Questions, Resources, and General Banter - Miss MacIntosh, My Darling

[Jim]

Marguerite Young’s magnum opus, Miss MacIntosh, My Darling took nearly 17 years to complete. Begun in 1947, she delivered the finished manuscript in February, 1964.


Wikipedia link for Marguerite Young:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Margueri...


Wikipedia link for Miss MacIntosh, My Darling:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Miss_Mac...


Interview in The Paris Review, 1977:

http://www.theparisreview.org/intervi...


Feel free to use this thread to ask questions and post links to resources for Marguerite Young’s Miss MacIntosh, My Darling.

Also, if you’ve written a review of the book, please post a link to share with the group.

[Larou]

I stumbled upon this while snooping around the interwebs: Tons of audio documents relating to Marguerite Young there - readings from Miss MacIntosh, portraits of and, probably the most interesting of the bunch, even an interview with her. I only have scratched at the surface myself, but it appears to be a veritable treasure trove.

[Jim]

Wow! What an amazing archive. Thanks for posting!

[Ellen]

Thanks Larou-it's a fabulous link. I'm enjoying it tremendously.

[Nathan "N.R."]

Firstly, thanks for that link, Larou. I hadn't seen it previously.

My question ;; I know that this is a huge dense thick rough kind of book and I finally have a copy of it myself; and so I don't mean to chide, but it seems that the BP discussions didn't persist through many chapters. I'd be interested, only for purposes of having a little more information about what it's like to read Miss MacIntosh, to know where readers ended up. Wrong book/wrong time? Didn't hold your interest? Just don't have the time?

I intend to read Miss MacIntosh in 2014, so if there's anyone else interested too we could rework a new schedule.

[Larou]

I'm still at it, kind of, it just has been pushed into the background a bit by other books (Vollmann!) and the reading progress slowed down from a few pages per day to a few pages per week.

What makes Miss MacIntosh such a slow read is that it's more like a prose poem than a novel - there is no plot, no character development, pretty much no development at all but an associative flight of images, which are very beautiful, even entrancing, but they just don't lend themselves to sustained reading over long periods of time. You really have to read this book slowly if you want to read it at all, and in small doses. And yeah, as wonderful as it is, maybe at 1200 pages it might be just a tad too long. :P Still, I haven't given up yet (am closing in on page 300 now) and might still finish it - maybe in a year or so...

[Jim]

I'm basically in agreement with Larou. Miss MacIntosh can, at times, make Proust's ISOLT seem like a plot-driven adventure story. The prose is beautiful and magnificent, but its density makes it difficult to read like we might read a more conventional novel.

Elsewhere, I described the experience as "swimming through peanut butter with your mouth open". It's slow-going and once your mouth is full, it takes a long time to chew and begin again.

Best advice I would give is if you wanted to read it straight through, you would need to clear the decks of other reading for a few weeks and have a quiet vacation in the country...

An anecdote from wikipedia:

Novelist Anne Tyler cured her spells of writer's block when she was writing The Accidental Tourist by reading random pages from Miss MacIntosh, My Darling. "Whatever page I turned to, it seemed, a glorious wealth of words swooped out at me." Tyler made Young's novel a traveling companion for her main character Macon Leary. A hardcover edition of the book was used as a prop in William Hurt's suitcase in the film adaptation.

I would agree that Miss MacIntosh is very much "a glorious wealth of words" and very much worth the candle - you just need to have the time and place to read it.

[Larou]

It's weird, how one always seems to end up talking in metaphors when talking about this novel. :P - Riffing on one I used in one of the threads, I would like to add that Miss MacIntosh My Darling is not so much something you read but rather something you live in and explore at you leisure.

[Nathan "N.R."]

Thanks for the returns, guys. Good to hear that you're still within the pages. I've been within Finnegans Wake for over a year's time and I'm in no rush to escape out the back end because being there, swarmed at all times, is magnificent. I read Young's Eugene Debs book, and from that experience I can glimpse a bit of what you're saying ;; but to get there all the way I'd have to disconnect her Debs book from history and history's anchor and enter free currents of fiction. I think I've got a small flavor of what yer talking about. sounds Darling(!).

[Nathan "N.R."]

The Miss MacIntosh, My Darling reading group (also functioning as a group for all things Young) is now open :: https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/...

BP members specifically are invited.

The new group is by no means meant to usurp the BP thread here.

[Andrew]

Per Nathan's (now decade old) posting of a specific group for Miss MacIntosh, My Darling: https://www.goodreads.com/group/show/... I'm wondering if others are lined up to read the new (but long promissed) Dalkey edition (coming later this month) - and might be interested in a thread and or schedule/s, for which I'm not the best connected to create, but could.