoveries she makes about neighbors and family, and, painfully, about herself, form a grand and continuing narrative that is set in motion after the Keystone Kops and robbers sale of the Buick to Chitral.

As Mrs. Bliss is set free of her constraints, so is the novelist set free of the programmed story, free to let Mrs. Bliss confront less-comfortable memories in which even the beloved Ted was not free of major misdemeanors. She is free to mourn the death of a son and free to discover that in the present she lives at an emotional as well as a geographic distance from family.

Elkin wrote against the constraint of plot, as did Melville, daring to stop the whale chase for a brilliant dissertation. So we have Mrs. Bliss set in play, visiting her dull, prosperous children, visiting a spick-and-span prison in which Chitral, who calls himself a “cliche,” is given a Stanley Elkin riff:

“Had you been here when we came to the New World we’d have made you slaves, stolen your gold and smashed your temples. We’d have wiped out your mathematics and astronomy and forbidden you access to your terrible gods. No offense, ma’am, but there’s something loathsome and repellent to persons like me in persons like you.

“Perhaps your passivity--I bear you no grudge, Widow Bliss, I’ve no bones to pick with your kind--is at odds with our conquistador spirit, something antithetical between our engagement and the Jew’s torpid stupor, his incuriosity and dead-pan, poker-faced genius for suffering. . . .”

And on and on he rants, in possession of the author’s stunning rhetoric, in sentences with cadences that scan; a lecture, or is it a sermon from the devil we create by roping ourselves off from those not of our kind? This novel is profoundly about the tags we hang on ourselves and others, sexually and racially; about the dishonest mumble of polite memories, polite words; about our separate dictions of discord--Chitral with his wild articulation, his lethal cultural overview, Mrs. Bliss with her Yiddish phrases, homey, shopworn, antique.

As I read “Mrs. Ted Bliss,” I felt that the writer, who suffered for many years with multiple sclerosis, knew that this was his last time on stage and that his voice must carry--unmiked, no replays--to the last row. Elkin believed in voice, in his voice as a writer. When you read Elkin--outrageous, forgiving, compassionate, always testing the possibilities of his characters and exploring the bounds of their stories and of fiction itself--you read Elkin prose, not laid-back minimal reportage.

“But life’s tallest order,” Elkin wrote, “is to keep the feelings up, to make the two dollars worth of euphoria go the distance. And life can’t do that. So fiction does. And there, right there, is the real--I want to say ‘only’--morality of fiction.” Yet this last work, this posthumous novel (what a high old time he’d have with that category), ends on a moral note.

Dorothy, grown older and infinitely wiser than Mrs. Bliss, the well-preserved widow, sits with Louise Munez, once known to her as a strange girl in the small society of the condo. Louise is now a woman of 50. The semblance of family is long gone from Condominium No. 1and at this particular moment everyone has fled. They sit alone waiting for Hurricane Andrew, the unpredictable act of nature or God. Mrs. Bliss opens her arms:

“In the darkness, she lifted her left hand to Louise’s head and began to stroke the dry hair.

“Because everything else falls away. Family, friends, love falls away. Even madness stilled at last. Until all that’s left is obligation.”

Obligation, as in the promise to forbear, as in the observance of our humanity.

“Mrs. Ted Bliss” came to me with a notice announcing the author’s publicity tour. Elkin was a master mimic. We will miss him in eight cities doing his clever takes on the cast of minor characters who surround Dorothy Bliss--the skimmers, the shysters, a fraudulent therapist. But let it be known that the sustained and sustaining performance for Elkin’s readers will be there, in perpetuity on the page. He went the distance.