Difficult Books

[Mark Kohut]

One of the two folks who wrote the 'most difficult' list, Garth, did a nice piece on Women & Men not long ago. 
I have a stored copy somewhere. 
I have a friend who knows him and I got to meet him in the most superficial way at a big book event once. 
Nice guy, genial at this.
Lookout Cartridge, started within the last pentade, read so much like Pynchon in the beginning, to me, mentally touched reader as we know, that I stopped out. The anxiety
of readership. That should be a recommendation and is although I have failed my own reader-response. 

From: Phillip Grayson <phillip.grayson at gmail.com>
To: John Bailey <sundayjb at gmail.com> 
Cc: Dave Monroe <against.the.dave at gmail.com>; Keith Davis <kbob42 at gmail.com>; pynchon -l <pynchon-l at waste.org> 
Sent: Thursday, August 9, 2012 12:40 AM
Subject: Re: Difficult Books


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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