Women and Men (NP)

[Ghetta Life]

I haven't read _Men & Women_, but I finished _Actress in the House_ last 
Fall and I really liked it.  His style of writing attempts to portray the 
process of thought, which is often disjointed, repetetive and disorienting, 
but the parts of the storey in _Actress_ all eventually come together for a 
"complete" picture.  The writing really is beautiful and worth the effort in 
_Actress_ and is probably also in M&W, but that is a much longer work, and 
probably also more difficult.

Here's what a web site says of M&W:

"The plot focuses on the lives of James Mayn, a journalist come to New York 
from a town in New Jersey, and Grace Kimball, a feminist/therapist who 
conducts what she calls a Body-Self workshop for women who have been through 
the mill. (She is Mayn's neighbor, though the two never meet.) Gradually, 
fragment by fragment, aspects of their lives are examined, along with the 
lives of their families, friends, associates, in an effort to encompass a 
wide range of American experience and some sources of contemporary anxiety 
and anguish: marriage and divorce, parents and children, sexual deviation, 
U.S. intervention in Latin American politics, environmental pollution and 
destruction, nuclear devastation."

http://www.robotwisdom.com/jorn/mcelroy.html

>From: jd <wescac at gmail.com>
>
>So I started reading Women and Men by Joseph McElroy a couple of days ago.  
>I'm about 60 or 70 pages in and pretty goddamn lost, and generally I'm 
>pretty good at following stream of conscious styled writing.  Granted, I've 
>been pretty damn tired the last few days, so maybe that's it.
>
>Anyways, I was wondering if anyone out there has read it, and maybe had the 
>same problem, and might perhaps be able to tell me if it gets a little more 
>coherent later on, and if they consider it worth the struggle.  I'm on the 
>verge of shelving it for something else but I've gotten 40 pages in to this 
>book three times in the past five years  and shelved it each time.  I think 
>that this time it's now or never.

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