Actress in the House [Hardcover]

Joseph McElroy (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 14, 2003

Joseph McElroy began his distinguished career in 1966, with A Smuggler's Bible, hailed in The New York Times as a novel of "daring, range, and brilliant subtlety . . . to ignore it would be as shameful an act of blind self-deprivation as that which so many of us performed when The Recognitions and Under the Volcano were first published." Actress in the House is his eighth novel-his first in twelve years-a provocative and imaginative work that explores the mysterious interaction of memory, abuse, love, and violence.

Struck in the face, the actress on stage is staggered but doesn't fall. She gazes into the audience, staring with bloody nose at the middle-aged man in the eighth row of this obscure downtown warehouse theater who is drawn in by this violence unmistakably over the line. Daley has never set eyes on this actress before, yet is not entirely unacquainted with her either. Almost against his will, her life will invade his, her efforts to break free of those who have tried to control her, and worse.

As Becca and Daley begin the uncertain process of discovering one another, talking surprisingly, absorbingly, with a humor and uncanny closeness on the night streets of mid-1990s New York, they slowly unearth the events-both past and present-that have brought them together and may tear them apart.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

After a 14-year hiatus, McElroy (The Letter Left to Me) breaks his silence with a hefty novel that explores the tangled themes of love, obsession, desire and destiny through the interwoven lives of a small circle of friends and acquaintances in contemporary New York City. This convoluted story begins with an actress being slapped viciously by a fellow actor during a performance of a play at a theater in lower Manhattan, an act that binds the fates of Becca, the victim, and Daley, an audience member whose sympathetic gaze meets hers as she reels from the assault. Although the connection between the pair that night is fleeting, Becca soon kindles a relationship when she requests that Daley, a lawyer, handle her eviction case. In the following months, a bond between this unlikely couple grows by zigs and zags, conjured through McElroy's narrative wizardry, his startling images and his keen ability to approach pivotal scenes from a variety of angles. Daley's obsession with the fair-haired actress with the imperfect nose is rendered in brief omniscient flashes, with McElroy painstakingly showing, at a pace that closely imitates real time, how love evolves and deepens. McElroy's electrically charged narrative explores many forms of violence-physical, verbal, emotional and psychological. His attempts to give ordinary events a fateful resonance can sometimes seem strained, and the slow pace of the narrative may put off some readers, but those who persevere will find a rewarding conclusion.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist

In a darkened theater in New York City, a lawyer named Daley watches with the audience as a young actress, Becca Lang, is struck in the face--hard--by her costar. Is the violence part of the play, or are the actors playing out a private conflict? Is the blow delivered as threat or punishment? Is the actress in danger? When the lights come up, Daley is troubled and restless, compelled to meet the actress and to understand what happened onstage. As he and Becca begin to speak, revisiting the intimacies and betrayals in their pasts, they discover that they are not strangers after all, and that their pasts and futures are strangely intertwined. McElroy's prose, especially his dialogue, is enigmatic and layered with meaning, and the mood he creates is both subtly threatening and achingly wistful. Over a 40-year career, McElroy has been compared to William Gaddis, Don DeLillo, and Thomas Pynchon. This absorbing and unsettling novel, his first in 14 years, may finally bring him the wider recognition he deserves. Meredith Parets
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 445 pages
• Publisher: Overlook Hardcover; 1 edition (April 14, 2003)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1585673501
• ISBN-13: 978-1585673506
• Product Dimensions: 9.2 x 6.3 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #445,246 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One of the best novels I've read in years..., December 19, 2003

By 

Yan Fong (Vancouver, B.C.) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Actress in the House (Hardcover)

If you're looking for a book to become truly absorbed in, one you'll probably want to re-read as soon as you've finished the last page, this is it. There is such a richness and abundance of thought in these pages, now that I've read it twice I feel like I can dip into it at random and find something worth rediscovering, whether it be earthquakes, improvisational jazz, the physics and engineering of dam construction,the particularly haunting old structures from pre Civil War years that abide today right next to modern buildings of glass-box construction, of course woven elegantly into the main elements that compose a love story: obsession, personal revelations and concealments, humor, mystery, and enchantment. There is a Proustian consciousness of the profound ambiguities of memory, and how its hidden secrets yield a determining influence on our lives, until they rise to the surface and can be overcome, absorbed.... Perhaps I'm wieghing this down with too many generalities, but this novel contains so much, any simple "rendering" or "encapsulation" of the plot would be to do it an injustice. So let something intentionally simplified suffice: a middle-aged man and a young woman fall in love in pre-millennial New York City, both of them are survivors, and in falling in love with each other, both of them come into much closer contact with just what it is that they have survived - its implications and consequences - which brings their budding relationship into serious jeopardy.

It seems that McElroy has been compared throughout his career to authors like Pynchon, DeLillo, Coover, Barthelme, and Barth, but here you find much less of the antic (and sometimes silly) humor of the latter three, something much more accessible and less self-consciously "important" than anything Pynchon has written. DeLillo would be the closest comparison. McElroy has the same gift for capturing the rhythms and nuances of everyday speech, the same sort of global consciousness, the same ability to capture and captivate the reader. But DeLillo, in my opinion, is more likely to be self-indulgent, abuse your attention as a reader (see Cosmopolis, The Body Artist, Ratner's Star, The Names...), where McElroy's serious purpose is always evident, even when he is charming you with humor.

Since reading Actress in the House I've also read the author's ingenious first novel, A Smuggler's Bible, and am now looking forward to the December publication of Lookout Cartridge before undertaking the mammoth Women and Men. Joseph McElroy is a true discovery for me. I hope to share it with many, many people.