The Letter Left to Me

by Joseph McElroy

Joseph McElroy brings to life a startling story of loss in 'The Letter Left To Me.' Written by a father to his son almost three years before the father's death, the letter in question is discovered a few days after the funeral. Powerful and moving when the boy first opens the envelope, his father's sober woprds warn him against life's daily distractions.

'The Letter Left To Me' is alive with the creative force of a young man struggling to make sense of himself and the people around him. In a style deceptively simple and direct, McElroy has again extended his range. The result is an American classic.

Genres: Fiction, Literature

152 pages, Paperback

First published August 12, 1988

About the author

Joseph 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.

Reviews

[s.penkevich [hiatus-will return-miss you all] · Rating 4 out of 5]

Each letter’s becoming different, it’s the person who’s laid eyes on it.

Whenever we send a message out into the world its reception is at the mercy of the interpretation of others, the original artistic expression assessed by the unique individual perspectives of all it touches. Thus is the nature of communication, and the web of preconceived notions, biases, or perhaps simply not listening accurately can take a message and pose and posture the meaning in an endless variety of ways. Thus is the nature of language and its elasticity in meaning. Joseph McElroy is a maestro on the strings of words, plucking them with finely-tuned care to compose the melody of language with an impressive layering of harmonies that capture the spirit of consciousness. The Letter Left to Me is another impressive literary phrase in the symphony of his career, condensing many of his themes and his style into a euphoria of interior investigation. Letter, at 152 pgs in the hardback edition, is small in stature, especially compared to the magnum opus of Women and Men which preceded this book, yet the shorter length is deceptive as McElroy contains a lifetime of insights and a vast universe of meaning coiling around the events of a father’s letter to his son as it moves from the singular to the plural.¹ McElroy magnificently juxtaposes the probing depths of internal turmoil and assessment of the letter as an individual as the letter moves outward into the world to become a universal, moving the story along like a skilled chess player positioning his pieces back and forth across the timeline of the young narrator’s life and mental investigation towards the perfectly crafted checkmate of conclusion.

‘The woman holding, then handing over the letter to this poised, dumbfounded fifteen-year-old: is the letter also hers?’

The opening sentence of Letter immediately readies the reader for an examination of ownership. The boy is handed a letter from his recently deceased father, a letter he wrote because ‘because I earnestly wish you to be a better man than I am.’ The letter is reprinted by the ‘family’ and sent to friends, then later to the Dean of the narrator’s university and further distributed to all students as a ‘lessons about life’ sort of deal.² All of this without consent of the narrator, the recipient of the letter as addressed by its author.

An actual discussion about what to do with the letter I believe did not happen. It is my fault. Not hearing isn’t so hard; for hearing is built almost of not-hearing. Do I recall not noting what was going on? Hey, wait a minute, that’s my letter.

Mere ownership of the letter itself is not McElroy’s aim, though the ethical analysis of such is an excellent primer for the further investigations aimed at. The letter is a physical representation of the message, a message the family believed should be put into the hands and hearts of those around them. This may be for a variety of reasons from general goodwill, to pride in their deceased son and his mental and emotional acuity.

His words were my words too.

Once the letter gets out into the world, it is examined and assessed by all who read it. Some praise the letter and tell the narrator how gifted and intelligent his father was. Some, such as a classmate, regard the letter as ‘bullshit’ or simple ‘propoganda’ This is their right, as once the letter has reached their hands and the message ingested, the fathers words become a part of them, become their words just as much as they had been the narrators. Javier Marias writes in his novel Tomorrow in the Battle Think on Me:

But each of us understands things as we choose to...once a story has been told, it’s anyone’s, it becomes common currency, it gets twisted and distorted, and we all tell our own version.

McElroy’s Letter is symbolic of novels themselves; once written the story belongs to all who read them and they are free to interpret them and review them by their own subjective approaches. Who owns words, who owns meaning? Which isn’t a negative, and explores the elasticity of language and meaning and the joys of literature where we can find our own meaning in endless ways³.

I put words together as if they’re my thinking.

Language is the heart of any McElroy novel and he has a unique and extraordinary method of letting words play together to extract meaning and reflect consciousness. The plot of Letter progresses by a back-and-forth of time to highlight ideas most necessary for discovery and understanding at a given time than for the sake of forward plot progress. Swirling through the interior world of the highly intelligent narrator, McElroy delivers sentences that sway to a rhythm to follow the natural dancesteps of inner thought in all its abstract wonders than to simply explain in linear movement. When thinking of his aunt sitting in their living room, the sentence naturally spins to an image of her in a pink cardigan leaving a church as this is the strong association with the Aunt as a Thing-in-herself for the narrator. Each image, each thought, bears the weight of prior experience and memory that attaches itself to the image. Words must be used to signify thoughts, and as the story of the Letter explores interpretation and ownership, so too do the individual words used in speaking about it. The narrator is highly intuned with the way people use words and the way words can be posed like dolls to affect a wide variety of postures and gestures. The same word can have different meanings or intention depending by how and by whom it is fired.

Esther uses “family” to mean foibles, the endearingly reliable kind. My Uncle, he said “family” to mean what his mother wanted...I am not using this word “family” myself much. I sounded the word in my mind. As if to an audience who can be pleased. Or as if something would happen…. “The Family” here means four persons, four members of my fathers “immediate” family…

McElroy is often considered a 'difficult writer', yet I find something so warm and inviting in his style. It's as if he is cheering you on, confident you can do it and wants you to achieve new heights in literature. When the moments of clarity and understanding hit, it is the purest and most joyful moments reading can offer, and this is what keeps me coming back for more. The Letter Left to Me is an extraordinary look into the world of the mind to see that the inner universe is just as expansive as the outer universe. Words and language are all brought out to dance gorgeously across the pages in a beautifully choreographed interpretive dance that demands the reader to take a look at each movement and determine the intended meaning. McElroy uses language and grammar in a way that is highly impressive and enviable, not being constrained by language but making it work for him, pushing it to overcome boundaries and showing it is more flexible than one could ever imagine. The world of words is ours for the taking, one in which we can all be the Kings and Queens, and this is cause for celebration.
4.5/5

‘The letter is everywhere and I can’t answer for it. I’ll answer the letter. I can’t. But I will.’

¹ A more insightful analysis of the contrast between McElroy’s ‘length’, in both pages and sentence structure, can be found in Nathan N.R. Gaddis’ review , which I highly recommend reading.

² It is interesting to wonder about this letter as it exists in the modern age of email and social media. This is the sort of thing that was once like a chain-letter, passed from email to email in mass sendings (occasionally under superstitious threat that ‘if you do not send this to at least 10 people it means you don’t love the Lord/will be murdered/won’t find love/etc’ [remember those?]) I was reminded of David Foster Wallace’s and George Saunder’s commencement speeches which circulated the internet before finding print and sold in every Barnes and Noble in America as This is Water and Congratulations, by the way, respectively (the links will lead you to the youtube readings of them if by some chance you have not heard them or had your father email them to you saying ‘thought this would be some inspiration to you.’)

³. I’m reminded of my literary theory classes where we examined Great Gatsby from a variety of views—economic, feminist, psychoanalytical, etc., each revealing a undercurrent of ideas overlooked or underplayed by the scope of other criticisms.

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

“This was something that stayed a secret for a while and then emerged from that unseen room into the public world, where it circulated, freely and openly, even though its true, undercover nature, its stolenness, remained concealed.” Ron Loewinsohn Magnetic Fields(s)

Joseph McElroy published The Letter Left to Me in the year following the publication of his massive Women and Men; the former a slender 152 pages, the later a massive 1191. Page count is not the only slendering found in Letter. The length and content of the sentences are reduced. Perspective shrinks from the planetary to the first-person of adolescence. The vocabulary has a bit less room to move around in. The temporality of Women and Men’s century wide span collapses to a mere 18 months. The inbetweenness and expansiveness of consciousness collapses into the self-absorbed and ineffectual. Letter is not a precis of McElroy’s work, but shows rather his ability to create the form and style required by the story. Between the two books is a range which establishes McElroy as a virtuoso thinker/ fictioner as much as either two on their own would indicate.

The Letter Left to Me concerns itself with a boy whose father has recently died leaving behind a Father’s Letter to His Son written three years prior to his death and delivered to the son three days following his death, handed to him by his mother who had found it in the desk’s drawer whence it had come from the safe-deposit box across the river where it had been kept these past three years. This letter addressed to him is slowly taken from him as it begins to circulate first among members of his family and friends of the family until 18 months later the Dean at his college distributes it among the entire 280 members of the Freshman class. The printing and distribution of the letter left for him was not his idea, not his initiative, yet neither did he do anything to halt its dispersal. Did he want this letter to be read by others? Whose letter was it? His father’s? His? Whose?

“I have written all this because I earnestly wish you to be a better man than I am.” --A Father to His Son.

We excerpt the following sentence as an example of what McElroy can do, a style of sentence of which there are perhaps only two in Letter:

So he’s demanding a change in my--not even my behavior but my body it comes to me now in college, this night that I came home after midnight, it is Christmas vacation, there is no answer, Christmas Vacation hollos through my unwary head, it has at this moment all gone wrong, every bit of it, every hope of it, this night kissing not the girl I loved but a girl I hardly knew--until I stopped wondering when her mother would come home, the girl’s hand on me, my face, my collarbone--and then talking about it, she and I, about kissing, about a double-fluted curve she almost like a sister makes her tongue do again now to show me what I have just been feeling as the clock passed midnight and twelve-fifteen, knowing that luckily tonight I’m a two-minute run from home, and kissing until one a.m., wanting to hold one of her stocking feet when she drew it up and her knee lifted her skirt, but all erased by my father’s anger at the door, intimacy exploded inside out.

The pertinent question becomes naturally enough whether The Letter Left to Me can be recommended as an entry into the prose and novels of Joseph McElroy. Not my first choice. Beginning with Letter is analogous to beginning Pynchon with The Crying of Lot 49. Yes, the voice is there, the themes are there, it’s all there. But it is not what these authors can do. For literary baby-steps these books are a temporal short-cut to getting a non-scalding sample of what is to come, but it is precisely “what is to come” that makes these authors great. Make no decision, in either case based on such a first contact. Letter will not prepare one any more for the majesty of Women and Men than Smuggler’s Bible prepared me; but such is the nature of preparation.


“The letter is everywhere and I can’t answer for it. I’ll answer the letter. I can’t. But I will.”



___________
A Note on the Type

This book was set in a digitized version of Granjon, a type named after Robert Granjon. George W. Jones based his designs for this type upon that used by Claude Garamond (c. 1480-1561) in his beautiful French books. Granjon more closely resembles Garamond’s own type than do the various modern types that bear his name. Robert Granjon began his career as type cutter in 1523 and was one of the first to practice the trade of type founder apart from that of printer.

Composed by Brevis Press, Bethany, Connecticut
Printed and bound by Fairfield Graphics, Fairfield, Pennsylvania
Design by Dorothy Schmiderer Baker

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

"He disappeared in the dead of winter:
The brooks were frozen, the airports almost deserted,
And snow disfigured the public statues;
The mercury sank in the mouth of the dying day.
What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day.

Far from his illness
The wolves ran on through the evergreen forests,
The peasant river was untempted by the fashionable quays;
By mourning tongues
The death of the poet was kept from his poems.

But for him it was his last afternoon as himself,
An afternoon of nurses and rumours;
The provinces of his body revolted,
The squares of his mind were empty,
Silence invaded the suburbs,
The current of his feeling failed; he became his admirers.

Now he is scattered among a hundred cities
And wholly given over to unfamiliar affections,
To find his happiness in another kind of wood
And be punished under a foreign code of conscience.
The words of a dead man
Are modified in the guts of the living.

But in the importance and noise of to-morrow
When the brokers are roaring like beasts on the floor of the Bourse,
And the poor have the sufferings to which they are fairly accustomed,
And each in the cell of himself is almost convinced of his freedom,
A few thousand will think of this day
As one thinks of a day when one did something slightly unusual.

What instruments we have agree
The day of his death was a dark cold day. "
- Auden

I had intended to write a review, but then discovered this:

http://www.princeton.edu/~eschor/sand...

and, even better, this:

http://www.electronicbookreview.com/t...

The light the Auden poem sheds on the content of the Novel should be obvious, and the phrase "he became his admirers" was echoing around my skull as I read.

I shall simply and briefly state that this is a seriously impressive piece of work from one of the still-living greats of Contemporary Fiction. Is is also very moving, not least when one knows how much may have its roots in the autobiographical.

[Jimmy Cline · Rating 2 out of 5]

It's interesting to read a novel by an experimental writer tackling subject matter that seems more suited for a writer with earnestly romantic sensibilities. Why is it so damn difficult to avoid mentioning the background of a writer such as Joseph McElroy? His prose; its elliptical opacity, its tendency to grasp everything at once, its introspective inquisitiveness, just seems to demand an explanation of sorts. This stuff clearly isn't normal. Stories do not read this way, even if it's a first-person narrative. McElroy assumes that myriad explanations are required for the smallest occurrences, or the most trivial day-to-day routines, more importantly, that there is something darker, more profound, and ultimately more complex to the most plebeian troubles of our everyday lives. Yet, when McElroy analytically gropes at the banal, he tends to overwrite simplicity with abstraction. Then again, this could be McElroy merely trying something new after the massive critical failure of his magnum opus, Women and Men. The Letter Left to Me is his attempt as a writer to grapple with one of the most troublesome inevitabilities of adult life; dealing with the death of a parent, especially the subsequent questions that a son or daughter might have that were forever left unanswered in the wake of a loved one’s passing.

The title is fairly straightforward. The son of a recently deceased academic has discovered a letter left to him by his father. His father studied chemistry at Harvard, and was a fairly successful man. Yet, from what the narrator only really alludes to about the content of the letter, it was a sort of speech about the destructive force of failure, and it was largely comprised of the father urging his son to avoid the mistakes that he made as a middle-aged man. The letter is disseminated widely; to the immediate family as well as throughout the school that the son is attending. The son struggles (inside of his head mainly) with the reality of the exposure of the letter, and what his father wanted to convey to him.

As is the case with many shorter, avant-garde fiction pieces such as this one, all of the essential details are deliberately omitted. By removing plot details that should normally concern the linear-minded reader, the bulk of the book itself is composed of artistically reflective descriptions. In McElroy's case, they are mainly physical ones. The make and year of the antique desk that the letter is first found in is described in meticulous detail. The young man's thoughts race around and around; from familial digressions, to the Autumnal east coast milieu that the story is set in, and on to his present academic life and a few fragmented bits of information about his father. Keep in mind, the story is really just one long digression of the central character's remembrances of his father.

McElroy is almost always this ponderous. It’s likely that if one were to crack open any one of his books at random, they are bound to catch a character reflecting on physical locations imbued with mystery and clues to even further reflections and endless daydreaming digressions. This might be what makes Women and Men so daunting, or so boring for that matter. Within the context of this short novel, the emphasis is placed on a semantically-driven comprehension of written words and thoughts; what the character thought of his father, what he thinks about what his relatives thought about his father, certain passages of the letter, and most importantly, what the father's notion of failure entailed, and how that might apply to his thoughts about the way in which his son is capable of disappointing his wishes.

One of the problems so central to the execution of this typically high-concept novel of McElroy's, is that his prose is far too lifeless to really foster any of the reader's interest in the emotional underpinnings of the family surrounding these two men, as well the poignant dynamic of their relationship in particular. McElroy's prose reads like the musical phrases of a Steve Reich composition. The minimal repetitions are nuanced enough to sound varied, but the dullness of what is being conveyed seems to drone on monotonously. This in turn, has a devastating effect on the momentum of story, or on the son's thoughts and how they flow. If this isn’t bad enough, there just isn't a cohesive enough theme to the specific concerns of any of the minor characters who happen upon the letter. It's occasionally curious enough to wonder at some of the dialogue between the son and a few of his fellow students, even members of the family who knew the father, but there is never anything intentionally revealing about any of their exchanges.

If this all sounds more or less like a long-winded way of asking what the point of all this is, it's because on the surface The Letter Left to Me intermittently hazards further analysis. It's obvious that the son's concern with the weightiness of something such as a posthumous letter from his father isn't supposed to be summarized or concluded in any way. The beauty to this story, it might seem, is to be found in the connections; physical and otherwise that tie families and friends together. Of course, this showed up a lot in A Smuggler's Bible, McElroy's first novel. One detected a similar obsession with physical objects that were imbued with memory; their power as metaphysical clues to the psychological yearnings and inclinations that the mind occasionally has. Unfortunately, all of the pieces, mainly the eponymous piece, carries so much psychological weight, weight that is explained away with complete indifference to any sort of effort at artistic concentration. Basically, a young man finds a letter that his father wrote to him before he died, it was well written, said some profound things about academic ambition, and the son thought about it for a while. These thoughts connect to other people, and as cycles of thoughts about terribly difficult problems in life tend to be, they're digressive to the point of inconclusiveness, as McElroy's book essentially is.

[Dan James · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my second McElroy novel, the first being Actress in the House. Both of which I've found out, after the fact, are not recommended as ideal points of entry. Fortunately, I very much enjoyed both and so wasn't turned off immediately.

Letter is a slim book about identity; how it's formed, how it changes, who owns it (assuming one even can), and how it's lost. The unnamed narrator, a young man in his late teens, receives a letter from his recently deceased father, which contains some fatherly advice, as well as some reflections on his own life, meant to be delivered in the event of his passing. We stand idly by, as does our narrator, while his letter becomes appropriated by his mother and grandparents. Professionally printed copies are designed and begin to circulate among extended family and friends. And, before long, it becomes spam mail for his college classmates. Through flashes of memory, as well as little snippets of the letter itself, pieces of the father's life begin to pile up, forming an almost composite image of the man, which seems to be altered as more and more people read the letter and process it through their unique perception. And while words on a piece of paper play a big part in the identity of the father, language itself plays a large role in his son's; words and phrases are borrowed from certain sides of the family, throwing in inflections and tones of voice from the other. We watch him try on these turns of phrase like a new wardrobe. Mixing and matching as he tries to find what works for him.

If there's one downside to Letter, it's that it's so short. If you're anything like me, McElroy's prose is at first very jarring. And, if not, then I envy you! It seems to take a while for my brain to rewire itself enough to get in the swing of it. But, once that happens, what at first seemed a discordant sort of syntax becomes strangely, beautifully lyrical. In my case, that's about 100 pages. So, at 150 total pages, it's almost over by the time it really starts to sing. The solution? Read it twice!

And so I'm done nibbling around the edges now. My next McElroy (probably sometime in Jan.) will be Women and Men.

[Charles Kell · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is McElroy's shortest novel (152 pgs), following the sprawling Women and Men (1,192 pgs), and one that leaves the reader with a lonely ache--that momentary feeling of loss that you get after finishing a great, masterful work.

A young man is remembering an event--the sudden death of his father when he was a boy. It is a loss that might have been mourned and put behind him except for an odd event within the larger one: the receipt of a letter the father wrote him, to be opened after his death, which his mother takes from an antique desk after the funeral and hands to him. "The woman holding, then handing over the letter to this poised, dumbfounded fifteen-year-old: is the letter also hers?" his account begins.

Immediately McElroy's prose grabs the reader as we are thrust into the inner workings of the unnamed 15-year-old narrator:

"My father has written a letter to me, a letter for me. He isn't here--which is the way with letters, I think (like an alarm signaling my distraction from whatever I ought to be thinking about). But this letter has been here. How long? (I'm building backwards naturally.) Was it waiting for him to be not here? It's been in a drawer of the desk right here in the living room, that open drawer there."

Throughout this short yet poignant and haunting work McElroy allows his young narrator to momentarily regress into a grief-stricken child while also acting and feeling much older than his years:

"In its time the letter calls me, advises me. To know what I could not know, could I? I'm not interested in being middle-aged. Yet I am still imagining these things in his absence. Like not amounting to much: now there's a line that will draw your effigy any time you want. I could imagine what a middle-aged body looked like--in motion, in some clothes, in a bathing suit, the knees, the hamstrings, the chest. But not what it felt like around you, with its efforts, its bones, its cells. And for a second I could be older than my father."

This, coming after one of the few excerpts of the letter given to the reader in which the narrator's father states, "Try to remember that however keen the disappointments of youth may seem, there is nothing as bitter as a middle-aged man's realization that he doesn't amount to much."

A main area of the novel is the problem of ownersip that is raised after the boy's mother prints copies of the letter for family members to read. Also, after the boy leaves for college, his mother sends the letter off to the dean, who in turn distributes copies to the entire freshman class. By now, the letter is a metaphor for intrusion--all the crippling interventions one bears in childhood, when one's destiny is not one's own. The letter, at times, becomes more of a burden. The boy wants to simultaneously disown the letter while keeping it close, personal--an object of him for him. The letter is a dead thing now, signaling the true deadness of the father. His classmates' reactions gradually illuminate this reality: "I think it was made up," one says. "Nobody would let his father's letter be used like that." "He just let it happen," another remarks.

In the end, however, the narrator acheives a symbiosis of sorts: he is able to live with the fact that the letter is "out there"--read and ridiculed by some, looked upon as great advice and a "father's last gift" by others--while at the same time maintaining a close relationship with both the letter and his dead father.

McElroy's stylish prose is both haunting and enveloping. It welcomes and wraps its arms around you while also making you feel each ghostly moment, the beautiful transcience of life. The reader--along with the 15-year-old narrator--learns that he or she will die, and, in the end, die alone. As aformentioned, there is that strange, beautiful ache after it has ended--I end up like the boy, looking forward and backward at the same time--making me want to go over this short novel again while also jumping into Joseph McEroy's other works.

[Christopher Robinson · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Letter Left to Me is far more dense than its slender profile would suggest to the eye. It’s perhaps the most vividly realistic depiction of a son grieving his father’s untimely demise that I’ve read to date. The unnamed narrator vacillates between sadness, anger, frustration, elation, denial, profound feelings of independence and abandonment (sometimes all in the same paragraph!). Lots of contradictory emotions. But that’s what losing a father too early is like; I know this from experience. I know all too well the emotional scramble, the alternating currents of light and dark that pass through the young male consciousness in the aftermath of a father’s death, and McElroy renders them brilliantly, beautifully, here. It’s a short, heavy, heartfelt, moving little novel and I recommend it highly.

[Cody · Rating 4 out of 5]

(Okay, so I cheated by a week and read one McElroy before the intended start date of the Great 2016 Joseph McElroy Project. Sue me.)

Falls into the 'didn't enjoy the process, but loved the book' category, a foreign concept to many. Reading McElroy here is like reading a goddamn headache. His stuttering prose demands close attention. Perhaps I should have followed fellow Goodreader Nathan Gaddis' recommendation and not started with The Letter. We will find out as I have the entire McElroy oeuvre primed in a bookshelf and awaiting me in 2016.

That said, the frustrations, the maddening inability to vocalize feelings after the death of a father are handled wonderfully. The pinging between the twin poles of despair and emancipation are too true (I lost my own father when I was not much older than the protagonist and can attest to the tonality). I look forward to the next book and slowly working my way up to the recognized masterpiece, Women and Men. Save the best for last and all that jazz.

[Cathie · Rating 5 out of 5]

very good = thoughts to come.

[Mike Polizzi · Rating 4 out of 5]

McElroy uses the long sentence to draw the reader in. The result is an intimate view of a young man's processing of his father's death. Hypnotic, beautifully observed and humane. He manages to dramatize the action while maintaining his character's dignity and proceeds along the quiet exposition of the thousands of small changes that make up a significant loss. Excellent.

[Omar Abu samra · Rating 4 out of 5]

A hard short decent book, Beautifully written

[Маx Nestelieiev · Rating 4 out of 5]

a little rest after Women and Men. Some Salinger (who has spotted the sentence about ducks and the park?), some Henry James, some bildungsroman, sometimes boring, well, have to think about it.

[later]

[M. Sarki · Rating 2 out of 5]

Sorry, but I did not think much of this title. Quite a bore actually. Little to be gained by reading it.

[Greg Gerke · Rating 5 out of 5]

Maybe the most underrated McElroy. Jamesian, heavy with furniture and the 40's--an examination of character and far-reaching emotions.

"I knew the mileage between here and New York City, but I did not make it equal some other things about it, time, noises, money, always noises, sleep, a countryside between here and the city atomized by some disorderly dream of mine, a bird upside down on a tree trunk, black-and-white, its head black-and-white-striped, its cheeks black: "What's it good for?" I would hear Pop state, and he might know the name of that living bird: the right-angle curve twenty miles south with the yellow-and-black barrier, a freshman, elegant, piloting his parents' car, who died Sunday night of our fourth weekend-a life of four weeks-and I in detail envisioned my mother receiving news of my death, and swiftly made up a letter received after my death and saw her reading it."

[Grant · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is subtly surreal, in a way, and has that trademark McElroy elliptical prose style that is strange yet somehow readable. Why would a family make copies for mass distribution of a father's letter to his son? The inappropriateness of that is borderline comical. But I suppose it is a representation of our obsession with preservation and what we can preserve of ourselves, and give to others in the future. What are we truly able to carry in ourselves of other people, of loved ones? And it is also about letting go, just as the son has to let go and accept the reality of the many versions of the letter out there in the world, and the inevitable myriad interpretations of it. But the son character rambles and repeats a lot, sometimes to an annoying extent. I'm not sure the letter says anything beyond trite aphorisms: put in real effort, don't give up too easily, explore different vistas in life, etc. At times moving, and contains some well crafted prose.

[Andrew De Sousa · Rating 2 out of 5]

6/10

[Lee · Rating 5 out of 5]

The novel left to us.

[may · Rating 4 out of 5]

From reading a few of his earlier works recently, I've gathered there's something so serene and peaceful (that I haven't found through any other writer as of yet - though would love to find more of his ilk) contained within the sentences of any McElroy novel.

Being one of the seemingly younger, !well-read, and "new to the club", admirers of Joe's work; I find this one battling my previous favourites of his, tooth and nail, for most memorable.

If I want to say anything about this novel it is:
- Maybe don't pick this as a first McElroy. But definitely a great choice for following up any of his other works (though at the time of writing I have only read 'A Smuggler's Bible' and 'Ancient History').
- Don't feel overwhelmed with McElroy's prose. In any capacity. Take it easy and let the sentences live and breathe. There's a ponderous nature in his text, and one which offers a feeling of satisfaction like no other I have come across.

The rest shall commence awfully (imo.) written...

What do you do when an already 'good' and admired man tells you to 'be a better man' than he could be? I took that as the cornerstone of this work, paired with the seemingly mish-mashing of a few important questions on ownership:
- What do I own?
- Can we own language?
- Is a letter for me, mine or the authors? or both? or for all?
- Who has say over what is mine?

An almost 'melancholic optimism' (mildly oxymoronic, I know) is presented within the pages of 'The Letter Left to Me'.

Meditations of those dear to us and the silly things we remember most about them when they leave.
A coming of age tale that will always be relevant as long as humans question 'what is mine?' and 'what is for all?'.
A boy becoming a man through examining the expectations he has to live up to, and the compromise of those he can fulfil (or aim to in the coming years).

This novel, short but overflowing with depth and emotion, is a novel I'd recommend to anyone; Those who are entering the world of adulthood, following in the footsteps of their guardians yet newly independent, or those who have surpassed the era and can reminisce, give guidance, and tell tales of times gone by.

Though not, possibly, directly referenced, this book reminds us that adults are just big kids, and kids just small, less experienced, adults.
Who says there's a generational barrier for conversation and debate? McElroy finds an equilibrium in text to create characters of all ages and backgrounds so well that he presents a realistic, yet distinctly McElroy world you find in his stories.
It's only language after all.

[Written April 2017]

[Leslie Graff · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book just wasn't appealing to me. I didn't find the narrator compelling, not that he was off-putting; he was just uninteresting. When a book is primarily about the narrator's internal experience, the narrator must be compelling. I didn't find the book bad or problematic, just not for me.