Our kind of writer

[Paul Mackin]

I don't suppose p-listers necessarily look at the Washington Post's Book
World with  the same assiduousness they do the Times' Sunday  reviews so
I thought I'd bring attention to  the clever opening of Stephen Moore's
review of Joseph McElroy's An Actress in the House.


Click on Joseph McElroy's name at Amazon.com, and you'll be told that
customers who shop for him also shop for the best and brightest of
post-World War II American novelists: Pynchon, Gaddis, Coover, Gass and
(the writer McElroy most resembles) DeLillo. He has never attracted
quite the following they have, even though his oeuvre is as impressive
as theirs. Debuting in 1966 with A Smuggler's Bible, which was
reminiscent of the astonishing first novels of Gaddis and Pynchon (and
is to be reissued this summer by Overlook), McElroy produced one
brilliant, cerebral novel after another -- Hind's Kidnap, Ancient
History, Lookout Cartridge, Plus -- culminating in his magnum opus of
1987, the 1,200-page Women and Men. A winsome novella, The Letter Left
to Me, followed in 1988, but nothing since. Thus it is especially
welcome to have a new novel by this postmodernist master, and one that
both builds on his previous accomplishments and explores new directions.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A3361-2003Apr10.html