Women and Men by Joseph McElroy

Mar 13, 2018 Adam Dalva added it

Difficult for me to review this book after such a long journey with it, but I have an essay about the experience up with The Paris Review: https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2... ...more

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Jun 15, 2013 Brian rated it it was amazing

Recommended to Brian by: Nathan "N.R." Gaddis

people matter
people = matter
people R matter
people are the matter

Most books you read. There are some, however, that read you. Women and Men read me, and found me lacking.

Everything got an explanation: the difference is you pick some things to not explain.

It began with a birth and a word: Breathe. In the beginning was the Word. You can live without breathing, you can't live without breath. Teach me, Jim Mayn, about special reincarnation, about the Choor Monster, the Anasazi Healer, the Hermit-Inve ...more

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Oct 07, 2012 Nathan "N.R." Gaddis added it

Shelves: joseph-mcelroy, systext

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, ...more

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Apr 11, 2015 Vit Babenco rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Women and Men seems to be the most ambitious novel ever written, anyway, it is the most ambitious one I’ve ever read.

Each of us when separated, having one side only, like a flat fish, is but the indenture of a man, and he is always looking for his other half. Men who are a section of that double nature which was once called Androgynous are lovers of women; adulterers are generally of this breed, and also adulterous women who lust after men: the women who are a section of the woman do not care f

Women and Men seems to be the most ambitious novel ever written, anyway, it is the most ambitious one I’ve ever read.

Each of us when separated, having one side only, like a flat fish, is but the indenture of a man, and he is always looking for his other half. Men who are a section of that double nature which was once called Androgynous are lovers of women; adulterers are generally of this breed, and also adulterous women who lust after men: the women who are a section of the woman do not care for men, but have female attachments; the female companions are of this sort. But they who are a section of the male follow the male, and while they are young, being slices of the original man, they hang about men and embrace them, and they are themselves the best of boys and youths, because they have the most manly nature – Plato, The Symposium.

In a way Women and Men is an outspread exegetic commentary to this Plato’s sentence.

Women and men each other’s axles, she felt on good days; each other’s future and frontier – Words, words, words…

Grace is a sum of female origins or a female collective consciousness, fragmentary and illogical – a cosmic ovum waiting to be fertilized.

She arched and farted like Mona Lisa if you really looked at her and moistly for good fruitarian measure.

And angels are a sum of male origins – a male collective consciousness, possessive and smug – cosmic spermatozoids seeking their target.

And she wasn’t getting any younger as the world turns, so your launch window gets smaller by the second until it’s maybe ten minutes wide if you want to launch to gain your desired orbit, because everything else is also moving in its directions and you won’t need a computer to process that stuff because women know. But whichever She it is that we relations raise into this window as a trial sacrifice, it was not consciousness alone we raised and targeted-for-Being, but the body she was becoming. Evolution of angel into human seemed illusion it seemed so slow at times.

straight away Joseph McElroy turns Women and Men into a skein of metaphysical enigmas embellishing, on the way, a trivial day to day existence with absurd twists, preposterous quirks and trashy sexual rites.

Elimination of dead matter in the brain both concentrated energies already present and opened gaps that let that energy jump and grow; the void left where internal body parts had been, set off kinetic potential uniting upper with lower.

I believe Joseph McElroy just wants to eliminate dead matter in our brain and set our imagination free.
The crap of the quotidian living accrues in our minds, intoxicating them, so we need to cleanse them from time to time like our bowels. ...more

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Sep 28, 2011 Ian "Marvin" Graye rated it it was amazing

Shelves: exert-yourself, reviews-5-stars, read-2013, reviews, mcelroy, le-clair

Along the Curve of Our Resolve

Joseph McElroy took a photo of America in 1977 and then, in the manner of Tristram Shandy’s father, took ten years to convert it into a panoramic painting or tapestry of modern life ("Oh cripes I thought this was gonna be in Technicolor").

He constructed an apartment building (a "multiple dwelling" or "articulated structure that gives play to a multiplicity of small-scale units"), populated it with multiple characters (including "multinational corporate selves" an ...more

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Feb 03, 2012 Nathan "N.R." Gaddis added it · review of another edition

Shelves: joseph-mcelroy, encyclopedic, after-joyce

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 ever ...more

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Nov 14, 2012 Aubrey rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: prose-prose-prose, reviewed, ever-on, 5-star, r-2014, r-goodreads

You cannot take the engineer out of the writer; you cannot take the integration out of life.

There was a time when I cross-referenced a Gravity's Rainbow relation of sunset, radiation dynamics of reddening shades versus the bloody westward draw over sea and foundered land. Whether 'twas a singular page or a singular thought of relative Pynchon's or my own, it didn't matter. What did was a figuring that in the duel between word and constant, equation and verse, mathematical flow of form and memori You cannot take the engineer out of the writer; you cannot take the integration out of life.

There was a time when I cross-referenced a Gravity's Rainbow relation of sunset, radiation dynamics of reddening shades versus the bloody westward draw over sea and foundered land. Whether 'twas a singular page or a singular thought of relative Pynchon's or my own, it didn't matter. What did was a figuring that in the duel between word and constant, equation and verse, mathematical flow of form and memorial firing of relation, I preferred story to solution.

Plot pulse. Theme pulse. Word pulse. Take your heartbeat as you wish and trust the rest to follow.

I no longer seek out a laboratory for my contribution to society, but that is a lie if metaphor is your friend and faithful fret, for what is creation by those who cannot help it if not a discovery, bred in light if not in number, boxed in bone if not in glass, lethal potential all the same?

The matter is we, for the longer one spends in the statistical mists the longer the system is we. I would speak plainly if I could, but every parse parts into the infinite stream, one for you and you and whatever your existence conjures at the differential moment of my saying "female", "atheist", "white", a shortened guarantee for each delineation of other. I find my place in the wave of things; mind your self less than the water.

...until the meaning of her day approached, and she almost had it

Ten years ago I studied the weather. Nowadays I tutor English. In the repetitions of the Odyssey, unobserved until explanation necessitated, I found the tidal aid of memory. In the water margin of Women and Men, coastal operative over a denser complexity than formula could ever hope to approximate, I reconciled my seventh grade failure to calculate the low pressure curve to my appreciation of what goes in to the wind, the sun, the snow.

It is raining today. How many breathers made it happen?

Politics, economics, rhyme, rhythm, calculate. Condensing is control is impossible without a correlating decrease in respect, climate change in charts, unhappiness in soap operas. We cannot comprehend the mechanics of earthquakes we fail to confirm our "science" of poli and econ we continue to kill each other and ourselves. We fear. Then we contain something, and we fear more.

Flick said anyone could have predicted the bomb: it was just bigger.

We could put forth the planetary motion of people as safeguard, obliging ourselves with acknowledgement of temporary status yet not really believing we'll ever find anything better. I could track down ever reference to anything ever within the bindings of this particular tome, but that is not a natural commitment of anything else I have ever read. My closure breeds in different ways, and until the void I let it lie.

...for if life is an education it must be to find out what you are already doing because can't avoid in some way Doing.

If you dream in sci-fi, are you innovative or simply giving the finger to Freud in the manner of one of many dreaded "genre" style constructions? No tech or politics in fiction for literature's sake, but that electricity wasn't made on the backs of philosophers, nor that forty hour work day. Whatever your comfortable level of luddism or adherence to Thoreau (two years on Walden two miles from home in brought back his laundry every weekend for his mother to do), you are a set of the system. Contemplate the creeded words of Hegel and co., but understanding's a nominal thing if existence is only respected in parts. Pretend as you may, you're not dead yet.

...In my keeper's multiple dwelling there are many Mansons.

Not so appealing now, is it.

...call nationalism just another brand of competition which is death next to cooperation...

Does that get your goat?

...to a neutral economist who says in the long run "it" evens out, and to Lord Keynes who said In the long run we are dead...

You should know my stance on free market capitalism versus a living wage by now.

...and now he works steadily against the death penalty ("against death as a penalty")...

I was not leading you astray with my hopeful view of We in the beginning. Only my definition may differ, for a lack of a considered life after the croak has made me all the more keen on the hearing of now. All for one, one for all, and heaven help those sputtering 'but'.

...people are the obstacles we choose and by a system that is always double we are inclined toward these obstacles in order by some last-second correction like multiple-reentry missiles to veer away around them at risk yet with awful chance, too, if we can find the way in to the risk of our lives...

If I can do it, so can you.

All of this speaks. In many bodies or, as our leaders have said, on an individual basis. Speaks also, we understand, in this "we" that we have heard. What is it? some community? Ours. Operating less than capacity then suddenly also beyond itself. So that in the zone between we have this voice of relations—is that it?—of possible relations too.

There is no we in I on a linguistic case level. So come, tell me the familiar anew; on a level of life, we'll find it yet. ...more

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Jul 20, 2013 alex rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: favorites

*3rd reading update*

"What I've always been trying to find was an adequate sentence and passage that could suggest what it is like to be fully alive, and that means to be thinking and feeling and moving even in a physical way that could be conveyed upon the page." -Joseph McElroy in conversation with Michael Silverblatt on KCRW's Bookworm

This is my favorite novel. The competition is not close.

Is it hyperbolic to say that in W&M McElroy comes close to actually realizing Heidegger's goal of approx ...more

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Aug 18, 2012 Aloha rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Recommends it for: PoMo lovers, readers who like difficult or puzzle literature

Recommended to Aloha by: Nathan "N.R." Gaddis

Shelves: a-own, 1-favorites, z-mcelroy-joseph, a-ebooks, genre-post-modern, a-paper-book, c-top-10-most-difficult-books, genre-sci-fi

Link to Women and Men forum: Women and Men

Joseph McElroy’s Women and Men opens with a birthing scene. The woman is at a party flashing back to her experience of birthing the baby. The title “division of labor” sets the economic tone of labor and productivity that recalls Karl Marx’s Division of Labor . She was experiencing awful pain while her husband Shay, formerly David, was below awaiting the birth of their child. He was paying attention and documenting everything, but can never really know h ...more

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Feb 20, 2013 Jonathan rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: big-books-to-live-in, signed-and-or-first-editions, favorites, worshiped-and-adored

"We had learned we were a language"

This is, to put it mildly, a completely unique work of art. It is a novel unlike any other novel I have read (excepting, of course, Joe's other work). It moves through time and thought and Being with such astonishing fluidity it will leave you Breathless. As I have said in other McElroy reviews, he works by accretion, by non-linear addition, by echoings and layerings and leaps across time and perspective within the bounds of a single sentence.

It is hard only ...more

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Mar 24, 2021 George rated it really liked it · review of another edition

After being available for over a month to Patreon supporters, my interview with the great Joseph McElroy is available to all peons! https://thecollidescope.com/2021/04/0...

Took me over a year and a half to get this interview so please support by sharing. Cheers!

Still working on a review, of course, but this is a big beast to tackle reading-wise and review-wise. ...more

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Apr 22, 2016 Cody rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: immortal, mcelroy

Log of the Journey of the HMS Women and Men

Day 1:
Noontime. Our good ship, the massive HMS Women and Men, sets sail out of Lincoln Harbor, NJ, USA. New Jersey coastline recedes in view. Lovely from a distance; far lovelier than from within it, I must confess. Our voyage began with the most joyous of news: a child born just as we breach’d the opens! (Apologies for punning; a lowly form of humour). A tremendous portent, howe’er misleading.

Just out of sight of land, we are caught within the maelstr ...more

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Apr 08, 2018 Nick Craske rated it it was amazing

Does the flap of a butterfly's wings in Brazil set off a tornado in Texas? That was the title of a 1972 lecture given by the scientist Edward Lorenz. He was studying changes in weather in the early 60s and accidentally discovered a dynamic non-linear system – a high profile discovery within the science community and American culture.

Joseph McElroy’s sixth novel, Women and Men is inherently inspired by, structured and constructed around Lorenz's dynamical mathematical system; we know it today as ...more

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Dec 28, 2013 Sentimental Surrealist rated it it was amazing

Shelves: doorstopper, best-ever-ever

Let's talk McElroy, hailed as the "lost postmodernist." Let's maybe take one from McElroy's own book, in fact this book which I have just finished and taken it upon myself to review, and talk about simultaneous reincarnation (or "S.R.," which I wouldn't know about without the continued and highly commendable efforts of Goodreaders Aubrey, so unceasingly kind as to send me a copy, Nathan "N.R.," and the other great & passionate McElroyites on this (give them a massive hug on) site). Allow your hu Let's talk McElroy, hailed as the "lost postmodernist." Let's maybe take one from McElroy's own book, in fact this book which I have just finished and taken it upon myself to review, and talk about simultaneous reincarnation (or "S.R.," which I wouldn't know about without the continued and highly commendable efforts of Goodreaders Aubrey, so unceasingly kind as to send me a copy, Nathan "N.R.," and the other great & passionate McElroyites on this (give them a massive hug on) site). Allow your humble servant to posit that McElroy is the simultaneous reincarnation of Pynchon. The two are unified by the size of their worldview, their doctrine-spanning styles, and their dizzying, all-encompassing prose, but the river split and the curves run parallel. First in terms of reputation & recognition (a smile through the void for the postmodernists in the crowd, if I may work in a third possible simultaneous reincarnate, because if one can become two then why not three?) - Pynchon we know as the not actually reclusive god-king who every few years releases titanic novels hailed for reading our cultural codes so accurately, while McElroy we don't know except to use the words Ozick put to Gaddis: "famous for not being famous enough," not to be confused with "famous for being famous" by any stretch of anyone's imagination. Yet more key to the McElroy-Pynchon dynamic is McElroy's vision, his interest in not just the systems but the people that compose them.

That's what's key to this behemoth: as other reviewers have rightfully pointed out (see Hadrian's excellent write-up for an example), our boy McElroy not only sees the universe in a grain of sand but grants that universe the same sense of weight that he gives our broader cosmos. So he'll talk about the whole history and mythology of the Anasazi people in one chapter and record the exacting details of a conversation about gender relations overheard in a cafe the next, and it's all important, all necessary to the book's broader vision which isn't so much a plot as a reading of history that happens to converge on a fictional point and a series of McElroy's own theories. Which is a lot to take in, and which sits in defiance of an alarmingly serious aspect of our current cultural dialog: that since we're all just made up of decaying carbon and will all die anyway, we'd all be happier if we abandoned our "human-centric" viewpoint and saw ourselves as insignificant on the scientific mega-scale. "Not so," says McElroy, who holds that people are matter but would like to offer two alternatives - that people matter and that people are the matter, the makings of something broader.

So far this might seem like a bit of a chilly book, but that's not true, either: it brims with an energy that sweeps you through its paragraphs, which eat DFW paragraphs for breakfast, and it frequently interrupts itself, dives off into tangents, and spills into dialects and wild puns, unexpected jokes and self-reflexive word games. Words, words, words, but also systems, systems, systems. And dualities - the eponymous of course, as it plays out for mother-father, husband-wife, brother-sister and so forth, but see also communism-capitalism, old-young, chaos-order, infinite-infinitesimal, modern-ancient, colonizer-colonized, medicine man and hermit-inventor, revolutionary-reactionary, sun-moon.

Let's for a moment lament how McElroy vanished. Seems to me you shouldn't be able to write a work of this magnitude and find it ignored, but that's how it happened. Granted, this one's coming back into print, and I imagine with the guy's internet following growing that he could easily come into some sort of literary spotlight soon. If he does, let's hope he doesn't get boiled down to something easily digestible, as is becoming the lamentable fate of the great DFW (Empathy! Graduation speeches! Movies! People not reading any of his works beyond a few pieces of nonfiction!) or Pynchon (paranoia! We're good), but just the same, maybe it won't be too long before this book gets some of the recognition it deserves. The best way to go about this is to pick up the reprint when it comes out and buckle down.

And it's definitely one to buckle down for. McElroy's prose has an astonishing flow, but it's dense with information and development and motion. But there are all sorts of reasons to rise to the occasion, especially if you're a fan of that swimming-head feeling of having read a truly great piece of fiction. Shit, I haven't even gotten into the dream of the "safe bomb" or the remarkable description of Ship Rock or the Hamlet opera thread. You gotta find out about those for yourselves. ...more

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Feb 12, 2018 Christopher Robinson rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: read-and-kept, favorite-books, very-favorite-novels, read-2018

I finished Women and Men late last night and I don’t know what to do with myself. After three months spent dwelling inside of this massive text, I’m left feeling like I’ve just gotten back from weeks spent out on a boat in rough seas; I had gotten used to the waves, to the chaos and unpredictability. And now, to be back on solid ground, to no longer be reading Women and Men... well, I don’t really know what to do with myself. I feel almost empty, lost, hesitant to start in on another novel today ...more

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Oct 29, 2018 Jason rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

I was absolutely elated, having very much wanted to read it for some time, when Dzanc announced it was publishing a new edition (the third, ever) this year of Joseph McElroy's quasi-infamous and presumably seldom-read (or certainly finished) WOMEN AND MEN. But hold the phone. That ain't all. Some time before the book's materialization, Dzanc announced on social media that they were offering for sale a number of copies signed by the author (!). Needless to say, I lept at the opportunity to acquir I was absolutely elated, having very much wanted to read it for some time, when Dzanc announced it was publishing a new edition (the third, ever) this year of Joseph McElroy's quasi-infamous and presumably seldom-read (or certainly finished) WOMEN AND MEN. But hold the phone. That ain't all. Some time before the book's materialization, Dzanc announced on social media that they were offering for sale a number of copies signed by the author (!). Needless to say, I lept at the opportunity to acquire one of these signed copies, going through a small amount of rigamarole in order to do so from Canada, where I reside. There were minor delays with the release of the edition, but long story short: I have been living with my signed copy of WOMEN AND MEN for a few months and it may well be my most prized possession. I have been waiting for a block of time wherein I would have some considerable grace to dedicate myself to it relatively unobstructed. And have I ever! It pleases me tremendously that I have managed to read McElroy's massive and wildly ambitious tome in twelve days. Eleven days, actually. On the fourth day I wasn't able to read even a single page as I was driving about the province in order to gather family members to attend a 100-year-old woman's birthday party. Eleven days, then. That's an average of nearly 118 pages a day. As I proceeded, the number of pages I was reading per day kept increasing as the novel's grip tightened. In its last few hundred pages WOMEN AND MEN became so mad and stimulating that I thought my nervous system might overload. I am not sure I have had any previous experiences as reader of excitation quite this intense! But, of course, it was an experience I have already demonstrated that I was primed for. Why? Ambitious novels by the so-called postmodernist American novelists (especially Gaddis, Gass, Coover, and Pynchon) have long given me more pleasure than anything else on the market. In fact, the American writers attacked in Jonathan Franzen's notorious, execrable, and utterly unfortunate essay "Mr. Difficult" constitute a large list of my heroes. I also find extremely long novels very exciting, as the level of engagement they summon from me is often psychically and spiritually transformative. Franzen calls these many writers I revere not only "difficult" but "Status" writers, as though extremely ambitious and challenging novels are a kind of phallic, egotistical product of malformed pride, meant to garner admiration at the expense of providing pleasure for readers. Franzen would presumably say that the extraordinary pleasure I experience reading ambitious and mind-pummelling literature is either me kidding myself or merely a freakish aberration entirely beside the point. Also: far from a kind of phallocentric manspreading, I find a novel like WOMEN AND MEN feminine in the extreme, as fertility and abundance might well be feminine concepts par excellence. This is especially important in relation to this particular novel in terms of how the work grapples with gender and purges itself of toxins. I do not think art like this is done for Status. I think it is done in direct engagement with tradition and with the Gods. When you undertake to do something this monumental, it so clearly has to be about commitment to the work itself, and I find assertions to the contrary absolutely incredible. The postmodern American writer with whom McElroy probably has the most in common, from the standpoint of theme and craft, is Thomas Pynchon. McElroy himself has confessed a certain fraternity. Ribald and dense twentieth-century novels were routinely compared to GRAVITY'S RAINBOW, but because it is a network novel informed by science, technology, and geopolitics--not to mention no small amount of entropy and paranoia--in the case of WOMEN IN LOVE the comparison is apt. McElroy is less baroque than Pynchon; there is far less orgiastic slapstick. WOMEN IN LOVE is massive and encyclopedic, though spiritually very open and expansive. At times it made me think of Rilke, at times it made me think of Dickens. I don't know if Wallace was influenced by WOMEN AND MEN, but the novel would have to be considered as much a precursor to INFINITE JEST as is GRAVITY'S RAINBOW. It is interesting that McElroy's massive novel is set primarily in New York in the late seventies, because perhaps the work of art it most reminded me of is Jacques Rivette's twelve-hour 1971 film OUT 1, something of its Parisian cinematic equivalent. Both WOMEN AND MEN and OUT 1 are urban, paranoid, and concerned with the domain of the conspiratorial, both are network narratives, and both feature a male and a female protagonist who almost completely fail (in McElroy's novel COMPLETELY fail) to directly interact. (The theatre groups of OUT 1 find their equivalent in WOMEN AND MEN in the form of the production of a fantastically odd sub-sub-Verdian HAMLET opera.) WOMEN AND MEN is composed primarily of essentially three different kinds of sections. Chapters about the main characters, quasi-Chekhovian slices of life featuring New Yorkers who are often completely divorced from any of the central action, and long sections called BREATHERS. Reading about WOMEN AND MEN over the years, I had begun to assume that the BREATHERS would be borderline unintelligible, sort of like the passages of near-gibberish in ULYSSES, but that is far from the case. Far from being the slotted-off breaks the designation might suggest, these sections are where much of the core business and real magic happens. Breathing is foregrounded as the central component of our embodied experience. In these sections embodied experience merges with fragmentation and the dissolution of the subject. They mobilize a kind of web of kinetic interbeing. Late in the novel an astral projecting convict talks of the Coloidal Unconscious. All our spirits are bound up in one another. Everything literally dissolves into a psychospiritual community stew. The BREATHERS also invite the voices of "angels" and "interrogators." "Angel" is described as a category as broad as "animal" or "mineral," and any given interrogator could be, in the language of the author, "so internalized it could be I or they across that sexually shared ocean.” Degrees of clairvoyance are ubiquitous in the novel, people serving as "transponders around the infinite network clinging to Earth’s made-to-measure finite sphere-cozy of a surface." At times the novel verges on science fiction. Perhaps its central image belongs to a future (to which the male protagonist Jim Mayne would seem to also belong in some mysterious parallel): lines of men and women lined up two by two and stepping onto a pad that transports them through space and causes them to emerge as one person. Elsewhere in the novel looms the specter of a non-lethal radiation that can turn one person into two. The sun and the moon at times become individually doubled. The central fixation of the novel is ultimately with the merger and separation of the sexes, the fraught contingencies of coupling. Jim Mayne, divorced journalist, represents that male side of the equation. Though, again, he is not a contained subject--he is radically the contrary. Late in the novel he is described as "part of a multiple scene but not any one answer to it." Grace Kimball (also divorced) is the principal female character, the woman who lives in his apartment complex but who he never quite meets. (I would like to pause here to just insert that there are A LOT of charcters in this novel.) As an at times exaggerated embodiment of trends relating to second wave feminism emergent in the New York of the 70s, Grace, who runs sex-positive Body-Self workshops, frequently speaks of the the need to temporarily sequester the sexes, dismantle the institution of marriage, integrate a culture of swinging, and even jokes about the necessity of subjecting men to a little "light rape." A recent article in the Paris Review by Adam Dalva worried me somewhat by suggesting that McElroy's treatment of feminism is possibly a little harsh. I was a little worried that I might have some reactionary ugliness in store for me. It would seem that McElroy did have unpleasant (for him) personal involvements with women belonging to circles similar to Grace's during the period (in the locale) the novel is set. He does also say, however, in discussion with Dalva, that he had also sympathized with the aims of the feminists he knew. It is clear that he wishes to mostly engage phenomena in good faith. And let me just say that Grace Kimball is a marvelous characters, a person I like and enjoy. She lays down a good rap and it is hard not to cozy to her. I will hardly be alone in feeling this. What I think kind of haunts the novel is divorce. Broken families. (Bears noting that McElroy does suggest that suicide was a common, and far from preferable, alternative to divorce before the relative popularization of legal separation.) What I believe bothers McElroy is glib and cavalier attitudes to these matters. Family is very important to WOMEN AND MEN. It is a source of ache and irresolution. As is romantic love. Giant global conspiracies ultimately become a matter of the family and the imperative to connect (and retain connection). It is a teeming novel of dazzling accrual. It would be folly to go any further attempting to sketch its scope. I thought of the famous story, possibly apocryphal, relating how the screenwriters of the movie adaptation of THE BIG SLEEP asked Raymond Chandler who had committed one of the murders in his novel, only to have Chandler confess that he didn't know. I wonder how much of a lock McElroy had on his palimpsest. How outlined is this giant? Was there an effort to produce layers of mystification or rather to operate from within it? What finally stuns about the book is the sheer abundance of moving pieces and the confounding levels of interrelation. The build is absolutely tidal (and the building towering). I am left with the sense of the importance of intimate connection and personal reflection in an interconnected world of daunting and irreducible complexity. And I am left with the insistent sense that creating art can be heroic. ...more

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Dec 05, 2015 Ronald Morton rated it it was amazing

Shelves: dalkey-archive, favorites

“Women and men maybe weren’t meant to get along”

I was talking to a co-worker about this book when I was about halfway through, simultaneously praising it and cautioning my co-worker about its difficulty level. The co-worker asks me, “what’s it about?” and I laugh a bit, and trail off, “well, that’s a bit tough to answer…”

It is partly about the close and even microscopic interrelations between women and men, which are always there. Also, the book sees that there are strange similarities betw

“Women and men maybe weren’t meant to get along”

I was talking to a co-worker about this book when I was about halfway through, simultaneously praising it and cautioning my co-worker about its difficulty level. The co-worker asks me, “what’s it about?” and I laugh a bit, and trail off, “well, that’s a bit tough to answer…”

It is partly about the close and even microscopic interrelations between women and men, which are always there. Also, the book sees that there are strange similarities between women and men—however, I cannot say that without acknowledging that this fundamental relationship happened during a time when second generation feminism was so important in New York, and there was a war going on that opened up all of the United States.
-Joseph McElroy, on Women and Men

There’s something expansive to be said about the fact that in a book “partly about the close and even microscopic interrelations between women and men” that the main male and female characters never meet - McElroy’s statement is spot on; within that context Women and Men explores in minute detail just how interrelated are the lives of its two main characters - it “microscopically”, patiently, weaves a jumbled, convoluted skein of characters – and families, and histories, and observers; stretched without regard to chronological time – that tie James/Jim Mayn and Grace Kimball close together, even when they are only passingly aware of the other.

Trey Strecker: Your novels are remarkably spatial--the reader experiences first-hand connective networks, cognitive processes, neural neighborhoods, as you call them in the title of one of your early essays.
Joseph McElroy: I'm glad you say "first-hand." And spatial, I guess so: sounds good. If you mean displacing time sequence with a theme unfolding, that's common in novels. Displacing time with space, though--is it me? is it the city? is it congenital attention shifts turning into a rhythm that layers time?--several things at once, the all-at-once, so extension in space comes across more than time passage. What good it is, I have no idea. It seems accurate.

Strecker and McElroy’s description of the reader’s interaction with Women and Men is incisive – especially McElroy’s reinforcement of the “first-hand” aspect of it; this book completely and entirely subsumes the reader into its narrative; the book, in its own way, becomes easier as it progresses.

But what about the book itself?

It begins with a birth.

But at the end when the elbows and hands and bottom and knees came free, slip, blip, grind no bump-and she only much later thought of the gunk draining out then, and nothing seemed to matter except the glistening baby that was younger than last month and was a baby beyond boy or girl, beyond not before, and then without strangeness nothing at all for quite a long moment seemed to matter-or be between them-not even the baby that was O.K., she’d looked at her husband behind the young doctor’s hands and she found tears on her husband’s seedy unshaven cheeks, tears from the wonderful vagueness in his eyes and on his forehead too, as if he had wept upward into his thick, bristly hair. But later she remembered what she could remember, as if she might have receded into her own breathing and part of her was never to be seen again, and knew he told the truth when he said it hurt him to see her in pain, and then she recalled those tears upon his forehead and saw that of course they were sweat. And she knew that while he did not look at her while he waited down there between her legs with the doctor, the tears that he could not keep from running out onto his face were not only for his daughter, because they did not-she was sure, she was sure-fill up his eyes and drop onto his skin until suddenly he had looked up past the appearing baby to look her in the eye-us, us--as he had not been able to down there at that end of the delivery table before now.

The opening five pages of the novel are utterly perfect – I’ve never came across a better depiction of birth anywhere in literature – and also they are utterly deceptive. See, the chapters which are titled entirely in lowercase – the opening chapter being one of them – are quite straightforward and accessible, functioning almost as short stories breaking up the rest of the book. The language in these sections is still dense, bulky, and at times opaque – so when reading the opening chapter I thought I understood why the book was considered difficult (I mean, I was expecting 1200 pages of this type of density). And then the next 100 pages or so just sort of punches the reader between the eyes. No one but McElroy writes like this – and I mean that both as praise and as recommendation.

I said above that the book becomes “easier”, and I mean it, but this book never becomes easy. It is densely populated with characters, many of whom are introduced early but not named until much later in the book – leading the reader to likely make false connections and relationships between characters only described or referenced by pronoun – even with the named characters in the book the relationships are often unclear, sometimes only revealing themselves through small details buried in page long sentences of exposition. Additionally, while the book is primarily set in New York in the mid 1970’s, it also spans centuries, mostly past but also a theoretical future, and often does so within the same chapter, the same paragraph, even sometimes in the same sentence. And so tenses are confused and jumbled. Not just tenses, but narrators as well. The narration of this book – if I’m reading the chapters titled in all caps correctly – is one being induced through a combination of interrogation and torture. And the narrators are plural, and the narrators are (I believe, I’m mostly going with the prevalence of this term throughout the novel) angels. Being such, they appear to exist outside of time and are seeing the story all at once – again, gleaned through the ALL CAPS titled chapters – and at a level of detail surpassing our own. And yet, McElroy pulls all of this off, and it is both overwhelming and breathtaking. Oh, and to add to all of that, the book is roughly 700,000 words – dense, monolithic pages of words – making it roughly 50% longer than War and Peace. (credit to somewhere to that piece of trivia – I don’t remember now where I came across it). This is a book that carries with it a reputation of being a difficult read; some books of this reputation are mostly just dense and long and only really require brute force on the part of the reader – Infinite Jest, The Tunnel, Ulysses – while others are difficult at the most basic narrative level – Gravity’s Rainbow, The Recognitions, Finnegan’s Wake. This book firmly falls into the latter camp; one could easily read its 1200 pages and leave no wiser than they came in.

More than anything though I love the way McElroy writes:

And yet we need that child or children. (There’s one or two of them right in the next room.) We said to our child in the next room, to our babe, our love, our hope for ourself, our sweet honest force, “How much light is there, then?" for the all-purpose child is doing its four terms of science dwarfed into one- and-a-half class-weeks (pill-assisted memory-wise, but we didn’t dare ask) and it should (our child) come up with a few of the answers and should know a thing or two about light; and it answers, “Plenty to go around,” it was us, not the kid, the kid knows a dumb question when it hears it (How much light is there?); yet then, inspired by pity, the child with angelic directness is heard to say, “Light is inside people so long as ...” and we add (because maybe that’s as far as our child is up to in class and because the light inside us feels deflected or busted, that sort of thing, though rebounding), “… so long as they turn,” because we have found upon turning that there’s light that likes that, inside us, it makes sounds during eye contact and in turn finds others nearby who have just turned as well, though not necessarily to us – “as long as they,” now continues the child formula from the next room, “turn it on!” This plus the cheer that accompanies the everyday discovery of the light that is cast by ice cream in the refrigerator.

Almost every page contains some standout paragraph or sentence (or entire page). More than that, the book is almost entirely self-referential; the narrative seems to spiral in on itself throughout the book, revisiting scenes and times and expanding slowly on them, revealing more and more of the narrative as the book progresses. It is intricate at a stupefying level, and breathtaking throughout the entire read.

I realize I’ve rambled a bit (a lot) here, but I needed to get as much of this down now as I could before some of the impact of this book began to dissipate. I am stunned by this magnificent book, I pity whatever book I read next for its failure in comparison (I’ll be gentle). ...more

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Sep 16, 2019 Michael rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: literary, postmodern, doorstop-mega-books, favorites, mcelroy

I've struggled with what to say about this book. I mean, what could I say that would do justice to this brilliant work of art? I am puny and insignificant in its presence, and others more learned than I have said better. Still, I feel compelled to say something, however trivial, if only to count myself in as an ardent devotee of WOMEN AND MEN.

This is one of only a handful of transformative novels that I am likely to discover in my lifetime of reading [though I can hope for a few more], the kind ...more

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Jul 06, 2020 Kevin Adams rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

What a way to spend the July 4th weekend. Finishing one of the great American Novels. Ever. Sorry guys, no watching fireworks. Dad’s finishing his book.

Not much I can say that will be better and more profound than the other McElroyites (???) on GR. It’s amazing. My first McElroy was Actress in the House when released in 2004(?) and then Lookout Cartridge and Women and Men. Care of the NYC public library. Much, much better this time. I’m smarter, more focused and I just loved it this time around. ...more

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Nov 13, 2015 David M rated it it was amazing

A shock near the end:

"It was as if suddenly, looking into the revealed distance, we could think." (pp 1161)

And pray tell what is it that we think when suddenly granted the ability to do so (but then what in this 1192 page tome is really "sudden"?). That, I wager, is precisely not the point. It's not a question of content.

I am reminded (all-too-conveniently, perhaps) of my favorite poet, the great Wallace Stevens. At the start of Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction, apostrophizing his art, "The vivid A shock near the end:

"It was as if suddenly, looking into the revealed distance, we could think." (pp 1161)

And pray tell what is it that we think when suddenly granted the ability to do so (but then what in this 1192 page tome is really "sudden"?). That, I wager, is precisely not the point. It's not a question of content.

I am reminded (all-too-conveniently, perhaps) of my favorite poet, the great Wallace Stevens. At the start of Notes Towards a Supreme Fiction, apostrophizing his art, "The vivid transparence that you bring is peace"... For all his elaborate metaphors, the intricate/infinite evasions of as, etc, Stevens is writing manifestos for an entirely different, much simpler kind of poetry - a poetry of objects clearly perceived. His often baroque style, however, is not obfuscation or irrelevant decoration but the labor necessary to achieve a second naivete.

I talk about Stevens in part because, having just finished Women and Men less than an hour ago, I'm not entirely confident I yet have the ability to discuss McElroy on his own. He is certainly a unique writer. The resemblances I see may just be my own feeble efforts to come to grips with this uniqueness.

Both McElroy and Stevens are unafraid of abstractions - blooded abstractions - and both take the weather very, very seriously.

In the interest of not giving away anything for the next reader, I shall leave the absolute last sentence unquoted in all its seven-word-long, declarative wonder.

*

I heartily recommend this book. I'd never even heard of it until I joined Goodreads this year (the author's name looked vaguely familiar). I was at once intrigued and a little skeptical. Was it really that great, or just very long and difficult and obscure?

Well, now I've read it all and while I can't claim to have absolutely loved every word and minute of it, nonetheless I found it compulsively readable for stretches lasting a hundred pages or more. The writing is often nothing less than astonishing, and as an artist McElroy has real warmth and generosity. Among other things, an intimate portrait of the late seventies, that time when the revolution had definitively failed to materialize and people were forced to move on with their libidinal energies. One might uncharitably characterize Grace Kimball and her friends as yuppies. One might, but then again one might hesitate due to the book's presiding spirit of hospitality. This is not black comedy or satire. McElroy must be one of the least cynical writers alive.

(As a narcissistic addendum, dear Goodreads, please allow me to say that I love the fact this book was published in 1986. Not only was that the year of my birth, it was also the year my idol Jean Genet finally left this vale of tears, as well as the year of the publication of perhaps my all-time favorite novel, A Book of Memories by Peter Nadas. This suggests many possibilities for either simultaneous or successive reincarnation.) ...more

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Oct 27, 2011 tENTATIVELY, cONVENIENCE rated it it was amazing

Recommends it for: EXTREMELY PATIENT READERS

Shelves: literature

review of
Joseph McElroy's Women and Men
by tENTATIVELY, a cONVENIENCE - October 27, 2011

I. 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 ...more

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Aug 27, 2011 Marc rated it it was amazing

This is one of the best novels I have ever read. It's also one of the most difficult.

McElroy does beautiful and strange things with the English language I have not seen done before, but no matter how dense matters get (and they get very dense in parts) the book is always moved by an amazing generosity - like getting concepts just out of your intellectual reach explained to you by friendly and very patient non-human entities (which actually could go as a plot-summary of sorts.) That said, he is a ...more

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Dec 17, 2012 Perifian rated it it was amazing

Shelves: my-sacred-texts, favorites, 1xyz

review In PROGRESS

Therefore we must learn to think in terms of an articulated structure that can cope with a multiplicity of small-scale units. — E. F. Schumacher

prolegomenonsense

I, inchoate (almost Larry's age in furthest non-Lagrangian thread), of mostly speculative fictional background, discovered JPM through comparison in review now unfortunately lost to me, postmodern literary movement recently isolated; infinite gratitude, anonymous angel. Further inquiry returned presence of novel in v review In PROGRESS

Therefore we must learn to think in terms of an articulated structure that can cope with a multiplicity of small-scale units. — E. F. Schumacher

prolegomenonsense

I, inchoate (almost Larry's age in furthest non-Lagrangian thread), of mostly speculative fictional background, discovered JPM through comparison in review now unfortunately lost to me, postmodern literary movement recently isolated; infinite gratitude, anonymous angel. Further inquiry returned presence of novel in various catalogues of longitude et operosity, sought traits; latter primarily from prætension, necessitation of intellection, accretion of aptitude for delectation of such, and masochism, former for final and for guarantee, in combination, of 'noble failure' status as WCS. I perused reviews of œuvre, encountering GR, demonstrative quotations, critical analyses, essays of and by. I would auspicate with W&M, in its generality a frame/canvas for other opera of greater specificity. Zealous, I lacked sagacity in purchase; I could now be in possession of the Ultramarine Press edition and additional affluence; how very Yulish of me (fortunately electronic and paperback publication is imminent for all impurists).

Archiseismotectonics

After reading internal evaluatory blurb (Ulysses reference understandable from a mental perspective; occasional bicyclical forays, elevators and fridges aside), and a note on the type (I was unaware that this was a thing), I was struck by the intensity of the selected epigraphic quotations, masculinity and femininity, segments and humanity. The index is first indication of undulation (structural palpability facilitating), existent also within chapters (breathers are granted) (difficulty in comprehension of text at primary level is rare, elicited by beautifully bizarre analogies and general profound humours ((musical) tone is frequently light, fortunate in exploration of suicide collateral)), in various respects; I had read that the amount of majuscule characters present in a title was directly proportional to its difficulty and was daunted by the increased PREVALENCE in approach of conclusion, further upon rendezvous with breather. The first poignant chapter, punny title (JPM has a fondness for calembours, indicated by (smiles) in a certain section, meaningful ambiguity invoking castigation from interrogator), concerns birth (and conception, if I correctly already remember), a uniquely female physiological process (why must pain be forgotten?) and the farthest and closest point betwixt, though distance, or illusion, is stressed in party (?), the denouement occurs partially in a cemetery where Mayn dreams and realises that he does. Times are jumped between; this particular partial stream of consciousness is the most realistic representation that I have read, thoughts flowing, converging, colliding and escaping in their natural habitat as opposed to the "let's sit down and think" variety so frequently encountered. I would frequently interrupt my reading to write quotations, create phrases and paragraphs, draw sketches, peripatetically ratiocinate (or tilt head up and to the left, close eyes and delib(e)rate or LD), beam elatedly or rest, comfortable and content, the density was, for me, frequently exhausting; if I felt that I had begun to appreciate and/or understand less, I would, with mignardise, slide the tome back between my hardbacks, return later, occasionally after a period of several weeks, read a word or two, repeat the aforementioned process, return, read two hundred pages, all dependant on various circumstances; if I failed to inject and extract meaning and connections into every word and overarch, I would backtrack and attempt again. I would have preferred to work on this review during as conceptual vastness occasionally supersedes impressive memorability from overwhelming power. The second CHAPTER was initially rather perplexing, the significance of certain (variable) images (combined), meditation upon which (tapeworm to tornado to our gregarious locusty) (and words and phrases (variations in repetitions) and relations(hips) (though I cannot recall mention of Jim's paternal grandparents, rather strange as a grandfather whom I have never met and, sadly, can never meet, is a heavy part of me and seen in me by others and myself) and systems (meteorology (McElroy also appreciates noctilucents and all) and œconomy as analogues, reminiscent of Mosley's marvelous wavicular whimsy)) triggers for recollection and addition of præceding epiphanies to aforementioned articulated structure internalised and constructed throughout opus by reciprocity, synæsthesia, by one and all (especially apparent inBETWEEN HISTORIES), becoming gradually almost entirely apparent considerably later (to fanfare of progressive cathartic lucidity, inspiration, exhilaration (I am glad that mine own written dib-dabblings have aided appreciation); this is still a work (power) in progress for me. Several notable personal infiltrations/perichoreses were born of Bhagavad Gita, ear infection, marital dissolution, childhood storytelling, et cetera. Mechanistic (over?) analyses were prevalent due to intent of complete encapsulation (funny(ish) example: Mayn = Many = Mayan (continental predecessors surfacing) = Mayan (illusory construct (multiple coincidental meanings)) = Man = May = cetera - laughable considering only dipping in at that point (don't get me started on OG)) but were replaced by sensory imaginaria(s) and existence as a mirror to and text and world respectively et vice versa. It is frequently difficult to imagine that the text (as a whole and extracts) was actually written; it appears not even organic, a planet in the process of accelerated formation, something vast, gravitational collapse, galactic vortices, a photograph of a nebula, ineffable, imagining our solar system a single pixel afore potential stars so seemingly small upon our shining screens. The characters, kith, kin, one along, radiating from and between the M/F foci, as whorled fingertips in Michelangelo's creation of Adam, synaptic cleft and tense void, appear not created isolate but a selected sample. The size of the codex and several chapters may appear intimidating or attractive (I can imagine rates of enjoyable reading varying considerably) but is certainly justified and necessary as evident (dropped excerpts exist in NS & PFS, I look forward to digesting the former soon now after completion to understand decision, prior to completion of current bibliography (review enhanced by viewing work in relation), finalised by joyously anticipated, triumphant return to this book), though I have experienced page position slightly influencing verbal impact (+ve & (rarely) −ve). I feel immensely privileged to have heard of and read (with musical accompaniment, though nobody more bombastic than the Young-Reich-Riley-Glass quartet) this novel (as most, apparently, inevitably (on account of ridiculous quality and obscurity)) at so (relatively) young an age and intend to evangelise and present to proliferate knowledge of and love for this resplendent masterpiece.

Here is a wave cloud in reward of your diligence:
description

...more

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Mar 08, 2015 Max rated it it was amazing

Shelves: favorites

I've read that McElroy writes like Pynchon, or Gaddis. He doesn't. If he did, people would read him. I don't really know how to succinctly describe his writing, it seems like he's writing some kind of humanist bible for aliens who want to reconstruct a diorama of the fears and aspirations that go into existing in a major metropolitan area.

It's beautiful, but so is a lot of stuff. A lot of fish are beautiful, so are certain types of rocks. Beautiful is not that great. What sets this apart from m ...more

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Jul 01, 2018 sean rated it it was amazing · review of another edition

Shelves: 2018

as i was coming to the end of women and men, i started thinking about why a book like this -- originally put out in hardcover by knopf, of all publishers -- might be forgotten. not just forgotten, but culturally erased: do even the slightest research and you’ll find that, now out of print, even paperback copies of this book go for a minimum of $100 USD on abebooks. philip roth said shortly before he died that while the medium of the novel may endure as capitalism accelerates, the act of reading ...more

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Mar 23, 2021 Andrew Sare rated it really liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: dalkey-archive

"All people matter or all people are matter"

I'm not one to reread a book, but I admit Women and Men could benefit from rereading. The first read to try to hold on to the storyline over 1,000+ pages with McElroy doing a fair bit to shake you. You build up some theories of what has happened. The second reading might be to test the theory or theories you have developed of the plot, and the third would be to finally just enjoy the form.

In the end everything is more-or-less revealed and I'd say it's "All people matter or all people are matter"

I'm not one to reread a book, but I admit Women and Men could benefit from rereading. The first read to try to hold on to the storyline over 1,000+ pages with McElroy doing a fair bit to shake you. You build up some theories of what has happened. The second reading might be to test the theory or theories you have developed of the plot, and the third would be to finally just enjoy the form.

In the end everything is more-or-less revealed and I'd say it's brilliant, a great work - but to get to that point you're forced to wear a hair shirt and give it your all. My advice is to embrace the discomfort. Over the course of reading this I had written out two earlier reviews, now deleted, reflecting hopefulness in the first third and making proclamations of brilliance, to confusion and dejection, then finally elation, enlightenment, enjoyment

My experience of reading this was perhaps similar to if I had a time machine or perfect memory and could relive my life, and reinvent some parts along the way. Looking back first I could imagine that I relive the big stuff, and beyond my own life span I might look for family legends and mysteries, add to them, explore and follow these narratives into the far future. If I did this enough times, for long enough, I might end up just jumping from one moment to the other looking at day to day moments of tranquility or conflict to linger in which define, or give a better picture of my essence or help me understand my existence.

If supersonic science and physics are what you’re looking for I suggest you skip to the shorter work: “Plus”. This work was like Plus to the maximum through maximalism overload. Of course if you read the essays about Women and Men first it might be much easier, but then have you lost something, have you experienced this as you were intended to?

If reading for the prose, you’ll find lots to love. There are some big emotional wounds and existential problems being chewed on. The chapter “news” made my throat constrict a bit like moments of a Richard Ford novel. Of course, you’ll also find this stuff more consistently in works by realists, but its good here too. Other areas of the text, especially near the beginning read somewhat more like poetry, to savour by the sip, by the sentence. Though, McElory eases off the early poetic forms and this turns into textual wilderness that’s easy to get lost in, until the last 150 or so pages where there is some clarity.

What a ride! ...more

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Jan 21, 2010 Brent Hayward rated it it was amazing

Verging on indecipherable, but mesmerizing and a way to look at people and cities and the machination thereof in ways you never have before. There's nothing that can prepare you for the experience of reading this - except maybe a few tabs of acid. ...more

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Jun 27, 2013 Dustin marked it as to-read

Recommended to Dustin by: Aloha

Shelves: challenging-literature, psychological, historical-fiction, classics, post-modernism, nook, defies-categorization, science, ethnography

I just read the synopsis of Woman and Men, and I am in complete awe by it depth and scope, stunned by what the author has apparently achieved with the utmost brilliance! I am VERY interested in this massive tome, I simply MUST read it! Thank you, once again, Aloha!!

Also courtesy of Aloha, in regards to Post-Modernism:

"In short, postmodernism deconstructs everything such that you're forced to take a second look at what you normally take for granted. We're on auto-pilot with our preconceived no

...more

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Oct 25, 2018 Adam rated it really liked it · review of another edition

A book is a book is a book, right? Of course not. Women & Men is alive, despite its resemblance to a tombstone. Which ought to remind us not only of the would-be readers it has buried but—better—the should-have-been-better books whose forgettable existence it immures. So before you baulk at the bulk, try to gratefully fathom how much shiterature McElroy has spared you.

I don't have the delusive audacity to believe I could add anything to what The Book itself already says or to what the studious A book is a book is a book, right? Of course not. Women & Men is alive, despite its resemblance to a tombstone. Which ought to remind us not only of the would-be readers it has buried but—better—the should-have-been-better books whose forgettable existence it immures. So before you baulk at the bulk, try to gratefully fathom how much shiterature McElroy has spared you.

I don't have the delusive audacity to believe I could add anything to what The Book itself already says or to what the studious cohort of readers and reviewers have already said about it. (See here.) I am but one reader, McElroy but one author. I am loath to bore you with my expurrience nor can I presume authorial intentions. But I will say that McElroy's love for readers is matched by his genius for writing: he cares enough to let you suffer to learn, to pay the price for bliss, knowledge, growth. In his own testimony:

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

The book is replete with words put together in astounding, luminous series—the sort of thing readers commonly anticipate from books worth reading. It is also frequently very difficult (but this you know) to find the purpose of a page, to recall how or why the sentence started and therefore how or why you should tarry with it. The period is the point. Said again slowly, the period is the point. The duration immersed in the flood of language puts the punctuation on the Meaning. Aestheticians of infinite ilk have claimed the identity of art and life; Women & Men takes the words right out of their mouths and puts them to practice on the page.

Like the universe to itself—which, while not We, approaches (always a mile or two too late) the receding idea which proves that We ourselves are neither that universe, nor it us, nor are, very much of the time, that articulating commonalty heretofore capable of accommodating a multiplicity of small-scale units, which, it has occurred to us as we have curved through the bodies of our history a work without a gear, locate us as (no joke, no future joke) what is within Mayn and within the elsewhere-busied Grace Kimball and others as what they don’t know they know about each other and a world, which “there” is outself-growing, too. (p.449 Dzanc)

To expel language at the speed of thought, to isolate and sustain the right notes in an unceasing cacophony. Due to its formal and material autonomy, the book defeats life. It exercises the discrepancy between text and reading—in other words, between the (illusion of a complete) aesthetic object and the phenomenological process of perceiving it—my thoughts do not always come out in sentences, but they are this long. The text mimics and teaches this. No one can live up to the demands this book places, which renders it exactly like or as if life. Could you ever, in numerous readings or lives, figure it all out or make all the connections? Ostensibly yes, someone can, just not you, not now. The reader is as prodigal and adrift as the mytho-modern-metro-meteorological (MMMM) torrent disguised as literature. On the distant horizon there is a convergence of what the novel is saying and what the book is doing. Like women and men. Am I getting closer? To what?! No. You may think you see its beginning and end but somewhere in the middle when you let it inside it instils or distils (an? (more?!)) infinity. The book, like life, escapes you, but you can’t get away from it. It is a test for which failure is the only correct answer. But the style of the shortcoming, as long as it lasts, is as close to truth as mortal readers and writers can attain.

Goodreaders, I confess in retrospect I did a bad reading. I stopped caring how or if Everything Is Connected and enjoyed/endured whatever the prose was doing. I’ve tried here to evoke something of the scope, the purview of historytimememoryperceptionthoughtangelsanglesspeechnewswindbreath which, like discrete yet inseparable water molecules, are poured into every sentence. It’s amazing, it’s exhausting. The prospect of drowning is no reason not to take the plunge.

“That's all that matters - paying attention. It is the most difficult thing in the world to get the average reader to do, as a result of the conditions under which the sport of reading is carried out.” -Lacan
...more

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Jun 19, 2018 Joyce rated it did not like it

i might have rated this book higher if i didn't resent it so much. it's not that it is bad exactly, if it were even half the size it is it i would probably think it merely mediocre.

it's easy to see the raptures this book induces in its readers, readers with whom my tastes are largely in line. i waited years for this reprint, its one of the most expensive books i've ever bought, and i spent almost a month reading it. a huge (almost the hugest) difficult (supposedly the most difficult) disappeared i might have rated this book higher if i didn't resent it so much. it's not that it is bad exactly, if it were even half the size it is it i would probably think it merely mediocre.

it's easy to see the raptures this book induces in its readers, readers with whom my tastes are largely in line. i waited years for this reprint, its one of the most expensive books i've ever bought, and i spent almost a month reading it. a huge (almost the hugest) difficult (supposedly the most difficult) disappeared due to underappreciation (this one is undeniable) postmodern meganovel, that form i love so much, this should have been perfect for me.

first of all, mcelroy's prose strikes all the wrong notes. he is clearly trying for grace and beauty but missing in a way the just grinds on you, there is no elegance. it is like discordant noise. his much vaunted difficulty (i wasn't much more challenged than usual by a novel) is just a result of him compounding many sentences into one. now i'm a fan of the long breathless sentence, but mcelroy just can't manage it and again it simply becomes annoying.

there is no subtlety to this book, there is nothing below the surface because mcelroy has such a large surface he needs to throw everything at it to fill it, so we have the constant grinding repetition of the key phrases (people r matter, an articulated etc) everything is stated and there is no hidden heart, everything is laid out immediately. nothing is ever hidden only to be revealed, there is only the stating of more and more facts that never actually advance on each other, it could have ended at any point.

for all mcelroy's claim to community this is a very limited novel, everything links back to mayn, every character seems to exist in a void populated only by the couple of other characters they are linked to.

mcelroy's overfocus on mayn at the expense of the titular women (or at least his supposed feminine counterpart grace kimball) would be a point of criticism were kimball's scenes not so spectacularly uncomfortable in their handling of her feminism.

the feminism itself and many other factors make it feel dated in a way the best meganovels dont, and its dated in a bad way rather than the neutral one of being an image of its time. and seeing as its about the 70s but was published in the 80s it must have been dated the moment it arrived.

i read night soul a few months ago and was largely unsatisfied, i found the prose there clunky too in its striving towards grace. but i attributed this to short stories not being mcelroy's field, like pynchon i assumed they were testing grounds for the real combat of the novels. that book was more bearable for its brevity. just the huge passages of nothing were unbearable, there was no aspect of the narrative i welcomed a turn to, they were all tiresome and empty.

i just cannot stress enough how much i wanted to like this book, how much i wanted the revelation to strike of its brilliance, how eager i was for this to happen still as i forced myself through turgid torrents about the goddamn east far eastern princess, and goddamn mayn not doing anything, and his goddamn childhood and grace goddamn kimball. i wanted to love the hermit inventor of new york, but couldn't bring myself to. mcelroy circles a vast number of ideas but does nothing with them.

the recurrence (at the very edges) of turn of the 20thc trade union conflicts and the chicago worlds fair simply made me miss against the day, and wish i was reading it again already. mcelroy writes like pynchon without feeling or depth. he understands there must be science, and there must be lots of characters and cutting back and forth, and a concern for obscure political evils, but he has no verve, no sense of beauty, he doesn't even seem a little horny when he writes about sex, he exhibits hardly any feeling at all.

one thing i have found interesting about mcelroy in my reading around him is that in his interviews he seems to talk exactly how he writes, that strange loppy dragging back and forth. i dont know what this means but its there. i henceforth renounce mcelroy and all his works ...more

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