Difficult Books

[Phillip Grayson]

On Wed, Aug 8, 2012 at 10:27 PM, John Bailey <sundayjb at gmail.com> wrote:

> Can anyone give a Pynchonista's appraisal of Joseph McElroy? He's
> never really made it onto my radar but sounds intriguing. Worth it?


I've read *Smuggler's Bible *and *Women and Men*.  *Smuggler's Bible *was
good, but I don't remember it especially well a year later.  It's a lot of
nested stories that compound on each other and add and play off themselves.
 I remember liking it a lot, but it wasn't too earth-shattering.

*Women and Men*, on the other hand, definitely does deserve to be on a list
of difficult books.  It's superlong and very obliquely told, difficult to
follow, but in my opinion worth it.  The topics and themes and what can be
discerned of the plot are all really interesting.  There're astronauts and
operas and all that good stuff, and the prose is very good, if difficult to
parse at times (the perspective just changes unannounced and pretty
constantly, so there's a lot of retracing your steps after being confused
for half a page), and I actually enjoyed it a lot.  It's much more staid
and less accessible than Pynchon, and I found it more effective and
enjoyable to just let a lot slip by with a befuddled look on my face and
trust that it would resolve itself later on in the story, and for the most
part it did.

It's a real experience of a book, it took me a few months to read it, and I
prolly went through six other (shortish, funnish) books in the meantime
just to take a break from it and feel literate again, but I found it a
really unique and interesting book.  I'd be loathe to recommend it, just
because it is so huge and such a slog, and I can easily imagine someone
hating it, but for me it was worth it, and I'd bet if you could get the
e-book and just open it every day and approach it as a short avant garde
work without having to hold 5 pounds of it in your hands it might be easier
to get after.

I guess that''s not too helpful at all, but that's my experience with
McElroy.

phllp
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