Joseph McElroy's Women and Men is a difficult, beautiful, and astounding book, astonishing. Those final adjectives ought to be clear enough and the prior will be all too quickly misunderstood. 'Difficult' cannot be understood pejoratively as Franzen et al would have it (and for whom Women and Men would fit their bill for difficulty and target for ridicule far better than JR albeit giving them a target even less recognized than Mr Gaddis) for is not calculus 'difficult' and do we not rejoice every time we read a story in our morning paper about underfunded, underperforming schools putting students through the rolls of a calculus course and those students find that the exertion, the grasping of calculus that most difficult of high school subjects is often what gives them the greatest intellectual pleasure, the kind of pleasure according to Aristotle which far outstrips other forms of pleasure? Indeed, Women and Men is difficult in its demanding upon its readers, a demand that we also take up imaginative pen that we also engage in storying and sentencing and (day)dreaming and that we show ourselves as talented, talented at sentencing and (day)dreaming (for James Mayn does not dream, not at night). Not many years past I was not that talented reader and clearly today I remain less talented than the master Joseph McElroy whose sentences are as tightly controlled and demonic as anything this side of Magister Gass, but I have come far in my schooling, far enough that I can see the cloud's lining if not the whole of the cloud, its far side yet dimmed by shadow.David Foster Wallace has said, and truly so, that much of experimental, innovative fiction is just not so very much fun to read and he could very well have had something like Women and Men in mind which it would be of great interest to me to learn of Mr Wallace's opinion and familiarity with sir McElroy -- but can anything be as much pure fun to read as Infinite Jest except perhaps that 'Antichrist' Mr Leyner? -- and one will have to sharpen up this 'fun' replacing it with 'pleasure' which is certainly more nuanced and won't equate to 'an entertaining 'read'' because some pleasures are of a higher order than fun. What is pleasurable in Women and Men is not a jumble of postmodern hi-jinx but the world of a mythology experienced in its creation, that writing which is a thinking and thoughts which are only coming together, not yet formed -- a myth told to James Mayn by his grandmother Margaret about an East Far Eastern Princess from Choor pursued on her homebound trek East by a Navajo Prince (did the Navajo have Princes?) and James retelling of this story to his daughter Flick or to his barmates Ted and Mayga but overheard by a nemesis/ alter ego Spence in bars across the country while in its retelling the myth gets added to because Mayn comes to the present out of the future which makes 1977 somehow his past. It is the telling of the story and not the story as polished and refined, handed to us as a finished product for consumption, ready to be turned into a film script -- Herr Gass' quip that a story is what is extracted from a novel in order to make a movie (extract it and make your movie and what's left is what makes the novel.) How to read, how reading happens is something McElroy can still teach us, we are not yet done with the learning of our craft. Only perhaps Finnegans Wake is more difficult and its century only 12 years old-- Ulysses we have been reading for three generations and with that depth of reading experience is not out of reach for us who take a small taste of humility and learn from our foregoing readers, but for Women and Men we are (in the word of friend James) 'untethered', a daunting position to be in if not a charge of freedom. Will Women and Men generations hence be only as daunting as Joyce's first masterpiece? I am pleased to contribute to its reading but I will must needs step aside as greater readers than I recall and pay heed to this which may or may not be of the great works of the twentieth century. More than a plot summary or a role call of its grand cast of characters a review of Women and Men ought to address in some manner the means and attitude and approach required for its reading, a setting of expectations. Set your expectations high, it is a difficult book, it will not lead you by the hand (nor leave your floundering); parsing every sentence will dash your hopes; tracking every pronoun to its antecedent will crush your resolve; demanding clarity before we have done the work, before the text has been allowed to breath in its realm of not-yet-formed thought, will frustrate your desire; sentence by sentence, one word followed by another word, the linearity of writing and its reading is precisely the constraint which thought is struggling against, that the before and after of words on a page do not allow creative-mythologizing thought the fullness of its realm demanded -- it is too soon, Women and Men comes before that time, it comes all at once in its simultaneity. And here I think is the crux of what one will come to love in McElroy's -- at first maddening -- prose, its urge toward the simultaneity of experience, memory, and thought before the formation of discrete propositions. This simultaneity (which within the novel appears under the rubric 'Simultaneous Reincarnation' or S.R, a 'new' reincarnation), for its explication, one searches for analogy and ends in the world of music, that sister medium in which the before-and-after, the this then this then this, is constitutive. One thinks first of the fugues of Bach as we begin to learn what it is to parse McElroy's syntax, that we are not reading simple propositions strung together one following another, but are hearing themes repeated and varied, not so much a melody of a line of poetry with its rhythm, but themes which on their own may be dull or opaque but when set together and stacked one upon another and played all at once -- did not Bach's greatest fugue (which one?) consist of as many as eight (or was it just six?) themes played simultaneously, written for harpsichord, two hands? -- creates a harmony equaled only by the heavens themselves, a harmony to be sure thoroughly cut with dissonance for it is the harshness in the ear which drives McElroy's prose. The themes of the fugue and their variation, their repetitions in new configurations, are not introduced with a full letter of recommendation but appear on the stage of our reading and are given their time to breath and come to speech, to recommend themselves to us as they mature and develop into a full, more complete thought. Only much later, often do we learn that we have already met this character, or finally receive his name. But not just the fugue, but the Symphony, the Opera (we have present a little opera by the name of Hamletin from the pen of a Chilean woman, which score is of some importance to an occurrence of international intrigue concerning elements in the post-Allende Chile) may serve as clues to the structure of our book. How many voices simultaneously did Mozart say he could stage? and we think also of Wagner's leitmotif which often perhaps is not so much 'leit' but fully macguffin (is that not what 'wide load' is all about?) But the music analogy here is not that of melody, but of theme and variation, of harmony and dissonance, of repetition, a symphonic wholeness chaotic perhaps in its parts, but controlled and whole.The quote McElroy says he meditated upon while writing Women and Men, a recurring theme in its variations: “an articulated structure that can cope with a multiplicity of small-scale units” -- has its source in a book called Small Is Beautiful: Economics as If People Mattered. 'Small' is misplaced in reference to this 1192 page doorstop in which a Chilean economist and his wife Clara play a significant part, but which also becomes 'eco' and thus 'ecology' (with a botanist naming locoweed, a biologist tracking wild javelina with scent glands in their rear, or the threat of a strip mining and processing operation turning coal into 'natural' gas, and the debates (endless) about new 'weathers' between one Hermit Inventor of New York and an Anasazi Healer) and James Mayn's friend Larry who has developed an obstacle geometry but who seems to be an economics student and chews over equations involving 'people,' 'are,' and 'matter' in various configurations. And there is the apartment building to which James Mayn has returned after his divorce, itself an articulated structure which can accommodate a multiplicity of small-scale dwelling units in one of which resides the other half of the novel, one Grace Kimball who runs a Body-Self workshop out of her apartment (Grace and James never meet, being two distinct nodal points around which our cast of characters are weaved.)"An articulated structure that can cope with a multiplicity of small-scale units" should perhaps be taken as McElroy's definition or articulation of The Novel, for Women and Men is that rare beast the novel novel, the new articulation of experience set down on the page in long format, a unity which is the articulation of a multiplicity of small-scale units. Women and Men sits within the realm between the modern novel and its continuation in the postmodern, jointing those two great lives of the novel. It is of a scale of The Recognitions but also works on memory as does Proust; is playfully meta-fictive (with shifts between first, second, and third persons including a 'we' voice and a mysterious 'Interrogator' which may be you, dear reader) yet epic as its title-reminiscent 19th century relative War and Peace. It is not, to clarify that persnickety misunderstanding which runs rampant in our Internets, a novel of stream-of-consciouness, but it is fully cognizant of that technique and in fact develops it into a full world, limited not to the single stream of thought and impressions of an isolated subject, but of intersubjective memory and experience articulated by an only sometimes intrusive third-personness, a stream of planetary consciousness perhaps. But no, it is not that, for someone much more versed than I will be required to parse how our point of view shifts and rearranges itself associatively. It remains the question "Is it worth it, these eleven hundred ninety two pages?" I say yes, yes I said. But not lightly. I hesitate to recommend this book to any but the most stalwart and well trained and talented readers. Trepidation is justified. Myself, I came too early to such masterworks as Mason & Dixon and squandered that opportunity. Women and Men may be at the end, at the extreme telos, of your reading list. I do not recommend this book to you but I do most urgently recommend you to it; it needs its reading, its testing -- shall it become a must-be-read or will it remain an obscurantism for those of us dwelling on the periphery of our literary tradition?__________My second review ::http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...__________Unrepresentative and selected sentences, two in number.The opening paragraph of the first chapter, “division of labor unknown”:After all she was not so sure what had happened, or when it had started. Which was probably not a correct state to be in, because what had happened made the biggest difference in her life so far. Hours of life that worked her back full to breaking of pain and drained it of its work when the back of her child’s head with a slick of dark hair and its rounded shoulders gave her that last extra push to free its arms still held inside her. She would tell her husband later--she knew she would--and she did tell him. She told her husband and he told others for weeks afterward. Also he had his own side to tell. She loved his excitement.From “THE HERMIT-INVENTOR OF NEW YORK, THE ANASAZI HEALER, AND THE UNKNOWN ABORTER,” p887 (aka, one of those infamous Breathing sections):It is coincidence that our relative-diarist-historian M. H. Mayne (who records what anxiety Jackson’s adopted son caused by his note-of-hand debts--he in fact even “charged” a young female slave, according to Alexander, the only person in the family who actually read the diaries--though Jim felt them in his hands unopened tightening that sequence of undone duty, newspaper, father, hometown, and the further knowing of his mother’s recoverable personality and biography; and M. H. Mayne, because of his connections) was thus secret custodian of the incognito Morgan who, if he is not related to the Alsatian mathematician who en route from Mexican War to California Gold Rush was nearly murdered in the desert by the mestizo bearer of what came to be the Mayne family pistol, must be such collateral to the Alsatian as to compel other parallels, ours, Margaret’s, Spence’s, straight or warped if not worse for wear and non-wear, to forks as curious as that given us by our alternative Thunder Dreamer who we think also brought the New York Hermit’s Anasazi weather friend a Colt pistol that had found its way not absolutely curse-proof from the upshot of the Mexican War at Chapultepec where the father of that dying white settler whom the Thunder Dreamer said spoke a bit like one of the Germans of the Plains had begotten his son unexpectedly and darkling upon a Saxon-blond war correspondent so subtly male, or so beautifully so, as to reveal her female center to the blind passion of the in-fact-doomed man only in the strange retrospect of the next day when as a Winfield Scott volunteer he realized at the moment of dust and staccato voices when he was hit by a Mexican ball that the nape of his exquisitely frightened lover’s neck the night before had been a girl’s.
review ofJoseph McElroy's Women and Men by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - October 27, 2011I. Actually. FINISHED. Reading. This. Whole. Fucking. Thing. From. Cover. To. Cover. All 1,192pp of it. I don't remember when I started this - maybe in March of 2011 - it took me something like 6 mnths to read it. Where to even start?! I'd only previously read McElroy's The Letter Left To Me wch I liked just enuf to consider reading something else by him. Then I found 2 bks by him on a dollar table outside a bkstore. Now, in my experience, when something reaches the dollar table or the cut-out bin or whatever it's often things I have no interest in whatsoever (like an outdated textbk) or something that's 'too much' for most people (like the early Mothers of Invention records in the local supermarket sale bins). I knew McElroy wasn't so much of a hack that he'd be in the 1st category so I got both bks. Then, of course, I just had to go all the way & read the longest one. & I've been semi-regretting it ever since. Why? B/c even though I think it's 'great' I'm still not sure that reading it wasn't a 'waste of time'! When I think of the experimental novels that I've read that I've loved the most, I think of James Joyce's Finnegans Wake, William S. Burroughs' The Soft Machine, Mario Vargas Llosa's Conversation in the Cathedral, Georges Perec's Life A User's Manual, & Lawrence Sterne's Tristram Shandy - to name a few. When I think of other long novels that I've read that I love but wdn't necessarily call experimental I think of Thomas Pynchon's Mason & Dixon (773pp) & Against the Day (1,085pp) [see my review of that here: http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...], & Neal Stephenson's Cryptonomicon (918pp) [see my review of that here: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/11...] & Quicksilver (916+pp). When I think of other long novels that I've read that I think were mostly crap, I think of Eugene Sue's The Wandering Jew (686pp) & Gertrude Stein's The Making of Americans (925pp) [see the complete version of my review of that starting here: http://www.goodreads.com/story/show/4...]. I'll start off by making a comparison to this latter. A promotional blurb for Stein's long work claims: "In The Making of Americans, Gertrude Stein sets out to tell "a history of a family's progress," radically reworking the traditional family saga novel to encompass her vision of personality and psychological relationships." & on p xix of Steven Meyer's Introduction to the Dalkey Archive edition that I have he claims that TMoA transforms from: "as Stein observed in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, "from being a history of a family to being a history of everybody the family knew," as it would later metamorphose into "the history of every kind and of every individual human being"" NOW, in relation to TMoA, that's got to be one of the biggest crocks of shit I've ever read - since TMoA is just Stein's collossally megalomaniacal verborrhea. BUT, if it were written about McElroy's Women and Men it wd give at least some idea of how ambitious this novel is - even though it wd still be inaccurate. So what CAN I accurately compare it to? None of the above, really - maybe the Vargas Llosa comes closest. Women and Men isn't stream-of-consciousness - but it meanders, sortof. Women and Men is in its own category once one tries to narrow it down from just 'novel'. It's a somewhat straight novel w/ characters who get developed.. but it's also SF, it's also a mystery, it's also myth, it's also political, it's also a novel of the 1970s.. & of times before.. & of the future.. I shd point out that Dalkey Archive published this as well as TMoA so I have to give them credit for taking the financial blow of publishing huge works w/ very little likely readership. Wch brings me to the 'reviews' that Women and Men has gotten: at the beginning of the bk there're 16 blurbed reviews that praise the work: WHAT I WANT TO KNOW IS: How many of these people actually read the entire thing? Maybe Walter Abish did, maybe Harry Mathews did, maybe all of them did, maybe none of them did. Knowing, as I do, that most professional reviewers & academics have very little time for reading the things that they refer to, I've come to expect hack reviewing, both positive & negative. I think these reviewers were positively inclined toward McElroy & didn't necessarily think it 'necessary' to read the entire work. 4 of the reviewers compared it to Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow. Now I LOVE Gravity's Rainbow & I think Women and Men is pretty damn special too - but what do these works really have in common? Not much as far as I can tell. Gravity's Rainbow is a 'page-turner', it has a thrilling plot & the writing style is straight-forward enuf for the moderately literate to be able to follow (of course, that might still eliminate 90% of the readers these days). IMO, Women and Men is not a 'page turner': it's too meandering. There's no compelling plot thread that's likely to arouse fervent interest among people in search of war, eg, to get worked up about. It's too abstruse. & it developed veeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeerrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrryyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy sloooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooowwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwwllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllllyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy. I LIKED IT FOR THAT but I have perverse tastes. Even for someone w/ my literate dedication, this bk is a challenge to read. When I got to the 1st Grace Kimball section I was almost defeated by my utter irritation w/ the character - & by how long the chapter was. It wasn't until I got to PAGE 285 & McElroy started playing w/ the language a bit more in the 1st of the Larry sections that I finally got some relief. & McElroy does play w/ the language. He uses a technique that I use too: the sudden dropping in of phonetic spelling & other deviations from the norm w/o any contextual justification. I like that, it keeps the reader alert, y'no? & here's a sample sentence from p416: "That's what Larry asked seventeen eighteen years later, and we hardly remembered he was still (read here) there, he's consented to be given a new Atala ten-speed by his father though he liked his old beat-up ten-speed Raleigh from the Island and now has an offer of a hundred dollars for it from Grace Kimball - he breathes so little in order to bring all he has to bear upon his internalized systems, none at all finished we understand, many started like variant radii aimed in at a locus of centers where may be found backward a hermit-inventor's new weather precipitated possibly from alterations in the charge-field of coastline configurations, not at this late date by that north-polar wind shift (you'll have sensed by now) that turned the clouds and altered rainfall shapes in the time of the gifted, hapless Anasazi six hundred years before the East Far Eastern Princess met the Hermit-Inventor in New York and saw herself in his glinting eye whose new weather at our afore-mentioned locus of centers got carried on by the hermit-inventor nephew of that old khaki beachcomber who came to the Jersey shore to speak to Margaret before he should die of what whole-grain toxins trekked through his system for years of breathing fire and smoke of bodies flying by his tenement windows, of using alcohol and tobacco, of pouring through himself all sugars of the City and all salts of the elaborate harbor where weet-wit weet-wit the purple sandpipers hosting their southern kinflock [tENT interpolation: note the pun off of "kinfolk"] of turnstones even more lost than they await the beaches of an earlier day, yet that earlier Hermit-Inventor managed to store one horned metabol adrift in his viscera drawing the rest of his substance toward it like a lip or a flower or flume." Now THAT was a good sentence - not in an easy-to-read sense but in the sense of there are few, if any, stock phrases in it. Women and Men takes place in NYC, as its advertising states, but it also takes place in the SW US, & in Chile, & in at least one imaginary place, etc.. It fascinated me how he managed to slip in political topics & history w/ such ease in sometimes unexpected places: the Guggenheims & Anaconda Copper on pp 521 & 617, & then Anaconda again on p 663. There's a whole section re a substitute teacher promoting anarchy. There's mention of the assassination of Orlando Letelier. There's mention of Lucky Luciano on p 1007. Much of the novel revolves around Pinochet's overthrow of Allende's government in Chile. There's an unidentified "interrogator". & McElroy certainly doesn't make it easy for the reader: pp 677-689 have an unidentified "I", & starting around 1054 there's an unidentified "he" who learns he's going to die soon. It isn't until we read more about Larry on p 1068 that we realize that the "he" is Ted, one of the main character's best friends. Reading McElroy to glean full plot elements means reading carefully. There's a character named George Foley who's in prison for murder. His textual style is unusual, he refers to Tesla vs Edison & the electric chair story. Later, on p 935, he respells his name "Feaulie" wch I speculate to be "faux lie": a "false lie", a double negative. It seems to be an interesting tactic on McElroy's part to have the only character who seems to know what's going on in the novel be the fortune teller, Señora Wing. From pp 938-942 she says some revealing things. Otherwise, all is, mostly, obscure. Some might say, as writer/reviewer Walter Abish does, that "McElroy illuminates with rare tenderness male and female union and apartness" but I tend to think that the title is misleading & is overemphasized by Abish. I only found maybe 2 mentions of "Women and Men" per se: pp 893 & 1049. There are surely many other novels that concentrate on women & men much more. Instead, Women and Men goes thru a whole complex of experience that certainly involved Women & Men & even explores them somewhat in depth thru Grace Kimball but, ultimately, explores so much more that Women & Men, per se, become more of a backdrop. If the bk were called "Suicides" it wd almost be just as apropos (ALMOST). I'd never accuse McElroy as being a poor writer, just a ssssssssssssssllllllllllllllllllllooooooooooooooooooowwwwwwwwwwwwww one. Threads are presented & the writing meanders thru them but it wasn't until p 956 when Jim Mayn & his dad, Mel, interact that I felt that the novel started 'turning'. I then began to wonder if Mel was Jim's "interrogator" in Jim's fantasy life. But, then, the "interrogator" seems to know Amy (p 1116) & that probably doesn't gel. &, shit, it wasn't until p 1081 that some info about Spence, a previously somewhat threatening 'fringe' character [pun intended], was revealed. There's paranoia: on p 1084 both the bike messenger & the spy read into SRO in an ignorant way. Such misreadings may contribute to the spy's hypothetical death later. & then there's the shooting of the "Trace Window": wassup?! There's plenty of mystery: some questions get answered, some are, perhaps, w/o answer. This isn't crime fiction, despite murders & suicides & whatnot, it's atmospheric, misty, cloudy. McElroy seems to delve into his writerly conclusions starting on p 1113: "We had learned we were a language; or was it we'd been asked to be?" where we also find these puns: "it came as an accusatory interrogation painfully circular could be so don't take her serially."Eventually, it seems that Science Fiction almost dominates (p 1114): "You cared about her. But go on, what kind of settlements were they? They sound quite real, routine like they're based on mature technology. I wouldn't know. Yes, I guess so. Maybe not planned out with all those sophisticated alternatives we can think about now, but when you were fourteen or fifteen the agriculture and the torus-shell stuff wasn't even in Galaxy I bet. I wouldn't know. I know. I simply saw a giant silver doughnut with spokes." By 1157 there's a section on the "bomb" that's certainly worthy of good SF & that really spins things on its head(s). McElroy waits, as most writers wd, to bring the 'punchlines' in near the end. & on 1162 there's even mention of the "multiverse"! &, then, after all that delightful verbosity, one can read at the end of the bk: "A NOTE ABOUT THE AUTHOR Joseph McElroy was born in 1930. He has received numerous awards for his fiction. He lives in New York City. This is his sixth novel." Now, THAT"S minimal!
What do You think about Women And Men (1993)?
As most members of this site can probably attest, throughout one's tenure as a reader, there are novels about which one can say "this book changed the way I think about books;" works that alter one's conception of fiction as such, about the work it can do and the ways it can do it. For me, this list of books is small- titles read throughout my life that remain fixed to the top of my hypothetical and fluid "favorite novels" list: V., Ulysses, Naked Lunch, and The Erasers as a precocious high schooler; Infinite Jest, Gravity's Rainbow, The Third Policeman, JR and The Recognitions in college… it'd been a while though since I'd read one of these gestalt-shifting, permanently-affecting novels (the last being Little, Big several years back) and I'd thought, naively of course, that maybe I'd read my last of them. Enter "Women and Men," Joseph McElroy's revered/feared and underappreciated opus. W&M's reputation is well-earned - it is relentless, massive, daunting, frustrating… a good case could be made for it being one of the most difficult works in American letters. This is stuff you probably already know if you're here and considering it as "to-read." What you may not know is that it is one of the most authentically human novels of the last century, filled to the brim with ecstatic and complex characters, intrigue and mystery, spare but deft humor, wonderful generational dramas, haunting and beautiful vignettes, legend and myth - to say nothing of the prose style which, simply put, must be read to be believed. Other GR reviewers, such as Nathan and Aloha, the latter of whom in particular's review is a must-read for those considering the journey (http://alohaswan.blogspot.com/2013/10...), have addressed the text in more formal, comprehensive ways. For me, the enduring memory of the experience of going through W&M (until I read it again, which I surely will), and what I hope to convey in my own review, is the degree to which the sheer humanity and ontologies of the characters (both principal and periphery) come through in the text.It's hard for me to articulate precisely what I mean - another testament to McElroy's supreme artistry - and I find that the closest analogue I can point to are the films of Terrence Malick at their most potent, wherein we as auditors are presented with a depiction of the truth of human existence as it is actually experienced- i.e. any action or plot machination is filtered through myriad layers of subjectivity (memories, imagination, preconceived notions, biases, false thinking, deja vu, aging and of course mortality, and on and on). McElroy spares us none of this. The "now" of all of W&M's characters, Jim in particular, is a temporal expanse (literally and figuratively), a flux, a map of human consciousness and experience replete with absences, labyrinthine pathways, old (and futural) haunts, and serious complications. Read Women and Men when you want a novel that, hyperbole aside, comes miraculously close to charting the lived. And read it when you have the time, patience, and desire to let it wash over you in eddies and currents, like those of Holderlin's (or Heraclitus') river. And then read it again.
—alex
I will stake what literary capital I may possess upon the proposition that Women and Men is one of the ten (or five or twenty or whichever way you’d like to dice the decem or quintum honorarium) greatest novels of the twentieth century. “Greatest” gives some folks the squirms (there’s a tapeworm for that!). Here’s what I mean by it: Proust, Joyce’s two fat ones, a novel by Mann (take your pick), Musil’s Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, The Recognitions (but why not J R as well?), Gravity’s Rainbow, Infinite Jest. Feel free to flesh out your list with literary flesh as you feel compelled. What causes a novel to find itself on such a list? Einzigartigkeit. These are novel novels which have never and will never be repeated. They are that by which other novels are judged, which is what “canon” means. They are novels for which readers need training; to read which one must have some aspiration to reach out and beyond one’s capability and hone readerly skills. They are craft and art. “But” inserts our Interrogator, how can you say this and we capitulate knowing that more angels will become human before we may be satisfied.Be that as it may. I’ve made my stake. I’ve double checked my reading. What I would like to ask is, whither my musical analogy for this peculiar novel? What is the musical parallel along which Women and Men curves? And I think the question of its musical analogy is apt because McElroy has not painted a portrait or scene but has sculpted (shall we say, ‘composed’?) a multi-(read four)dimensional world. To Wagner’s Der Ring des Nibelungen we shall turn. Why?Wagner’s Ring, four nights of sustained, unrelenting emotion, is composed in a musical language known as atonal. Not tonal. Does that mean we can call this music real noise? Not at all. Tonal composition (if you permit us to speak the language of amateur musicologist) provides for a home plate, somewhere whence one can return at the conclusion of musical adventures, a musical knowledge that as the final bombastic chord is struck we have come to rest, concluded, and break out into applause and ovations and shouts of “Bravo!” “Huzzah!” etc. Atonal composition has no home but meanders and staggers and rises and quiets itself in a never to be completed movement-quest within an infinite musical space and we know quietly within ourselves that the evening of music has been concluded when sounds have ceased but echo through a sustain within our trembling spirits, no bursting of soul completed which would allow us rest but rather a bursting with no cessation. [We hear the first chord of Das Rheingold as it plays itself for, by our watch, well over three minutes, not introducing us to the Rheinmaidens, but finding ourselves already (and always) among them, disturbed then by a strange figure at last.] We add, as a footnote (and a musicnote!), that Wagner added to our musical vocabulary a little function commonly called a leitmotif, a small musical phrase, an object, which repeats itself speaks itself and operates to tie together the score, the libretto, and the action upon the stage; a quilting point which constitutes the Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk. What does this tell us about McElroy’s masterpiece, Women and Men? It is an atonal novel. We begin already among its world, “After all she was not sure what had happened, or when it had started” and concludes with a sustain, “He heard a motion along the surface of things. He thought he would stand here awhile.” The prose moves between these points often and usually always without a plate to call home but in its place an alloy (naturally occurring) plate from which two are turned into one onto a new home between earth and moon in future. Names, those anchors, are left for later pages as (meanwhile) we experience the world of each as they experience their worlds and the relations which they are (those angels) between women and men. We don’t know yet how to position ourselves when interrogated, one could say tortured into confessing, about what it is that we are about. About to what? (But if you call that writing real prose.) Wagnerian, too, are the frequent (re-)occurrences of objects which can only be called leitmotivs: the Wide Load, a tapeworm, Object Geometry, various forms of reincarnation, a colt pistol and its correlate double moon, Andrew Jackson, a disassembled Statue on Bedloe’s Island, the demon infested head hole of the Navajo Prince’s mother who comes back to life when he leaves, fragments of Navajo myth, a mother telling here son to go way but it was she that went away, Traces and their Windows, a Colloidal Unconscious, those Interrogators, locoweed, “women and men”. These literary objects form themselves into an articulated structure which can accommodate a multiplicity of small-scale meanings and which resist the translation of two questions into what might have been one answer no matter the threat of the Dreaded Modulus which would have us believe that we can turn one system into another as if they were naught but tables but we have already forgot the other answer. Atonal. Articulated structure of small-scale leitmotivs. But also we see both Wagner and McElroy refusing the materials of christian or olympic storydom and taking up instead the aboriginally germanic Nibelungenlied (Wagner) and Navajo Diné Bahane' (McElroy). [You find yourself pleased with that curvaceous parallel? our torturer threatens us with.] But, true, unlike opera of an earlier era the Wagnerian opera is a single piece of music with beginnings and endings hours from each other and nary a piece of fabric (read aria) detachable from the whole (one does not “do” a Wagner “recital”), McElroy’s atonal work finds itself articulated into such small-scale stories that can be read and enjoyed and bathed in in their separateness, but excepting when we know ourselves immersed in our beloved BREATHERS where there are no McElroy “recitals.” But as with our angels which are within us and are us these stories contain their relations with the whole, with both women and men and Women and Men even as they are not fully subsumed but an Interrogator who would have it that we know what this means, this which we have just said. We will leave them and their relations just as they may leave us as we are their relations themselves.We already know that we say this and with our newly discovered S.R. (Simultaneous Reincarnation, but mere Incarnation would satisfy many of us) is proven as you might find us in two places at the same time before: we submit the P.R. (Prior Review ). The structure in its wealth of articulations into small-scale thread-units may be followed where which we may could call a Nesting Of Angels, or NOAh shipping us off to what Grace Kimball would surely call a “Body-Self Readingshop” because as Larry has taught us, PRM, knowing he means People aRe Matter or people matter that we might conclude with our proposition that people are the matter, which is surely what will matter most we hear someone ask?__________My first review ::http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/...
—Nathan "N.R." Gaddis
Not so long ago there was a little boy named Billy Joe Haskins and all he had after his Daddy died of the cancers was a puppy called Fyodor and a kitten called Vjatcheslav and fifteen copies of Joseph McElroy's Women and Men and his final wish just before he died of malnutrition while trying to spread the word of the goodness of McElroy's mammoth masterpiece by going door to door in sub-zero temperatures and forcing copies of the book onto people and was eaten by Fyodor and Vjatcheslav froze to death was that a group of people should convene and Read Women and Men together. A week ago a saintly man who we'll call Stephen M heard the wish of the dying boy and with the warmth and joy in his heart which can only come from granting the wishes of dead children being munched on by starving animals created the group. And now, I implore all of you, for the sake of little Billy and his final request, join the group. And spam Dalkey Archive Press with emails telling them to put it back in print. And tell NR Gaddis if you're interested in a print copy of W&M from Dzanc Books next June. And vote for this review so Billy's message can spread. I know, I'm making a lot of demands, but can't you help a dead brother out? Just this once? You don't hate children, do you? You're not one of these people whose hearts have been hardened by Satan and now when you hear about boys like Billy getting their faces gnawed off you laugh and kill a goat in the devil's name and burn the American flag because you are filled with evil and hatred of all that is good in the world, like more people reading Women and Men? Point is, if you're not one of those people, you'll join the group. And tell NR if you want a print copy. And give me votes. And stand on one foot while waving the other in the air. And move your hands around like you just don't care. And drop it like it's hot. And ...
—Ali
