Difficult Books

[Monte Davis]

For this encouragement, much thanks. I liked Smuggler's Bible, Lookout
Cartridge, and Plus very much, but bounced off Women and Men. For me, not
unlike bouncing off Finnegans Wake despite many happy returns to Ulysses:
ambivalence between "I'm not strong enough to get over that high pass with
him" and "He's gone too far, too hermetic/esoteric."

 

I'll have another look at Women and Men. 

 

From: owner-pynchon-l at waste.org [mailto:owner-pynchon-l at waste.org] On Behalf
Of Phillip Grayson
Sent: Thursday, August 09, 2012 12:41 AM
To: John Bailey
Cc: Dave Monroe; Keith Davis; pynchon -l
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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