Women and Men [Paperback]

Joseph McElroy (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: April 1, 1993

Beginning in childbirth and entered like a multiple dwelling in motion, Women and Men embraces and anatomizes the 1970s in New Yorkfrom experiments in the chaotic relations between the sexes to the flux of the city itself. Yet through an intricate overlay of scenes, voices, fact, and myth, this expanding fiction finds its way also across continents and into earlier and future times and indeed the Earth, to reveal connections between the most disparate lives and systems of feeling and power. At its breathing heart, it plots the fuguelike and fieldlike densities of late-twentieth-century life.

McElroy rests a global vision on two people, apartment-house neighbors who never quite meet. Except, that is, in the population of others whose histories cross theirsbelievers and skeptics; lovers, friends, and hermits; children, parents, grandparents, avatars, and, apparently, angels. For Women and Men shows how the families through which we pass let one person's experience belong to that of many, so that we throw light on each other as if these kinships were refracted lives so real as to be reincarnate.

A mirror of manners, the book is also a meditation on the languagesrich, ludicrous, exact, and also Americanin which we try to grasp the world we're in. Along the kindred axes of separation and intimacy Women and Men extends the great line of twentieth-century innovative fiction.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The daunting (1190 pages) length of this novel is the least of the impediments the author imposes between its sheer mass and the most willing reader. Even more challenging is a narrative manner by design elusive, at times opaque, interspersed with digressions, eccentricities, parentheses and asides. 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. Across the affective spectrum from estrangment to connectedness, the narrative voices return always to the themes of feeling. "It's what's between us," a voice says, "or we share." McElroy's ambition is heroic (the novel represents a decade's work), his canvas densely peopled, the animating talent unmistakable; but his narrative method is so diffuse and fragmentary, so willfully withholding of information, that the reader's admiration can soon give way to fatigue.
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

This work belongs to that neglected genre of the Sixties, the mega-novel. It is a sprawling narrative full of weird characters, confusing subplots, multiple time frames, and huge chunks of esoteric information. The story focuses on a meteorologist, James Mayn, and a feminist, Grace Kimball, who live in the same apartment building in New York, though "focus" may be the wrong word: a basic structural device is to touch briefly on a wide range of subjects, then circle back and add more detail. Thus, there are digressions on the weather, lesbianism, space exploration, the CIA's role in Chile, and the many uses of jojoba beans; only after a few hundred pages can the reader begin to discern any pattern. McElroy's critical reputation has always been impeccable, his audience negligible. (His most recent novel was Lookout Cartridge, LJ 2/1/75.) This book probably won't change that. It is not sexy or suspenseful, but it is endlessly fascinatingand it is McElroy's most ambitious, most successful work to date. Edward B. St. John, Loyola Marymount Univ. Lib., Los Angeles
Copyright 1987 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 1191 pages
• Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press (April 1, 1993)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1564780236
• ISBN-13: 978-1564780232
• Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.1 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,649,366 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

30 of 31 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Worth the Effort? This reviewer says Yes!, May 5, 2000

By 

"omnipot" - See all my reviews

This review is from: Women and Men (Paperback)

Having recently joined the undoubtedly small list of people who have read Joseph McElroy's Women and Men from start to end (took about a month) am I compelled to write to You Who Are Reading This and tell you that I found this book amazing and endlessly beautiful and endlessly rereadable. Yet be forewarned, not necessarily of its size (any fool can see how big it is), but of its style. If you haven't read McElroy, don't jump into this unless you consider yourself the boldest and bravest of readers (McElroy's A Smuggler's Bible, Lookout Cartridge, and Plus will give you a good idea of his work, though W&M takes the concepts in these earlier novels and not only recycles them, but reconfigures them).

The plot of Women and Men is very much tied into the structure of Women and Men, and one can think of the structure as a vast net ballooning outward (think Big Bang) as the novel progresses. Facts, storylines, characters and themes accumulate and swell at an alarming rate, and by the novel's midway point the reader will no doubt feel overwhelmed. But McElroy's Universe appears to be a closed one, and, slowly, eventually, the facts start coming together, storylines mesh (to a degree), characters sort themselves out (mostly), and some resolutions occur (though not all). And if the structure of Women and Men is a ballooning/expanding mesh (it could be, yet is also so much more), and if the characters are the points where this mesh (or "field") crosses, then the connecting mesh between these points could be seen as representing one of the most distinctive aspects of this novel: the first person plural narrative, the "We" who sometimes refer to themselves as angels (during sections titled "Breathers"). Messengers yes, but also Medium. Of the sound (voices) and the light (images) that connect the characters, of how they know one another, of how they become part of each other's lives and are thus reincarnated in others. (Something like that; I'm fudging this, but I'm not far off: they also represent the ultimate "connectors," we the readers.)

Main plot points? Two lives: Jim Mayn, an estranged journalist who's mother committed suicide when he was fifteen, and Grace Kimball who lives in the same apartment building and runs a very '70s feminist Body-Self workshop. They never meet, but do influence one another's lives (through the web of characters). There is also woven into this some international conspiracy involving a possible planned assassination of Chilean President Allende (talk about a tangled web!) and a fascinating underlay of Native American myth and "real life" biography involving Mayn's grandmother and a Navaho "prince" who has fallen in love with her and follows her across late 19th century American). And much more, all minutely detailed and told in endless Faulknerian sentences (some over a 1000 words long) that actually speed the reader along. The last 50 pages are breathtaking (including a wonderful, and necessary, dreamstory), the last 10 are as affecting as anything I've ever read.

Either give this book up after 100 pages, or read it all the way through; it's a book that's only complete once it's completed, and you should find yourself vastly rewarded and awed as I was, and still am. Few writers put as much into a novel as, say, Beethoven would put into a symphony. Joseph McElroy does. But like all of his novels (excluding his The Letter Left to Me), it does ask a lot of you (this is "cool" media, not "hot"), and it is as good as you, the reader, are willing make it, and I think that is a good thing.

I also highly recommend Tom LeClair's The Art of Excess, which has an essay on Women and Men that puts this grasping review to shame. The Dalkey Archive Press's Joseph McElroy Number (Spring '90, Review of Contemporary Fiction) is invaluable too.

Joseph McElroy is currently at work on two novels, one of which should be published in the near future. I eagerly await them.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A true, forgotten masterpiece, September 25, 2010

By 

Gianantonio Bissaro - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Women and Men (Paperback)

I really don't understand why "Infinite Jest" is so famous, whilst this masterpiece is nearly forgotten in the history of contemporary literature. You need constance and a big effort to finish it, but it is time well spent.
Try to find a copy!