{"id":122622,"date":"2018-03-13T11:00:49","date_gmt":"2018-03-13T15:00:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/?p=122622"},"modified":"2018-03-12T17:55:40","modified_gmt":"2018-03-12T21:55:40","slug":"finally-reading-joseph-mcelroys-lost-magnum-opus","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.theparisreview.org\/blog\/2018\/03\/13\/finally-reading-joseph-mcelroys-lost-magnum-opus\/","title":{"rendered":"On Finally Reading Joseph McElroy\u2019s Lost Magnum Opus"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Obsession had brought me to Joseph McElroy\u2019s apartment building. I was vibrating from too much caffeine. I had been up late with his 1,200-page novel, Women and Men, <\/em>suffering the long-forgotten nervousness of cramming for a difficult final. The elevator opened directly into his apartment\u2014a surprise. I hadn\u2019t prepared my facial expression. McElroy, in a purple checked shirt tucked neatly into neutral pants, greeted me cautiously. As he led me through a maze of books, I noted the strength of his voice and the way, at eighty-seven, he walked with only the faintest hint of caution. I sat in his study beneath a large printed photo of McElroy himself staring angrily down at me. For the past decade, every time I\u2019d entered a used bookstore, it was with the hope of finally finding a copy of Women and Men<\/em>. Now I was interviewing its author, something that I\u2019d had no desire to do.<\/p>\n

My interest in the novel began with Jonathan Franzen<\/a>\u2019s \u201cMr. Difficult,\u201d a takedown of William Gaddis<\/a>. I wasn\u2019t yet aware of the phenomenon of big-game hunting, the youngish critic making a case for their own fiction by taking down a writer who is either too lofty or too dead (ideally both) to punch back. Franzen\u2019s argument relied on a binary: there was the \u201cStatus model\u201d of evaluating novels\u2014artistic greatness regardless of the novel\u2019s popular success\u2014and the \u201cContract model\u201d\u2014a friendly egalitarian compact between writer and reader. While Franzen allows that certain novels like House of Mirth<\/em> can be appreciated in both modes, the categories diverge over challenging works. For a contract reader, difficulty is an impediment. I took note when he identified a status canon of \u201cintellectual, socially edgy white-male American fiction writers \u2026 Pynchon, DeLillo<\/a>, Heller<\/a>, Coover, Gaddis, Gass<\/a>, Burroughs<\/a>, Barth<\/a>, Barthelme<\/a>, Hannah<\/a>, Hawkes, McElroy, and Elkin<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n

I had never heard of Joseph McElroy, whose 1987\u00a0book regularly sells for\u00a0more than three hundred\u00a0dollars on eBay. The one volume in the New York Public Library system is impossible to secure, there is no e-book, and I grew fascinated with the elusiveness of Women and Men<\/em>. I wasn\u2019t alone. Most online discussions of the book are tips on finding it. The novel was notorious, eleven years of labor that quickly vanished from cultural consciousness. Many books go out of print because they are unremarkable, but few acquire the cult status of Women and Men<\/em>. We who hadn\u2019t read it all had the same questions: Why was it so long? And was it good? And why, despite its failure, did it still fascinate so many?\u00a0<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Soon, all this wonder will subside. Women and Men <\/em>will be reprinted\u00a0in paperback on April 15<\/a>. But for a very long time, the book was my permanently ingrained MacGuffin. Whenever I perused shelves, I would look for that Turgenevian title. I stopped in most often at Cobble Hill\u2019s Community Bookstore. The owner, John\u00a0Scioli, chain-smoked outside and, judging by the smell, inside too. He sold unsorted used books for almost nothing. Every time, I walked in with the collector\u2019s hope, like buying a lottery ticket with a smack of highfalutinism.<\/p>\n

I searched for years, during which I acquired a liking for Coover, Barth, and Barthelme, appreciation for Hannah and Pynchon, vague dubiousness regarding DeLillo, less vague skepticism for Burroughs, and mystification toward Hawkes and Elkin. Then, a breakthrough: a woman I was dating took Women and Men<\/em> out from the New York Society Library for me. As the massive spine gleamed yellow atop her dining table, I felt overwhelming gratitude. But the next week, things were said in a taxi going over the Manhattan Bridge. I returned the novel, paid an exorbitant member\u2019s fee so I could join the library myself, and took it right back out again. There was a sense of anticlimax. The bibliophile\u2019s journey\u2014I assume because I\u2019ve suffered only from bibliomonomania\u2014needs to end in genuine possession. My fetishism wasn\u2019t satisfied because the library book wasn\u2019t mine. I read the first two paragraphs, renewed it eleven straight times, then retired my membership.<\/p>\n

Word came that the Community Bookstore was closing. No preparations seemed underway. If anything, the clutter grew, but Scioli just stood out front, daunting and resolute as Ahab. Then, one humid night, I walked past and saw hundreds of books being chucked into a dumpster. Desperate to save what I could, I entered and headed, as always, right to the m<\/em>\u2019s. And there it was. The fat hardcover. It was in pristine condition and didn\u2019t even smell of smoke. At the register, Scioli looked me over. I feigned nonchalance as I handed Women and Men<\/em> his way. \u201cFirst edition,\u201d he said, as my nerve endings fired. \u201cFive dollars.\u201d I handed the bill over. Was there the slightest twinkle in his eyes? Or did mine have enough tenderness for both of us?<\/p>\n

Now, at last, I could read the novel. But unfortunately, I had meanwhile become a professional writer\u2014it would be imprudent not to write an essay. I pitched several editors. The word fun<\/em> was used. One publication suggested that I find out if there was going to be an e-book, so I reached out to McElroy\u2019s publisher\u2019s publicity person, who, according to my Twitter stalking, promptly embarked on an indefinite cross-country road trip during which he did not once check his phone. Eventually, I turned to McElroy\u2019s website, which had a contact form. I copied and pasted my pitch and my question about the e-book. Garth Risk Hallberg once wrote of McElroy, \u201cHe may be the lost postmodernist, but he\u2019s right under our noses, waiting to be found.\u201d This turned out to be more accurate than pithy. The next morning, I received McElroy\u2019s reply, which read,\u00a0in part:<\/p>\n

Though \u201ca fun piece\u201d is a little bewildering to me. You\u2019re speaking of an ambitious and serious and very long novel widely written about\u2014see the citations in the front matter of the Dalkey Archive 2nd edition, also essays in a volume of The<\/em>\u00a0Review of Contemporary Fiction<\/em>\u00a0Spring 1990.\u00a0If you want to read the novel or other novels of mine, you will. And if you want to write about my work, you will. But I’m reluctant to express opinions about Women and Men<\/em> to be used as some substitute for the book itself. I’m sure you understand.<\/p>\n

Think what you want to do. all best, Joseph McElroy<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

There ensued a period of physical panic. I hadn\u2019t even asked <\/em>for an interview. I discovered that McElroy had most recently given one to Vice<\/em> in 2013. It opens, \u201cI spoke to Joseph McElroy, my friend\u2019s dad and one of postmodernism\u2019s major players\u201d and meanders downhill from there. (The kicker is \u201cYou seem to like to take your sweet time with your writing.\u201d) Better understanding his tone, I wrote back with the phrase \u201cfall on my sword.\u201d We arranged a meeting. I had six weeks to read his notorious epic.<\/p>\n

I quickly understood why the book was little read. There are physical limitations. It was too bulky to read on the subway while standing; the spine strained with the slightest flex. The critics who overcame these obstacles gave Women and Men<\/em> a reception that focused on the book\u2019s difficulty, as with the New York Times<\/em> review<\/a>: \u201cFor me, by the close, it was like having listened for several days to an all-news station in a foreign language: you have a rough idea of what\u2019s been going on, the news is worse than you imagine, and, while you feel more or less informed, you can\u2019t really say that you\u2019ve enjoyed yourself.\u201d<\/p>\n

This kind of takedown makes me want to defend Women and Men<\/em>. On the other hand, that desire possibly stems from the gleam of the unusual. Would I like Coldplay if I\u2019d somehow never heard of Coldplay but had discovered Parachutes <\/em>in the dollar bin of a record store? I might! When something has been rejected and we have the thrill of personal discovery, it can\u2019t help but alter the way we receive it.<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

What I can say is that Women and Men<\/em> is pyrotechnically written and, yes, I can\u2019t delay saying it any longer, extremely difficult. I\u2019ve never said \u201choisted by my own petard\u201d more often than while reading this book. Women and Men<\/em> behaves like a Fibonacci sequence, gaining complexity as it goes in a grid that never squares off. The action is centered on a\u00a0seventies New York apartment building that both the protagonist, Jim Mayn, and Grace Kimball, the female sort-of-lead, inhabit. Though they\u2019re in a massive meet-cute scenario, they will never meet. Jim is a pop-science journalist and has repeatedly seen a vision of the future in which women and men will be joined colloidally by standing on a metal plate and warping in twos into space, where they will become one. (A colloid is a mixture with particles of one substance dispersed discretely through a second substance). Grace leads nude feminist workshops, and her goal is the opposite: \u201cget it together, keep generally women and men apart.\u201d Jim sleeps dreamlessly, but characters from his life inhabit Grace\u2019s dreams. The two nearly intersect constantly and even ring each other\u2019s doorbells, but they never connect.<\/p>\n

Jim is also piecing together the fragments of his life: Is Spence, the evil, well-connected anti-Pinochet spy, actually his brother? Why was Jim\u2019s grandmother traveling through the American West with a \u201cNavajo Prince\u201d as the \u201cFar Eastern Princess\u201d in 1894? And did his grandmother actually kill herself, and did his mother kill herself, too, or did she board a submarine lurking off the coast of New Jersey? Is the tapeworm that was retrieved by a Native American healer that is now weaving its way through Luisa the Chilean opera singer\u2019s bowels so she can lose weight to impress her lover a misbegotten attempt to please Allende\u2019s murderer? Eventually, Jim and Spence form an unlikely alliance. As with Infinite Jest<\/em>, the action is suspended in a graveyard, with two diggers about to achieve clarity.<\/p>\n

There are dozens of subplots, too, from a mentally disabled bike messenger gang to a boy doing his econ homework. The strongest of these sections is a sequence that anticipates modern cyberwarfare, \u201cThe Dream as Later Reported,\u201d which describes a bomb that \u201cwould destroy non-living structures, leaving anything alive unharmed.\u201d It makes for great sci-fi, but it\u2019s so buried that it\u2019s likely that few have read it.<\/p>\n

Though the plot is challenging, the novel\u2019s true difficulty lies in structure: a postmodernist layer of \u201cbreathers\u201d takes up about three-eighths of the book. Idiomatically, there should be the expectation of a break, but instead, these are a flurry of textual experimentation: Rilkean angels who speak in the first-person plural offer a disorganized rendering in which many of the novel\u2019s 122 characters appear associatively in a fractured multicentury timeline that spans the Western Hemisphere. These breathers are especially challenging because McElroy, according to his essay in the spring 1990 edition of the\u00a0Review of Contemporary Fiction<\/em>,\u00a0\u201ccut 300 pages one month before we went into galleys \u2026 by squeezing breathers and translating talk into wordless telepathy.\u201d The ensuing ramble is what McElroy calls \u201cthe colloidal unconsciousness.\u201d Take this representative sentence:<\/p>\n

The future her father had sloped out onto was <\/em>like us the slope, static but for the shadow it threw, which was him<\/em>, back upon Now, the Present, which was really the past from the vantage of that future he had gone into like a shock of memory which gave off a desire to return to what was a void and had to be reinvented, namely this present: God! he thought it wasn\u2019t him, this future position, it felt causeless, caused by an absence of cause, it came at him a sure home, not someone else\u2019s.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The breathers rest on top of a Modernist layer of action, about six hundred pages in length, that features the novel\u2019s principal characters (six chapters with Jim Mayn, two with Grace Kimball, five with other men) and forms the narrative core of Women and Men<\/em>. The sentences in those sections are long but mostly clear, with assorted flourishes. The chapters are written in different forms, as with the striking \u201cMike-Whipped Landscaped Specially Flown In,\u201d whose paragraphs all start with a variant of \u201cpull away\u201d:<\/p>\n

He pulled away from his father\u2019s house, having pulled away from his father, from the fondest interrogation he could ever recall as if he and his father, who had never after all died, might be closely related; and he took his father with him moving inch by inch here and there in the house at times so unmindful of a car, a dark blue car he could swear had followed him, that he hardly wondered what was <\/em>on his mind but recognized that he was content and his father was curious, and he had never been content like this with his father that he could recall.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Then all of that<\/em> exits on top of a realist layer\u00a0that is largely comprised of discontinuous short sequences that feature secondary characters. These interpolated stories are readily pleasurable. The only difficulty in reading them is connecting them to the larger plot. From \u201cThe Departed Tenant\u201d:<\/p>\n

\u201cSometimes he stayed overnight, but sometimes he didn\u2019t. But he liked staying overnight with her, so that when he didn\u2019t stay, it lingered, like a bad time. It wasn\u2019t a bad time, but you might call it a bit dumb. But it was his life.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

(There\u2019s also a 113-page telepathic letter by a prisoner named Foley that has all three styles going at once and is, for better or worse, the novel\u2019s crucial skeleton key.)<\/p>\n

*<\/p>\n

Women and Men<\/em> is complex, but I had an issue that extended beyond\u00a0incomprehension. I have a theory that long novels often feature a hedonistic body character and a chilly mind character so the novelist can split their life experience. Here, Jim is meant to be the mind character, and Grace the body. I favor a Gately, a Pierre, a Bloom over the Hals and Prince Andreis and Stephen Dedaluses of the canon. This is one thing Franzen missed in \u201cMr. Difficult\u201d\u2014a great difficult book can do both<\/em>. The most heady status novels make up for their challenge by giving us contract characters, often the most beloved figures in literature. We wouldn\u2019t love Queequeg if he didn\u2019t stand apart. But McElroy, in my view, overweighed the book toward Jim and lacked authorial admiration for his body character. It\u2019s not just a question of screen time. When we first get Grace\u2019s perspective, she\u2019s masturbating, and the language gets noticeably simpler. In her sealed-off, sexualized apartment, which boasts \u201ccunt hooks\u201d instead of coat hooks, she\u2019s passive observer of story, not actor. Throughout the novel, female characters are denied the centrality that the title Women and Men<\/em> suggests, and the humor at Grace\u2019s New Age women\u2019s group\u2019s expense seemed to me to be a mockery of the feminist movements of the seventies.<\/p>\n

This concern about gender had me nervous for our interview. I wasn\u2019t sure how to raise the subject with McElroy. As I looked up at the large photograph and fiddled with my tape recorder, he smiled, offered me watermelon and almonds. I relaxed, and we talked for hours. McElroy spoke as he wrote: in winding paragraphs with bursts of deep intelligence.<\/p>\n

(On America: \u201cIt\u2019s unfathomably various, and it\u2019s also disappointing\u201d; on Odessa: \u201cOdessa is a dark and interesting and dilapidated and dangerous place\u201d; on the eBay value of\u00a0Women and Men<\/em>: \u201cI am aware of it and why I didn\u2019t have two to three boxes of the edition\u2014I didn\u2019t think about that. Stupid of me\u201d; on Barthelme: \u201cHe wouldn\u2019t look after himself. I mean, he wasn\u2019t even sixty when he died. Couldn\u2019t stop drinking\u201d; on himself: \u201cI\u2019m now getting older. I\u2019m very old.\u201d)<\/p>\n

When I finally broached the topic of Women and Men<\/em>, he immediately tried to change the subject. \u201cIt\u2019s in the past, long ago, although the writing I think stands up \u2026 I can talk about it, but it\u2019s not a subject I\u2019m interested in expounding \u2026 If they need to know, if they need to have the novelist explain what it\u2019s about, what you meant and all that, then something has gone wrong.\u201d<\/p>\n

Though I was<\/em> hoping that he would explain some aspects of the plot (I\u2019m still not clear if the submarine is Russian or Chilean), I instead asked about the process of writing such a long novel. He said that he hadn\u2019t used a computer and that with one, there would have been more connections between sections, since the realist vignettes were written separately. \u201cI wanted that to be a population, another quiet, half-anonymous population but with vivid, brief people you meet in the city.\u201d That led us into talking about the book\u2019s reception, particularly the New York Times<\/em> review. \u201cMostly, reviews don\u2019t bother me. They balance each other out,\u201d McElroy told me. \u201cBut I was sorry about that. I thought I deserved better.\u201d I asked him about failure. \u201cGaddis and I talked about that,\u201d McElroy said. \u201c[He thought] that\u2019s what it\u2019s all about. I said it is not \u2026 And we laughed at that. I said we\u2019re probably both right about failure \u2026 If you go for something which is a downer, really go for it. Go through to the bottom and the far side.\u201d<\/p>\n

He clapped his hands and started talking faster, rocking back and forth with a gleam in his eyes. \u201cI woke up from a really, really bad and tumultuous dream this morning at about five thirty. I know where the dream came from, and it came partly from my reflecting, before I went to bed last night, on what Freud has to say about the censor in us preventing certain things from getting to the surface. I have always, from the beginning, and in different forms, insisted upon writing multidirectional narratives that were on the edge of going to pieces. I don\u2019t think it was mainly self-indulgence, but I think there was sometimes an element of recklessness in the beginning. And it\u2019s risky to do that. Wright Morris said that American novelists\u2014I think he meant young American novelists\u2014try to do too much and then want to take credit for failing. And I think that my sense of form, precariously on the edge of not working, is some self-involved egotism in me but ambition also. That life is difficult and if some books came out long \u2026 I\u2019ve always wanted to take something to the edge. And maybe partly because I can\u2019t help it. There\u2019s something in my mind that is at risk, and I write in order to make sense when it\u2019s hard to make sense. But I like to think rather that I think life is interesting. A lot of stuff comes to me, and I want to include it. And I think it is sometimes a fault that I have difficulty excluding certain things.\u201d<\/p>\n

That, at last, was the explanation for Women and Men <\/em>I\u2019d been hoping for. Finally, I asked about the impact that feminism had on the book.<\/p>\n

\u201cI was in the midst of it,\u201d he said, speaking gravely. \u201cI was at the terrible ground-zero kind of point because of where I was living.\u201d He talked about how, in downtown New York, in the period in which Women and Men <\/em>is set, the burgeoning feminist movement had affected his personal life, though he\u2019d also sympathized with their aims. In the stress of that, he said, he\u2019d acted out, then tried to grasp the subject through writing. I was surprised by how forthright he was being\u2014the complication I\u2019d noticed with Grace Kimball had been intentional, not an oversight. In his work, he\u2019d found humor in the movement, but also a threat. \u201cAnd I don\u2019t think I could have written that big book if I hadn\u2019t felt threatened,\u201d he said. \u201cTerrible anger at some of the women I knew who were in organizations like what is written about in Women and Men<\/em>.\u201d<\/p>\n

McElroy writes every day. He\u2019s been working on a long book about water for at least fifteen years, and after that, he plans to finish a novel that he started in 1948. He never stopped producing after Women and Men. <\/em>He didn\u2019t consider it a disappointment. He wrote it, then he wrote other things. That\u2019s all. He signed a few of his other novels for me, then walked me out. As he led me through his winding maze of books, I thought about what he\u2019d said about that list of men in \u201cMr. Difficult\u201d: \u201cThese are all friends of mine.\u201d They had seemed like giants when I\u2019d encountered them at the start of adulthood. And McElroy remembered the essay well. \u201cI have never minded being called difficult,\u201d he said. \u201cUsually what they say in the beginning is, \u2018Difficult, but it\u2019s worth it,\u2019 or something like that. But \u2026 I think it\u2019s almost uniformly not clarified when it\u2019s used in critical pieces.\u201d<\/p>\n

I left his building happy\u2014I\u2019d liked him, and it had gone well. It was warm out, so I walked home over the Brooklyn Bridge, turning, as always, to look at downtown Manhattan, the skyline so different\u00a0from what\u00a0it was when Women and Men<\/em> came out. My favorite bit of McElroy\u2019s writing is his 9\/11 piece<\/a>, which revisits the themes of his novel from the perspective of his apartment, which is blocks from Ground Zero. About introspection, he writes, \u201cIs it that we have the leisure to be overtaken by it, and if we were on the run and wounded, losing each other, hungry, as good as dead\u2014that would be our drill and we wouldn\u2019t be free to register emotion, take stock of health hazards, reflect and document? Talk to our children. Women and men talking truly.\u201d<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Adam Dalva is a graduate of NYU\u2019s M.F.A. program, where he was a Veterans Writing Workshop fellow. His work has been published by <\/em>The New York Review of Books, Tin House, the<\/em> Guardian, and others. He teaches creative writing at Rutgers University, is a book critic for <\/em>Guernica magazine, and is also a dealer of French eighteenth-century antiques.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

  Obsession had brought me to Joseph McElroy\u2019s apartment building. I was vibrating from too much caffeine. I had been up late with his 1,200-page novel, Women and Men, suffering the long-forgotten nervousness of cramming for a difficult final. The elevator opened directly into his apartment\u2014a surprise. I hadn\u2019t prepared my facial expression. McElroy, in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1421,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[419],"tags":[33300,33301,33299,33305,33296,33295,33297,33298,33302,33303,32913,33293,110,33292,33294,33304],"class_list":["post-122622","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-arts-culture","tag-barth","tag-barthelme","tag-burroughs","tag-cobble-hills-community-book-store","tag-coover","tag-delillo","tag-gaddis","tag-gass","tag-hannah","tag-hawkes","tag-heller","tag-house-of-mirth","tag-jonathan-franzen","tag-joseph-mcelroy","tag-pynchon","tag-women-and-men"],"acf":[],"yoast_head":"\nOn Finally Reading Joseph McElroy\u2019s Magnum Opus<\/title>\n<meta name=\"description\" content=\"It\u2019s 1,200 pages long, it\u2019s notoriously difficult, and copies sell for more than $300 on eBay. 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