An American Story: On Stanley Elkin’s “The Franchiser”

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“Less Prozac, more protein. Less burnout, more babies, less feminism, more femininity.” 

–Podcaster & wellness-influencer Alex Clark at Turning Point USA’s Young Women’s Leadership Summit in Dallas, Texas June 13-15, 2025

“A man of franchise, a true democrat who would make Bar Harbor, Maine, look like Chicago, who would quell distinction, obliterate difference, who would common-denominate until Americans recognize that it was America everywhere.” 

–Stanley Elkin, The Franchiser (1976)

In June the conservative nonprofit Turning Point USA hosted its annual Young Women’s Leadership Summit. The Summit’s speakers included a mix of podcasters and wellness-influencers, with Alex Clark host of the podcast “Culture Apothecary” headlining the event. The speakers, including Clark herself, promoted a mix of traditionally conservative-coded views—like an emphasis on the importance of firm gender roles and the nuclear family—alongside warnings of microplastics, of SSRIS, of all dangers, physical, mental, and spiritual, to the health of the young women in attendance. In  The New York Times’ reporting of the Summit you can see images of merchandise available for purchase; like sweatshirts with the flowing script “Healing a Sick Culture” adorned with icons of wedding rings, praying hands, and sticks of butter. In that same Times article attendees are even quoted as stating they first became drawn to influencers like Clark and other figures in the conservative podcast milieu because of COVID-19 pandemic. They were alone, they were scared, and women like Clark were offering camaraderie, comfort, and answers to their fears. In the years since quarantine, we as a culture have become familiar with several of the archetypes that populate this type of women’s “content”; from trad-wives with massive inherited wealth, to pilates girls with athleisure brands, or MAHA (“Make America Healthy Again”) moms with a penchant for media appearances, all hope to sell us an American cure for our all-American problem. 

Stanley Elkin, a forgotten mid-century juggernaut, an author who straddled the line between Modernism and Post-Modernism, a behemoth of stream-of-consciousness riffs, a contemporary, friend, and colleague of Williams Gass at Saint Louis’ Washington University, wrote a story of a man that preceded influencers like Clark, but might as well have foretold their ascendancy. This man’s name was Ben Flesh, the titular Franchiser of Elkin’s 1976 novel, recently reissued by Dalkey Archives. Elkin’s Franchiser, like many of his other works (The Magic Kingdom, The MacGuffin, George Mills, etc.) has been out-of-print since the author’s death from multiple sclerosis in the mid-nineties. Elkin’s life-long struggle with his own health presents a parallel to Flesh’s decline as the ex-GI franchiser is also stricken with a MS diagnosis while traveling across the country to and from his various franchises:a Mister Softee stand, a dance academy, a movie theater, to a laundromat. When Flesh is first given his MS diagnosis in a South Dakota hospital after a manic episode, he comes to the realization that shapes the book’s remaining two thirds, “ his body, anyone’s, everyone’s, was something for the public record, something accountable like books for audit, like deeds on file in county courthouses.”¹ 

When illness strikes, be it MS or COVID or chronic inflammation, there’s truth to the statement that one’s body becomes something of a collective talking point, kin to a public utility that’s not cutting the proverbial mustard. You find yourself forever up for discussion. Yet, what happens when a fissuring culture is cracked open by a pandemic, and illness haunts all bodies? Elkin’s Franchiser and the women of the Leadership Summit milieu appear to be strange bedfellows at first glance, but they represent interlocking views on American health and vulnerability, and can be read as primers on what it means to be sick in a country where everything has its price. 

In a recent profile on activist Zen Honeycutt’s MAHA power group Moms Across America by Bari Weiss’ The Free Press, a number of women—Honeycutt supporters with shared interests and those who more generally identify with the MAGA and MAHA movements— express hope that the Trump administration, specifically Robert F. Kennedy Jr., will turn around what they see as crises of corruption and chronic illness pervading the country. Honeycutt, a controversial figure given her long-standing anti-vaccine stance, presents a compelling brand of discordant charisma for when she states “once you start to question the food, you question everything”, she brings up a valid point – why wouldn’t you doubt a system that’s long been rigged against you? However, I feel something like sorrow for the everyday women who’ve joined the ranks of MAA and MAHA, those who fervently believe in a healthier future, a happier future, a distinctly “American” future, for they’ve hitched their wagons to a political behemoth that really doesn’t give a damn about them. Like Moms Across America board member Kelly Ryerson admits, “I have no idea whether me personally, going from place to place, makes any difference, but it makes me feel better because I’m desperate.”

I see a parallel between the doubt and distress many of these conservative women feel and the floundering directionlessness of many GIs, like the fictional Flesh and Elkin’s peers, returning home after the end of WWII. Both groups were sold a bill of goods by a system that pares humans down to dollars and cents, profits and losses. For instance many working or middle-class conservative women have long felt alienated by neo-liberal feminism: a movement born of markets and empty signifiers, beholden to corporations, and grossly uninterested in actual access to equal economic opportunity. GIs first returning home from WWII, a war in which they were urged to enlist in, were met with family and loved ones who no longer understood them or at worst didn’t really care what they had seen and how it changed them.

I believe Elkin’s novel and, for lack of a better phrase, the conservative women’s health movement are both modern stories of transactions gone awry; of short sells, and good deals, of theft, and long cons, of smart investments, and bad-news bargains. Reading both cultural objects under this lens of health as a commodity lets us not only remember a forgotten masterpiece, but also allows for an expanded understanding of the fears and anxieties encroaching upon our current lives. To better see where these links lie we first need to know who Elkin was, what happened in The Franchiser, and what exactly makes the book a compelling spiritual antecedent to our version of The Franchiser: the figure of The Influencer. 

In a 1992 essay, “Out of One’s Tree: My Bout with Temporary Insanity”, for Harper’s Magazine, Stanley Elkin wrote of the effects of the prednisone he was prescribed to help alleviate the inflammation caused by his MS. Prednisone, a steroid that I too was given as a child due to lung issues, can indeed cause extreme mood swings. One moment you may be jumping on the couch, the next, you’re sobbing with guilt for missing school. Elkin, during his bout with steroids mania, was struck with the fear that he never “really wrote any of his books, that his work belonged to someone else”. Elkin’s reflection stuck with me. For in a 1976 interview with the Paris Review, the author reflected on his own early writing-style as a grad student at the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana, a style he likened to that of William Faulkner, the author whom he would go on to write about in his dissertation. Elkin posited that Faulkner empathized with “the egocentric will pitted against something stronger than itself”, an assertion he eventually came to realize was in fact a truer disclosure about his own work since, in the author’s own words, “Faulkner’s heroes are often nicer guys than mine.” 

What does it mean to be a nice guy, for the will of the one to be pitted against the larger all? I don’t know if I’d call any of Elkin’s protagonists “nice”, from Eddy Bale’s displaced fixation on taking terminally ill children to Disney World in The Magic Kingdom, Bobbo Druff’s paranoia and unconfronted failings within the unwieldy city streets of  The MacGuffin, or Ben Flesh’s own forever lacking quest for legacy in The Franchiser. I would, however, recognize these men and their quixotic quests to be someone. All Elkin’s characters illuminate something of the systems that they were born within; systems that have been for better or worse, shaped by America’s global reach, our competing needs for belonging and independence, and the price tag we put on each of these modes of being. 

Like William Gass writes in the preface to the 1980 edition of  The Franchiser, “Stanley Elkin puts his imagination to work by placing it like a seed within the soil of some vocation.  Vocation: that is no trade-school word for him,”² for he, “makes a man—out of the elements he lives in, the body he is confined to, the world he works in, the language he knows”.³ As a reader, I see shades of Elkin’s own father in these working men, an analysis that Elkin’himself may have pushed back against for he claimed in that same Paris Review interview that “there is little autobiography in my work.” Yet, like Ben Flesh, whom Gass describes as “American at its best; he is the word become Ben; he utters pure pop; he speaks Lite beer, his verbs are coated with a secret recipe.”⁴ Elkin spoke of his father’s career as a traveling salesman in a similar manner, “the man believed in costume jewelry, in rhinestones and beads, and sang junk jewelry’s meteorological condition—its Fall line and Spring.”

This idea of a costume worn as second skin, of sincere spectacle, as something distinctly American—top of the line fools gold, only the very best ersatz sparkles and sham karats, the ole’ razzle dazzle—provides a through line to Ben’s origins in The Franchiser. Ben Flesh’s father and godfather were partners in a theatrical costume company, outfitting shows up and down the eastern seaboard. The material of Flesh’s early world, the slick hot stage lights, both align with and engender the language, the cadence, of who Elkin’s would have him become. Though I find myself somewhat balking at Gass’ use of “best” in the above quote, I can understand the dark humor in aestheticizing the collective tendency to both manufacture and believe, zealously, in the country’s own hype; especially during an era marked by diminishing public expectations and global uncertainty. Elkin was a man of 1970s America: he lived within a world shaped by Watergate, the legacy of Vietnam, economic meltdown, and political violence.

It’s an age not unlike the current moment in American culture, with political analyses pinpointing the declining trust in public institutions as a shared factor in the precarious atmosphere of the seventies and now. I mention this declining trust specifically in media, higher education, and the government, because when belief in these traditional sites of normative value crumbles we’re left only with franchises: those centers of homogenous logic and the same oh-so-American values. We see a similar phenomenon in MAHA adjacent brands, especially wellness and beauty lines marketed to women Take Primally Pure, a skincare line that recently came under fire from the FTC for their marketing campaign that claimed traditional sunscreen was poison. Pure also functions as a platform for a health podcast, Grounded Wellness, in which the brand’s founder talks with a number of guests who espouse the benefits of raw milk and the practice of “ earthing”, of questioning everything you think you know about Big Agri and Big Pharma. This suspicion, this desire to dig deeper, to know “the truth”, is a common trait of MAHA women and their platforms, their brands, their, dare I say, franchises. And like any franchise worth its salt, nothing here is free. 

Now Ben Flesh enters, stage left. Ben Flesh was not born rich. His parents died early and he scooted by as an average, middle of the road fellow. He was able to attend the Wharton School of Business on the GI Bill and had dreams of middle management. Yet, this changed when he was called to visit his dying godfather. In the start to a memorable monologue, his godfather ponders, “How crowded is the universe [. . .] How stuffed to bursting with its cargo of crap. Consider, Ben. You could have been a pencil or the metal band that holds the eraser to the wood, the wire of lead that runs through it.”⁵ The old man gifts Flesh not money but money’s use. Flesh inherits the nation’s prime interest rate; a guarantee backed by the godfather’s wealth, to be underwritten by the inheritance of his eighteen godsiblings. With this rate, Ben is able to take out loans at the rate given only to a bank’s most favored customers. 

Yet, Elkin’s hero doesn’t know what to do with this opportunity”  as all ,“…he wanted was what he never believed he could have. All he wanted was a job.”⁶ Not until Ben’s godsiblings explain the concept of a Howard Johnson hotel to him—that anyone essentially can “be” Howard Johnson given they follow the rules provided by the corporation—does he realize that he can be a trader of names and ideas, that he could join the legacy of men who had “certain things going for them”⁷, and endlessly propagate the idea of an idea of a hotel, a restaurant, a dance school, a movie theater, a fast food stand, till all things became a single, pounding, quadri-syllabic shout of “AMERICA.” 

There’s a performance inherent to Ben’s moneyed American persona, an image of complete candor and ease that reminds me of Hannah Neeleman, the matriarch of Ballerina Farm. Neeleman is considered t one of the first trad-wives to enter public consciousness through her soothing Instagram videos, usually making dinner with her children or tending to her sizeable family farm. The picture painted by Ballerine Farm is one of good old-fashioned American work ethic; that Neeleman and her husband built their farm, and lucrative business, from the ground up with just a dream and tenacity. This isn’t to dismiss the work Neeleman surely handles day in and day out—like Ben constantly, and forever, hustling between franchises—but her farm wouldn’t have been possible without her husband’s sizeable inheritance as the heir of JetBlue fortune. Though Ben was not born rich like Neeleman’s spouse (it would be more accurate to state he was given access to potential and chance through money), with the current wealth disparity in this country being likened to a second Gilded Age, there is an increasingly high baseline level of material wealth one must have access to in order to take chances, to grasp at potential. 

We’re treated to Ben’s cross-country conquests, his ecstatic surprise summits with the employees at each of his businesses. Yet MS, as Elkin would tell us, is a stress disease and Ben, like his country, is beginning to pull at the seams. After his diagnosis Ben enters remission against the combined backdrop of the 1977 natural gas shortage and the 1978-79 oil crisis. His businesses are struggling, they’re shuttering; the prime interest rate is through the roof and no longer guaranteed by his now distant godsiblings, and Ben’s magic touch all but dissipated. He eventually tries to open a Travel Inn in Georgia as a last ditch stand to join the ranks of men who had “certain things going” but found that he must now run the hotel as himself, simply Ben and his flesh. He then has the epiphany that contains the franchiser’s driving fear: 

“I’ll be old. 

This alone had not occurred to him.

I’ll be old. And I won’t know how.

And it was frightening to him as it had been when as a small boy he knew that one day he would be grown up and he hadn’t a clue how he would handle that either.” ⁸

Though the story closes with Ben’s defeat, “within weeks he would be strapped to a wheelchair,”⁹  arguably that Elkin is in starry-eyed love with this universe’s “cargo of crap” and his protagonist’s life. For Ben would go on to think, perhaps in the throes of mania,that he was a “privileged man who could have been a vegetable or mineral instead of an animal, and a lower animal instead of a higher, who could have been a pencil, or a dot on a die, who could have been a stitch in a glove or change in someone’s pocket, or a lost dollar nobody found”¹⁰. There’s a generosity to Elkin’s vision of a life spent trying and breaking from the effort to join something larger than yourself. For instance, in a 1985 review of the author’s Magic Kingdom, Max Apple pulls a quote from Elkin dated five years earlier close to the release of The Franchiser,  ”’Life is never meaningless,’” [Elkin] insisted. ‘’It’s an astonishing gift and what this book is about is when that gift is taken away. The meaning is the loss itself.’”

I worry that Elkin’s vision of Ben’s capacious humanity and the bizarre gift of life is cracking; that we find ourselves under a new and increasingly unrecognizable set of norms each passing day. As our bodies age, and new illnesses drop, Ben’s ever-changing and ultimately unreliable prime interest rate, has been replaced by the Id-based architecture of the Internet. On Alex Clark’s X account, there are two public posts from April 24th and July 21st of this year. They read “Make America thin, fertile, and republican again” and “Anyone else think it’s weird that the Gardasil generation is almost all on IVF?” These two quotes struck me for they appeared like funhouse mirrors into not just conservative American women’s, but all American women’s, fears of aging, of dying, of their bodies failing, of getting swindled by what they were told was a pretty good deal. I’m not sure if there’s any solution to these anxieties for we’re Americans; we’re destined to look for a legacy, whether one of our own invention or one bought ready-made. However, a good first step is to remember with the same capacious and doggeded determination of Ben Flesh that we could have always been pencils, and consciously decide to no longer buy what they’re trying to sell us.

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