Women and Men: A Novel

Rating:
Summary: Worth the Effort? This reviewer says Yes!
Review: Having recently joined the undoubtedly small list of people who have read Joseph McElroy's Women and Men from start to end (took about a month) am I compelled to write to You Who Are Reading This and tell you that I found this book amazing and endlessly beautiful and endlessly rereadable. Yet be forewarned, not necessarily of its size (any fool can see how big it is), but of its style. If you haven't read McElroy, don't jump into this unless you consider yourself the boldest and bravest of readers (McElroy's A Smuggler's Bible, Lookout Cartridge, and Plus will give you a good idea of his work, though W&M takes the concepts in these earlier novels and not only recycles them, but reconfigures them).

The plot of Women and Men is very much tied into the structure of Women and Men, and one can think of the structure as a vast net ballooning outward (think Big Bang) as the novel progresses. Facts, storylines, characters and themes accumulate and swell at an alarming rate, and by the novel's midway point the reader will no doubt feel overwhelmed. But McElroy's Universe appears to be a closed one, and, slowly, eventually, the facts start coming together, storylines mesh (to a degree), characters sort themselves out (mostly), and some resolutions occur (though not all). And if the structure of Women and Men is a ballooning/expanding mesh (it could be, yet is also so much more), and if the characters are the points where this mesh (or "field") crosses, then the connecting mesh between these points could be seen as representing one of the most distinctive aspects of this novel: the first person plural narrative, the "We" who sometimes refer to themselves as angels (during sections titled "Breathers"). Messengers yes, but also Medium. Of the sound (voices) and the light (images) that connect the characters, of how they know one another, of how they become part of each other's lives and are thus reincarnated in others. (Something like that; I'm fudging this, but I'm not far off: they also represent the ultimate "connectors," we the readers.)

Main plot points? Two lives: Jim Mayn, an estranged journalist who's mother committed suicide when he was fifteen, and Grace Kimball who lives in the same apartment building and runs a very '70s feminist Body-Self workshop. They never meet, but do influence one another's lives (through the web of characters). There is also woven into this some international conspiracy involving a possible planned assassination of Chilean President Allende (talk about a tangled web!) and a fascinating underlay of Native American myth and "real life" biography involving Mayn's grandmother and a Navaho "prince" who has fallen in love with her and follows her across late 19th century American). And much more, all minutely detailed and told in endless Faulknerian sentences (some over a 1000 words long) that actually speed the reader along. The last 50 pages are breathtaking (including a wonderful, and necessary, dreamstory), the last 10 are as affecting as anything I've ever read.

Either give this book up after 100 pages, or read it all the way through; it's a book that's only complete once it's completed, and you should find yourself vastly rewarded and awed as I was, and still am. Few writers put as much into a novel as, say, Beethoven would put into a symphony. Joseph McElroy does. But like all of his novels (excluding his The Letter Left to Me), it does ask a lot of you (this is "cool" media, not "hot"), and it is as good as you, the reader, are willing make it, and I think that is a good thing.

I also highly recommend Tom LeClair's The Art of Excess, which has an essay on Women and Men that puts this grasping review to shame. The Dalkey Archive Press's Joseph McElroy Number (Spring '90, Review of Contemporary Fiction) is invaluable too.

Joseph McElroy is currently at work on two novels, one of which should be published in the near future. I eagerly await them.

Rating:
Summary: Postmodernism through formula
Review: There's a fine line between the false and the true - it varies for every person where that line lies. This book, to me, is totally false. To another it may not appear so... I think that it was subtle, what turned me off. It seems to fit some sort of postmodernist gargantua novel formula - the odd 'personalized' form of writing, the occasional strange diagram, and the far out math that, in this case, the author probably doesn't even understand and only threw in to make himself look smart - and there's the key. This book feels like the author is trying to make a name for himself, to prove that he's smart, and it just doesn't work. Pynchon can get away with that sort of thing because he was an engineering major and worked for Boeing - he actually DOES understand the yaw control formula, I would be willing to bet (I'm talking about Gravity's Rainbow here - if you havn't read it, don't buy Women and Men until you do, it's what McElroy was trying to be compared to). However, he talks about animal biology and Pavlovian mind programming, which he may not be as well-versed in as it would seem in his writing, but he makes it seem so real, so true - McElroy just has that underlying rot of falsification for me. Perhaps it's just me, maybe I'm being too skeptical, or maybe McElroy just didn't have a solid story so he decided to mask it in an experimental form of writing (actually, the concept of the story is great, it's just that in practice it did not turn out well - another author writing another book may have more success).