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Actress in the House
Joseph McElroy began his distinguished career in 1966, with "A Smuggler's Bible," hailed in "The New York Times" as a novel of "daring, range, and brilliant subtlety . . . to ignore it would be as shameful an act of blind self-deprivation as that which so many of us performed when "The Recognitions" and "Under the Volcano" were first published." "Actress in the House" is his eighth novel-his first in twelve years-a provocative and imaginative work that explores the mysterious interaction of memory, abuse, love, and violence.
Struck in the face, the actress on stage is staggered but doesn't fall. She gazes into the audience, staring with bloody nose at the middle-aged man in the eighth row of this obscure downtown warehouse theater who is drawn in by this violence unmistakably over the line. Daley has never set eyes on this actress before, yet is not entirely unacquainted with her either. Almost against his will, her life will invade his, her efforts to break free of those who have tried to control her, and worse.
As Becca and Daley begin the uncertain process of discovering one another, talking surprisingly, absorbingly, with a humor and uncanny closeness on the night streets of mid-1990s New York, they slowly unearth the events-both past and present-that have brought them together and may tear them apart.
Struck in the face, the actress on stage is staggered but doesn't fall. She gazes into the audience, staring with bloody nose at the middle-aged man in the eighth row of this obscure downtown warehouse theater who is drawn in by this violence unmistakably over the line. Daley has never set eyes on this actress before, yet is not entirely unacquainted with her either. Almost against his will, her life will invade his, her efforts to break free of those who have tried to control her, and worse.
As Becca and Daley begin the uncertain process of discovering one another, talking surprisingly, absorbingly, with a humor and uncanny closeness on the night streets of mid-1990s New York, they slowly unearth the events-both past and present-that have brought them together and may tear them apart.
445 pages, Hardcover
First published April 1, 2003
5 people are currently reading
366 people want to read
About the author
Joseph McElroy
32 books234 followersJoseph McElroy is an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist.
McElroy grew up in Brooklyn Heights, NY, a neighborhood that features prominently in much of his fiction. He received his B.A. from Williams College in 1951 and his M.A. from Columbia University in 1952. He served in the Coast Guard from 1952–4, and then returned to Columbia to complete his Ph.D. in 1961. As an English instructor at the University of New Hampshire, his short fiction was first published in anthologies. He retired from teaching in 1995 after thirty-one years in the English department at Queens College, City University of New York.
McElroy's writing is often grouped with that of William Gaddis and Thomas Pynchon because of the encyclopedic quality of his novels, particularly the 1191 pages of Women and Men (1987). Echoes of McElroy's work can be found in that of Don DeLillo and David Foster Wallace. McElroy's work often reflects a preoccupation with how science functions in American society; Exponential, a collection of essays published in Italy in 2003, collects science and technology journalism written primarily in the 1970s and 1980s for the New York Review of Books.
He has received the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and fellowships from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and Ingram Merrill Foundations, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
McElroy grew up in Brooklyn Heights, NY, a neighborhood that features prominently in much of his fiction. He received his B.A. from Williams College in 1951 and his M.A. from Columbia University in 1952. He served in the Coast Guard from 1952–4, and then returned to Columbia to complete his Ph.D. in 1961. As an English instructor at the University of New Hampshire, his short fiction was first published in anthologies. He retired from teaching in 1995 after thirty-one years in the English department at Queens College, City University of New York.
McElroy's writing is often grouped with that of William Gaddis and Thomas Pynchon because of the encyclopedic quality of his novels, particularly the 1191 pages of Women and Men (1987). Echoes of McElroy's work can be found in that of Don DeLillo and David Foster Wallace. McElroy's work often reflects a preoccupation with how science functions in American society; Exponential, a collection of essays published in Italy in 2003, collects science and technology journalism written primarily in the 1970s and 1980s for the New York Review of Books.
He has received the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and fellowships from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and Ingram Merrill Foundations, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
July 17, 2017
Based around three specific instances of violence, Actress in the House is Free Jazz in prose form: disconnected at times, aligning at others in glorious synchronicity. It is doubtlessly as elliptical as its titular character, a young woman who may or may not be what she seems. McElroy, master percussionist, once again outpaces everyone at capturing the rhythms of life. This go ‘round it’s the 32nd-note, 7/4 time brushed swing on the ride cymbal mimicking the gestalt and swoop of budding lust/love, shattered at unexpected intervals by the report of that startling snare-hit known popularly as The Past.
People talk about a musician’s ‘attack,’ the way she or he leans into or away from an instrument, a note, phrase, etc. Its double entendre here is a stroke of special genius. The duality of ‘attack’ being something either beautiful or monstrous—or both—in Actress is a masterstroke by the unparalleled McElroy, a writer that has exhibited with every book that he has found new ways of communicating complex ideas. He allows the reader to engage in the intimate language of a new couple as it evolves from innuendo and flirtation into the inevitably compound dimensionality of agenda.
For the initiated, there are interesting parallels to Cannonball throughout this fantastic novel. As with his entire body of work, there are plenty of Joe hallmarks: the formation of thought, material matter, physics, the elusiveness of language, and, of course, water.
If words were water, Joe is my Atlantic to Pynchon’s Pacific. Long may his currents pull me thither and yon.
People talk about a musician’s ‘attack,’ the way she or he leans into or away from an instrument, a note, phrase, etc. Its double entendre here is a stroke of special genius. The duality of ‘attack’ being something either beautiful or monstrous—or both—in Actress is a masterstroke by the unparalleled McElroy, a writer that has exhibited with every book that he has found new ways of communicating complex ideas. He allows the reader to engage in the intimate language of a new couple as it evolves from innuendo and flirtation into the inevitably compound dimensionality of agenda.
For the initiated, there are interesting parallels to Cannonball throughout this fantastic novel. As with his entire body of work, there are plenty of Joe hallmarks: the formation of thought, material matter, physics, the elusiveness of language, and, of course, water.
If words were water, Joe is my Atlantic to Pynchon’s Pacific. Long may his currents pull me thither and yon.
Read
May 20, 2017The Novel, Its Reading
I have jousted. I have been unseated, unhorsed, multiply. Up out of the dust off from the track I’ve hauled myself back into the saddle again with pummeling only anticipated even expected that these bruisings are what I’m in for. Tilting not at windmills but up against the greatest I’ve put myself at risk. For status. Risked, but what to have gained? And if gained, what?
My steed an Adirondack fashioned by familiar fatherly hands in open air with hummingbirds flitting, an occasional neighborhood raccoon joining the spectators; a lance, its boards slightly warped these past nine years in a warehouse but now released for readerly pleasure the slight decrease in humidity producing a concavity which displeased me but its matter, what the boards so warped contained, provided by my opponent down the field, these sentences not familiar from my training. I will tilt. This chevalier I’ve challenged only knowing the scrapes, bruisings, threatened with bones broken and liver pierced, but knowing otherwise I might have the cheers of the crowd undeserved for having brought myself up against an opponent I might have easily unhorsed, turning my lance over against him repeatedly but to no great purpose by pride. A failed pride against a lesser foe. But McElroy, he would surely teach me humility a virtue for any knight pursuing status.
His charger moving against me I recognize motion but cannot parse it clearly as his lance (those sentences!) dents my helm throwing me my first flavor of dust in my nostrils, now for another charge this time well seated I shatter my own lance against his buckler remaining horsed and turning only to not see his slight shift of perspective I am confused and receive his lance to my chest but it shatters. His lance. I have survived upright against that blow. My opponent I know and have recognized, jousted with previously yet here I return for another charge unprepared for what he has prepared for me this time again but it will not be repeated. Who he is? Only my lance with it’s warped boards inform me as it strains to make contact directly that ashen lance I steady to Sir McElroy’s breast-plate I will not concede defeat but I round the tournament field again.
Defeat would have been easy. Defeat is a task at all times available to those of us coming up against the difficult to blame all so quickly the superiority of our opponent and to wish to detect a condescension nonexistent but that might be a coward’s move to moral high ground. Such a move is for the coward himself. No. We take to the field against the challenger who is at least our equal who will in all likelihood be our better. Our jousting is honorable; courageous is an old-fashioned word. We enter the field before we confess defeat, what would be defeat? To not take to the field in the first place. To exit the field upon our first unhorsing at page sixty. Can we come through the sentences unscathed? Not at all but the scathing will heal and we might return and will return, continuing to the next tournament where we might come up against another of equal valor or perhaps one superior to ourselves disdaining the easy route of multiple notches of dishonorable victories. Our lances will break, we will be unseated, our bones will mend and our armor will wear our story to be read by those who can read such things in the shine and dull of a well tilted battle armor; but we contracted for this. Our honor, despised as “status” by those who would have us all equal at that lowest denominator as all of us not even pages with no knights, no errancy, but only stable children to futter the stallions which will not be ridden into battle anymore one day. But indeed for glory, status, honor, what we have risked may not come back to us but it will here.
The Earlier Not So Funny Story; Preserved for Archival Purposes
_______________
Funny story. I placed an order for the once-in-progress novel from Gass, Middle C, but was $0.57(US) short of free shipping. So I placed, additionally, an order for Actress in the House, apparently first edition hardcover, for $8.52(US) (68% off list price). Will amazon not ship my McElroy until next March, publication date of Middle C? Or will they do the honorable thing and ship it this week? Only one copy remaining at this price. . .Going. . . [I understand, no, it's not a very funny story.]
[edit] Update of the not very funny story. I've now placed an order for the annotations to Finn's Wake and some hearing protection devices (local death metal bands have been bleeding my ears) and amazon appears to be shipping Actress along with these other products.
[edit again] The story, part one, comes to an end. The volume has arrived. It awaits (eagerly?) an August (?) reading.
Further Required Reading
______________
ACTRESS IN THE HOUSE
Reviewed by Sven Birkerts
"In fiction, as in the other arts, we on occasion feel the exaltation of the deeply difficult, but far more often we encounter the reverse, what feels like the rebuff of a willed exclusivity. At what point does the one shade into the other? Is obscurity the inevitable product of an author's presentation of the subtlest truths of human interaction, or is it just the preferred register of certain temperaments? Should a reader have to work as hard as he or she works reading, say, ''The Recognitions,'' by William Gaddis, or ''The Ambassadors,'' by Henry James? And if the answer is yes, maybe or even no, what authority does that ''should'' presuppose?"
_______________
"Failure. Building. Embrace.":
An Interview with Joseph McElroy
by Trey Strecker
RAINTAXI, Fall 2003.
"Joseph McElroy is the author of eight novels: A Smuggler's Bible, Hind's Kidnap, Ancient History, Lookout Cartridge, Plus, Women and Men, The Letter Left to Me, and Actress in the House. In contrast to the pessimism and cynicism of much postmodern art, McElroy's novels exhibit a serious passion to understand how others perceive the world. Each book begins with "the breakdown of knowing"--the endpoint for many postmodern novels--but a 'Joseph McElroy novel' never ends there. His novels, often intricate networks of characters and events, masterfully engage the ability of human consciousness to structure its experience. 'Writing is how I think,' McElroy explains. 'What I do every morning into the mid-afternoon. Failure. Building. Embrace.'
"McElroy's new novel Actress in the House negotiates the complex interaction of love and abuse, memory, and action. The novel opens when an attorney witnesses an actress at a warehouse theater violently slapped during a performance; as the actress is hit, she catches the lawyer's attention. From this initial event, McElroy explores the 'joint venture' between actress and audience. From the intersection of these two lives, this 'plunge into another person,' McElroy crafts a prismatic narrative that delves into each characters' individual (perhaps linked) past. The Overlook Press, which publishes Actress, is also reissuing out-of-print McElroy classics like A Smuggler's Bible and Lookout Cartridge."
Glories of goodreads
______________
Friend Paul (professional) has hidden his review of Actress in the House within the thread of his review of Night Soul. Please go over yonder and read it.
I have jousted. I have been unseated, unhorsed, multiply. Up out of the dust off from the track I’ve hauled myself back into the saddle again with pummeling only anticipated even expected that these bruisings are what I’m in for. Tilting not at windmills but up against the greatest I’ve put myself at risk. For status. Risked, but what to have gained? And if gained, what?
My steed an Adirondack fashioned by familiar fatherly hands in open air with hummingbirds flitting, an occasional neighborhood raccoon joining the spectators; a lance, its boards slightly warped these past nine years in a warehouse but now released for readerly pleasure the slight decrease in humidity producing a concavity which displeased me but its matter, what the boards so warped contained, provided by my opponent down the field, these sentences not familiar from my training. I will tilt. This chevalier I’ve challenged only knowing the scrapes, bruisings, threatened with bones broken and liver pierced, but knowing otherwise I might have the cheers of the crowd undeserved for having brought myself up against an opponent I might have easily unhorsed, turning my lance over against him repeatedly but to no great purpose by pride. A failed pride against a lesser foe. But McElroy, he would surely teach me humility a virtue for any knight pursuing status.
His charger moving against me I recognize motion but cannot parse it clearly as his lance (those sentences!) dents my helm throwing me my first flavor of dust in my nostrils, now for another charge this time well seated I shatter my own lance against his buckler remaining horsed and turning only to not see his slight shift of perspective I am confused and receive his lance to my chest but it shatters. His lance. I have survived upright against that blow. My opponent I know and have recognized, jousted with previously yet here I return for another charge unprepared for what he has prepared for me this time again but it will not be repeated. Who he is? Only my lance with it’s warped boards inform me as it strains to make contact directly that ashen lance I steady to Sir McElroy’s breast-plate I will not concede defeat but I round the tournament field again.
Defeat would have been easy. Defeat is a task at all times available to those of us coming up against the difficult to blame all so quickly the superiority of our opponent and to wish to detect a condescension nonexistent but that might be a coward’s move to moral high ground. Such a move is for the coward himself. No. We take to the field against the challenger who is at least our equal who will in all likelihood be our better. Our jousting is honorable; courageous is an old-fashioned word. We enter the field before we confess defeat, what would be defeat? To not take to the field in the first place. To exit the field upon our first unhorsing at page sixty. Can we come through the sentences unscathed? Not at all but the scathing will heal and we might return and will return, continuing to the next tournament where we might come up against another of equal valor or perhaps one superior to ourselves disdaining the easy route of multiple notches of dishonorable victories. Our lances will break, we will be unseated, our bones will mend and our armor will wear our story to be read by those who can read such things in the shine and dull of a well tilted battle armor; but we contracted for this. Our honor, despised as “status” by those who would have us all equal at that lowest denominator as all of us not even pages with no knights, no errancy, but only stable children to futter the stallions which will not be ridden into battle anymore one day. But indeed for glory, status, honor, what we have risked may not come back to us but it will here.
The Earlier Not So Funny Story; Preserved for Archival Purposes
_______________
Funny story. I placed an order for the once-in-progress novel from Gass, Middle C, but was $0.57(US) short of free shipping. So I placed, additionally, an order for Actress in the House, apparently first edition hardcover, for $8.52(US) (68% off list price). Will amazon not ship my McElroy until next March, publication date of Middle C? Or will they do the honorable thing and ship it this week? Only one copy remaining at this price. . .Going. . . [I understand, no, it's not a very funny story.]
[edit] Update of the not very funny story. I've now placed an order for the annotations to Finn's Wake and some hearing protection devices (local death metal bands have been bleeding my ears) and amazon appears to be shipping Actress along with these other products.
[edit again] The story, part one, comes to an end. The volume has arrived. It awaits (eagerly?) an August (?) reading.
Further Required Reading
______________
ACTRESS IN THE HOUSE
Reviewed by Sven Birkerts
"In fiction, as in the other arts, we on occasion feel the exaltation of the deeply difficult, but far more often we encounter the reverse, what feels like the rebuff of a willed exclusivity. At what point does the one shade into the other? Is obscurity the inevitable product of an author's presentation of the subtlest truths of human interaction, or is it just the preferred register of certain temperaments? Should a reader have to work as hard as he or she works reading, say, ''The Recognitions,'' by William Gaddis, or ''The Ambassadors,'' by Henry James? And if the answer is yes, maybe or even no, what authority does that ''should'' presuppose?"
_______________
"Failure. Building. Embrace.":
An Interview with Joseph McElroy
by Trey Strecker
RAINTAXI, Fall 2003.
"Joseph McElroy is the author of eight novels: A Smuggler's Bible, Hind's Kidnap, Ancient History, Lookout Cartridge, Plus, Women and Men, The Letter Left to Me, and Actress in the House. In contrast to the pessimism and cynicism of much postmodern art, McElroy's novels exhibit a serious passion to understand how others perceive the world. Each book begins with "the breakdown of knowing"--the endpoint for many postmodern novels--but a 'Joseph McElroy novel' never ends there. His novels, often intricate networks of characters and events, masterfully engage the ability of human consciousness to structure its experience. 'Writing is how I think,' McElroy explains. 'What I do every morning into the mid-afternoon. Failure. Building. Embrace.'
"McElroy's new novel Actress in the House negotiates the complex interaction of love and abuse, memory, and action. The novel opens when an attorney witnesses an actress at a warehouse theater violently slapped during a performance; as the actress is hit, she catches the lawyer's attention. From this initial event, McElroy explores the 'joint venture' between actress and audience. From the intersection of these two lives, this 'plunge into another person,' McElroy crafts a prismatic narrative that delves into each characters' individual (perhaps linked) past. The Overlook Press, which publishes Actress, is also reissuing out-of-print McElroy classics like A Smuggler's Bible and Lookout Cartridge."
Glories of goodreads
______________
Friend Paul (professional) has hidden his review of Actress in the House within the thread of his review of Night Soul. Please go over yonder and read it.
September 14, 2016
A master of the creation of an aura, tone, as he wraps the reader in the bending of time in irregular circles, demanding the entry into an actual reality. The reality lies in the chaos of reality from moment to moment. McElroy paints the words in a structure which leads (forces) the reader to experience the whirlwind of each moment. He prescribes no antidote because there is none. His contribution intended or not is to extend the experience to increase the reader’s awareness of this continous phenomena so as not to be left on the line waiting to receive a plan to nullify the experience, to join the throng, and waste the possibility of their life’s unique contribution. A brilliant and radical offering of a call to arms. The prescription is the absence of a prescription.
You can call it what you want, pomo, modern, omen-istic (Even though made up it could become a factor some day), or perhaps more accurate no name at all. Beyond boundaries this is the epitome of experiencing the writer’s experience through reading the way the words are written, their structure. I had to have a complete confidence in this writer from the beginning to make this happen. A rare form of indissoluble connection between reader and author. A trust leaving no room for doubt; allowing the words to rush over and through me.
The words will settle at some point in time according to your constitution, your nature. It will not be the usual understanding but an un-worded experience that will mark your life. As part of the course of your cellular structure it will remain.
Yet through this all McElroy allows the murmur of plot to peek and whisper along the text. His dexterous pen ploys barely noticeable mentions of significant happenings where the reader mumbles, holy shit, while continuing reading.
Daley is a lawyer but not of first choice. First choice is unclear. Gripping the strands of web, he holds onto objects and clear linear narratives of events as he watches, clarifies, interprets, reaching for a distanced understanding? What he sees out there is a, becoming- a -part -of, which he is deprived of, being an Other. The text’s essence is of living vs. thinking about living life. Which has meaning or does either?
There are books that contend with time, that provide the opportunity for the reader and writer to approach one another, enter that particular space where the brush of a meeting might take place. It doesn’t matter whether this book is a 3 or a 5 star rating. I have read books of lesser ratings which have had profound effects on me. This book eschews categorization while unfolding its unique capture of the tremble of human consciousness.
You can call it what you want, pomo, modern, omen-istic (Even though made up it could become a factor some day), or perhaps more accurate no name at all. Beyond boundaries this is the epitome of experiencing the writer’s experience through reading the way the words are written, their structure. I had to have a complete confidence in this writer from the beginning to make this happen. A rare form of indissoluble connection between reader and author. A trust leaving no room for doubt; allowing the words to rush over and through me.
The words will settle at some point in time according to your constitution, your nature. It will not be the usual understanding but an un-worded experience that will mark your life. As part of the course of your cellular structure it will remain.
Yet through this all McElroy allows the murmur of plot to peek and whisper along the text. His dexterous pen ploys barely noticeable mentions of significant happenings where the reader mumbles, holy shit, while continuing reading.
Daley is a lawyer but not of first choice. First choice is unclear. Gripping the strands of web, he holds onto objects and clear linear narratives of events as he watches, clarifies, interprets, reaching for a distanced understanding? What he sees out there is a, becoming- a -part -of, which he is deprived of, being an Other. The text’s essence is of living vs. thinking about living life. Which has meaning or does either?
There are books that contend with time, that provide the opportunity for the reader and writer to approach one another, enter that particular space where the brush of a meeting might take place. It doesn’t matter whether this book is a 3 or a 5 star rating. I have read books of lesser ratings which have had profound effects on me. This book eschews categorization while unfolding its unique capture of the tremble of human consciousness.
March 18, 2021
My interest in this one flagged around the midpoint. I think my issue was with the Becca character. Always finishing people's sentences for them; lot's of disjointed dialogue between her and Daley. My favorite chapters were with Della and Wolf. Interesting characters and the annoying dialogue is not as pronounced. The ending bounces back from a middling second act, and it was a lot of fun to experience McElroy's prose for the first time. If this is the most accessible work of his, as I've read elsewhere, I'm a little worried about tackling W&M. I count myself as a McElroy fan now, but I'll be taking a break before reading him again. Strong three stars.
June 17, 2014
It begins:
"A shock, that's all it was, in the darkened house. The girl struck by her partner very hard. It had staggered her, it was over the line, you wondered how she was standing. Her partner had clapped her one to the side of her face with the full flat of his hand, and it had swung her right around toward the audience, almost knocked her off the stage, and she was hurt. The man in the eighth row from his angle hadn't seen it coming, but neither had she seen it you could almost believe, the actress herself. Something wrong up there. He was stunned and amazed, he was honestly thrilled, not stunned at all."
A partial list of Joe's theme-soundings throughout the novel:
The jolt of a slap.
The snap of a drumstick on snareskin.
An enormous taut tent rippling.
The tremor of an earthquake.
A dive into once-still water.
Childhood sexual abuse.
Sudden illness, sudden death.
A collapsing bridge.
A failed mugging, self-defence by broken umbrella.
Cambodia
Vietnam
War Crimes
Ripples in the Field.
Ripples in the Background.
Violence.
Consequences.
Imagine trying to describe the impact of, the passage of, ripples in a pond-surface without describing the pond. Without, even, letting us know we are seeing water.
That is what Joe does. It makes for difficult reading, yes, in that it is harder to run on sand than on concrete. But is there not a reason why runners love to train on the beach?
A really-not-bad-at-all review from the NY Times can be read here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/20/boo...
"A shock, that's all it was, in the darkened house. The girl struck by her partner very hard. It had staggered her, it was over the line, you wondered how she was standing. Her partner had clapped her one to the side of her face with the full flat of his hand, and it had swung her right around toward the audience, almost knocked her off the stage, and she was hurt. The man in the eighth row from his angle hadn't seen it coming, but neither had she seen it you could almost believe, the actress herself. Something wrong up there. He was stunned and amazed, he was honestly thrilled, not stunned at all."
A partial list of Joe's theme-soundings throughout the novel:
The jolt of a slap.
The snap of a drumstick on snareskin.
An enormous taut tent rippling.
The tremor of an earthquake.
A dive into once-still water.
Childhood sexual abuse.
Sudden illness, sudden death.
A collapsing bridge.
A failed mugging, self-defence by broken umbrella.
Cambodia
Vietnam
War Crimes
Ripples in the Field.
Ripples in the Background.
Violence.
Consequences.
Imagine trying to describe the impact of, the passage of, ripples in a pond-surface without describing the pond. Without, even, letting us know we are seeing water.
That is what Joe does. It makes for difficult reading, yes, in that it is harder to run on sand than on concrete. But is there not a reason why runners love to train on the beach?
A really-not-bad-at-all review from the NY Times can be read here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2003/04/20/boo...
October 26, 2016
This is the first McElroy novel I've read twice. To be honest, it was still a little confusing the second time around; still, I recommend it. All great novels reward multiple encounters (in fact it'd be nice if it were somehow possible to skip directly to the second reading).
I do think this is a great novel, quite possibly McElroy's greatest. His early books from the sixties and seventies - especially Lookout Cartridge - are a bit too cold for my taste. This affect changes abruptly changes with the opening of his gargantuan Women and Men. There McElroy developed a style capable of capturing the most intimate moments within and between people. I know many here regard W&M as his masterpiece; I wouldn't really argue except to suggest that that book does contain a lot of noodling. I at least found the writing in that 500,000+ word book to sometimes be uneven. Certain chapters were a lot more interesting than others (but then maybe I just need to read it again?).
I think with Actress in the House McElroy is able to achieve something closer to perfection. It has the form of an ordinary novel. A middle-aged widower's chance encounter with a brilliant but troubled young woman leads to a passionate affair that completely upends the man's life, dramatic revelations ensue, and he is forced to confront the demons of his past ... what could be more novelistic than that?
So there is a plot but then it's not really told in a sequential manner. McElroy is at his best when scratching phantom limbs to relieve the itch in someone else's brain. Not so much the event itself as its multiple and simultaneous reverberations through space and time. Actress in the House is a book about unspeakable things - abuse, incestuous rape, war crimes - and for the most part they actually do go unspoken, or else spoken of only-very-obliquely. This is somewhat disconcerting in a culture which puts so much value on confessional literature. Yet McElroy's general avoidance of explicit description is not a form of prudishness, I don't think. Nor is just an aesthete's pose. By writing about monstrous things in a complicated and indirect style he's able to depict the actual subtle textures, a lifeworld of monstrosity - strange and seductive layers that a more straightforward account would have to leave out.
I do think this is a great novel, quite possibly McElroy's greatest. His early books from the sixties and seventies - especially Lookout Cartridge - are a bit too cold for my taste. This affect changes abruptly changes with the opening of his gargantuan Women and Men. There McElroy developed a style capable of capturing the most intimate moments within and between people. I know many here regard W&M as his masterpiece; I wouldn't really argue except to suggest that that book does contain a lot of noodling. I at least found the writing in that 500,000+ word book to sometimes be uneven. Certain chapters were a lot more interesting than others (but then maybe I just need to read it again?).
I think with Actress in the House McElroy is able to achieve something closer to perfection. It has the form of an ordinary novel. A middle-aged widower's chance encounter with a brilliant but troubled young woman leads to a passionate affair that completely upends the man's life, dramatic revelations ensue, and he is forced to confront the demons of his past ... what could be more novelistic than that?
So there is a plot but then it's not really told in a sequential manner. McElroy is at his best when scratching phantom limbs to relieve the itch in someone else's brain. Not so much the event itself as its multiple and simultaneous reverberations through space and time. Actress in the House is a book about unspeakable things - abuse, incestuous rape, war crimes - and for the most part they actually do go unspoken, or else spoken of only-very-obliquely. This is somewhat disconcerting in a culture which puts so much value on confessional literature. Yet McElroy's general avoidance of explicit description is not a form of prudishness, I don't think. Nor is just an aesthete's pose. By writing about monstrous things in a complicated and indirect style he's able to depict the actual subtle textures, a lifeworld of monstrosity - strange and seductive layers that a more straightforward account would have to leave out.
December 28, 2018
Once a thing’s done, no one ever knows how it happened. 314
and Virginia Woolf’s “The Mark on the Wall” (every McElroy character has a mark)
In McElroy consciousness is a darkened house, standing room only. Thoughts brush up against memories, identities, concepts, locations, and personal detritus...
...anecdotes of a family that made you think That’s history, though it occurred to Daley maybe story was exactly what history wasn’t though he could not spell it out. 346
The idea of a brother. The idea of a lover. A spark of recognition between two patrons is enough to momentarily illuminate fractions of the room, the source and angle of light always different. Between a phone call and a slap across the face, casting across a helicopter, a stage play as it travels. From a night when your wife was still alive to the innards of an Australian turkey even further back, between which brightly for a moment the botched mugging, your brother in Osaka absorbing an underwater explosion. We are always catching familiar faces from discreet sides, fleetingly. Sufficient flashes, enough neurons firing in our own mind and we might begin to put the story together. It is absorbed piecemeal in moments and connections, rather than followed in a straight line like blood.
You have the event over here, and some name for it over here, you have to bring them together. 317
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about abuse, and how trauma travels down that line through generations. I’m a teacher. I see it in families as an outsider and I see it more and more within my own.
A little abuse went a long way. (So did a lot.) 319
The question of how we can overcome damage or whether we ever do, this has been torturous. I feel I’m finding that each new shock creates fresh lines of flight, leading to unpredictable multiplicities. The idea that we might adapt or rise above is constantly being overridden by internal idiosyncrasies. The sentiment that we might be made stronger or wiser further obscures buried and sedimented wounds, often hides us from ourselves along with the ways we might knowingly or unknowingly hurt others. You can track a line of betterment and a separate line of degradation within the same person. There doesn’t seem to be progress, only transformation. And yet we all act as if...
and Virginia Woolf’s “The Mark on the Wall” (every McElroy character has a mark)
In McElroy consciousness is a darkened house, standing room only. Thoughts brush up against memories, identities, concepts, locations, and personal detritus...
...anecdotes of a family that made you think That’s history, though it occurred to Daley maybe story was exactly what history wasn’t though he could not spell it out. 346
The idea of a brother. The idea of a lover. A spark of recognition between two patrons is enough to momentarily illuminate fractions of the room, the source and angle of light always different. Between a phone call and a slap across the face, casting across a helicopter, a stage play as it travels. From a night when your wife was still alive to the innards of an Australian turkey even further back, between which brightly for a moment the botched mugging, your brother in Osaka absorbing an underwater explosion. We are always catching familiar faces from discreet sides, fleetingly. Sufficient flashes, enough neurons firing in our own mind and we might begin to put the story together. It is absorbed piecemeal in moments and connections, rather than followed in a straight line like blood.
You have the event over here, and some name for it over here, you have to bring them together. 317
I’ve been thinking a lot lately about abuse, and how trauma travels down that line through generations. I’m a teacher. I see it in families as an outsider and I see it more and more within my own.
A little abuse went a long way. (So did a lot.) 319
The question of how we can overcome damage or whether we ever do, this has been torturous. I feel I’m finding that each new shock creates fresh lines of flight, leading to unpredictable multiplicities. The idea that we might adapt or rise above is constantly being overridden by internal idiosyncrasies. The sentiment that we might be made stronger or wiser further obscures buried and sedimented wounds, often hides us from ourselves along with the ways we might knowingly or unknowingly hurt others. You can track a line of betterment and a separate line of degradation within the same person. There doesn’t seem to be progress, only transformation. And yet we all act as if...
December 10, 2018
Abuse, violence, war, agency, metaphysics, etiology, the flow of time, and, as always, of water. Diving, helicopters, a stranger with cryptic knowledge (of the protagonist, of the setting, of history), and weird families. This is the McEl-world.
Actress in the House took me by surprise, not because it was so good, but because I feel much of his other works get more attention/recognition, but this may be his "best" in a holistic sense: it's unarguably the most "accessible" of McElroy's works (without being dumbed down, simplified, etc.; ie. accessible in a really marvelous way), it employs so many themes and motifs threaded throughout his earlier works (and his one novel after this one), and it captures a lot of his best prose at its most poignant and enigmatic.
What determines abuse? What are its affects on the abused? The abuser? Is all abuse violence? How far can violence go in war before becoming abuse? Is war abuse? What is the body's impact on water—the source of all life—and how can we minimize our impact? And is minimized impact the ideal? What is knowing? What is knowing a person? What is a person's agency in interaction? Is abuse a common complicity between abuser and abused?
McElroy's novel dances with these questions as Becca and Bill (Daley) come to know one another in the course of a brisk week after he sees her brutally slapped in an off-Broadway play. We are all tidally locked to one another—connected by invisible gravity, pushing and pulling on one another with or without direct force, permanently bonded and therefore reliant and intimate with one another.
If you're wondering where to start with McElroy, I can't think of a better way than a slap in the face followed by the caress of a new lover.
Actress in the House took me by surprise, not because it was so good, but because I feel much of his other works get more attention/recognition, but this may be his "best" in a holistic sense: it's unarguably the most "accessible" of McElroy's works (without being dumbed down, simplified, etc.; ie. accessible in a really marvelous way), it employs so many themes and motifs threaded throughout his earlier works (and his one novel after this one), and it captures a lot of his best prose at its most poignant and enigmatic.
What determines abuse? What are its affects on the abused? The abuser? Is all abuse violence? How far can violence go in war before becoming abuse? Is war abuse? What is the body's impact on water—the source of all life—and how can we minimize our impact? And is minimized impact the ideal? What is knowing? What is knowing a person? What is a person's agency in interaction? Is abuse a common complicity between abuser and abused?
McElroy's novel dances with these questions as Becca and Bill (Daley) come to know one another in the course of a brisk week after he sees her brutally slapped in an off-Broadway play. We are all tidally locked to one another—connected by invisible gravity, pushing and pulling on one another with or without direct force, permanently bonded and therefore reliant and intimate with one another.
If you're wondering where to start with McElroy, I can't think of a better way than a slap in the face followed by the caress of a new lover.
May 16, 2022
What a humane novel, filled with longing, pain, tenderness, and loss. Also, experimental in construction. Highly recommended.
June 16, 2023
Actress in the House as a novel feels very informed by McElroy's preceding behemoth Women and Men, as his first major novel following this sprawling book Actress hones in on the core of Women and Men, the relationships between the sexes, and by narrowing its focus and treating its subjects with more warmth and humanity it manages to supersede it's better known progenitor, and sits as an excellent, woefully underappreciated part of McElroy's oeuvre.
Actress is a reflective novel, it chronicles the first night and then the first week of two people falling in love, a middle aged lawyer, Daley, and a younger hard on her luck actress Becca. Actress has potentially the least momentum of any McElroy novel, and takes his style to its quietest extreme. To read a McElroy book is to be immersed in a moment, to be made aware of the plethora of cascading thoughts, impressions, verbal and nonverbal messages, random memories, personal expectations, miscommunications, excitements and frustrations and fears and joys that make up every single instance of communication between two people.
As the reader we are overwhelmed, swept along in a torrent of free association and unconscious thought as McElroy deftly steers our path circuitously, rotating us around and around central events, memories and traumas, which we barely glean on the first pass but the longer the book goes the more we glean, until suddenly we sit up at the end of the book, rub our eyes, and realize we understand everything.
Besides the hypnotic experimental quality of his work, McElroy paints for us in Actress a strikingly real relationship between two people overloaded with personal baggage and trauma, and the ways in which they help and hurt each other. The book expounds on the abuses, minor and major, that people in relationships inflict upon each other, the power of love to provide structure and support those who lack it, and the immense and immediate challenge personal trauma and grief present to intimacy and trust.
What I love about McElroy is that he marries postmodern metatextual experimentation with a modernist reverence for the human mind and spirit, and in no book is that better exemplified than in Actress. Ultimately Actress is a novel of hope, hope stumbled upon almost in surprise, and a novel that shows people as they are, damaged, defensively performative, and lonely, but always yearning for the opportunity to give and receive love.
Actress is a reflective novel, it chronicles the first night and then the first week of two people falling in love, a middle aged lawyer, Daley, and a younger hard on her luck actress Becca. Actress has potentially the least momentum of any McElroy novel, and takes his style to its quietest extreme. To read a McElroy book is to be immersed in a moment, to be made aware of the plethora of cascading thoughts, impressions, verbal and nonverbal messages, random memories, personal expectations, miscommunications, excitements and frustrations and fears and joys that make up every single instance of communication between two people.
As the reader we are overwhelmed, swept along in a torrent of free association and unconscious thought as McElroy deftly steers our path circuitously, rotating us around and around central events, memories and traumas, which we barely glean on the first pass but the longer the book goes the more we glean, until suddenly we sit up at the end of the book, rub our eyes, and realize we understand everything.
Besides the hypnotic experimental quality of his work, McElroy paints for us in Actress a strikingly real relationship between two people overloaded with personal baggage and trauma, and the ways in which they help and hurt each other. The book expounds on the abuses, minor and major, that people in relationships inflict upon each other, the power of love to provide structure and support those who lack it, and the immense and immediate challenge personal trauma and grief present to intimacy and trust.
What I love about McElroy is that he marries postmodern metatextual experimentation with a modernist reverence for the human mind and spirit, and in no book is that better exemplified than in Actress. Ultimately Actress is a novel of hope, hope stumbled upon almost in surprise, and a novel that shows people as they are, damaged, defensively performative, and lonely, but always yearning for the opportunity to give and receive love.
June 4, 2019
"Actress in the House" is far from McElroy's most best – and at times feels decidedly minor, especially when held up against the prose and scope of W&M, Lookout Cartridge, or PLUS – but that is not to rob it of its true delights, which abound on nearly every page. Daley and Becca's pasts, histories, memories become "absorbed" (a word used with religious conviction throughout by JM) by one another as their lives become intertwined. How do we handle shock, both seemingly banal and horrifying? Violence, both remembered and present, rears its head in many of these memories that haunt our two heroes – the slap that sends Becca to the floor in the darkened off-off broadway theater on the books' opening page; Daley's umbrella defense of himself on his early-morning Hudson River jog at the hands of white collar bandits wielding knives; a memory of the sinister Ruley slapping Daley's first wife Della; memories of Becca's abuse (perhaps half imagined but certainly elliptically and obliquely narrated) at the hands of her brother & father; and memories of POWs in Vietnam and war folly. Characteristic of JM is the obsessive turning and returning of these events, until we seem to have seen them from all conceivable sides and come to know something of these characters in the process.
I likely wouldn't have gone near AITH were I not on this McElroy completist tip, but strangely it might also be a good starting place for the uninitiated – one still gets a real feel for McElroy's "midcourse corrections" where one starts to feel the circuits of their brain being rewired in real time; his sentences infecting the ways we think about the characters, but more importantly about thought itself. All of this is on full display throughout AITH, but is much less forbidding than opening Women and Men and initially wondering if what you're reading is in fact in English at all.
I likely wouldn't have gone near AITH were I not on this McElroy completist tip, but strangely it might also be a good starting place for the uninitiated – one still gets a real feel for McElroy's "midcourse corrections" where one starts to feel the circuits of their brain being rewired in real time; his sentences infecting the ways we think about the characters, but more importantly about thought itself. All of this is on full display throughout AITH, but is much less forbidding than opening Women and Men and initially wondering if what you're reading is in fact in English at all.
February 10, 2024
As always with McElroy, strange book here. Pretty strange indeed, and yet somehow intriguing and compulsively readable. "What's this supposed to be about?" was a constant question throughout reading this one, for me. And yet I was intrigued. But people don't really talk like this. This is stylized, sometimes amusing, sometimes just plain odd, Raymond Chandler-esque film noir-ish dialogue.
According to the blurb, the book is about "themes of love and abuse, memory and action". I dunno about all that. The abuse element is certainly there as an underlying theme (especially w/ Becca). I think the book is more about how we all have to act, to a certain extent, to live with the troubles of the past. Everyone has some skeletons in the closet and we "perform" in our day-to-day lives to present ourselves to the world; everyone has a sanitized "being-in-the-world" role they wish to play vs. the "warts and all" reality.
The (sometimes unexpected) interconnectedness between characters is also there, as in Women & Men. The shifting from the micro to macro happens a lot here, also as in W&M, and is sometimes beautiful, such as in the descriptions of the birds and abalone.
According to the blurb, the book is about "themes of love and abuse, memory and action". I dunno about all that. The abuse element is certainly there as an underlying theme (especially w/ Becca). I think the book is more about how we all have to act, to a certain extent, to live with the troubles of the past. Everyone has some skeletons in the closet and we "perform" in our day-to-day lives to present ourselves to the world; everyone has a sanitized "being-in-the-world" role they wish to play vs. the "warts and all" reality.
The (sometimes unexpected) interconnectedness between characters is also there, as in Women & Men. The shifting from the micro to macro happens a lot here, also as in W&M, and is sometimes beautiful, such as in the descriptions of the birds and abalone.
September 16, 2018
A slow sadness becoming. The house is the systematic catalogue of history that inserts your genuine memories into artificial characters and-or vice versa. Becca/Lotta/Wolf/any other anti-American symbol merge into one foil for Daley or you become your name Daily. One of the most impressive novels ever written.
June 1, 2024
”He gets it and doesn’t get it.”
tasted
August 22, 2015I’m glad I tasted Joseph McElroy’s writing. His style is unique, with clipped, noirish sentences combined with a tilted sort of stream-of-consciousness. I highly recommend a taste, or even a full meal.
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