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briandice's review against another edition
5.0
people matter
people = matter
people R matter
people are the matter
Most books you read. There are some, however, that read you. Women and Men read me, and found me lacking.
Everything got an explanation: the difference is you pick some things to not explain.
It began with a birth and a word: Breathe. In the beginning was the Word. You can live without breathing, you can't live without breath. Teach me, Jim Mayn, about special reincarnation, about the Choor Monster, the Anasazi Healer, the Hermit-Inventor of New York. Can you be both yourself and another? Your grandmother, the Navajo prince, Spence?
But we do. We are. Angels of change, seeking human limit.
Unearthed from a box of several hundred pictures received from my uncle two years ago, this is a photo of Ira and Margaret Dice on their farm in Atalissa, Iowa (pop. 311) - early 1900s. My paternal great-great grandparents stand in front of their farmhouse; long-shadowed late in the day and posing for a picture they don't look happy to take. I Breathe in, connect myself to them - I become them. I Breathe out and connect myself to my great-great grandchildren 100 years from now, become them. I am Jim Mayn from the past, Jim Mayn from the future. I have seen the joining of genders into one. I have experienced the special reincarnation.
Presentiment is that long shadow on the lawn - Dickinson
Which is the journey, which the destination?
But I've missed it. I know I have. I'm 200 pages from the end of this novel that isn't, this book that is like a literary toxin. I have a Word-infection that feels terminal; I am unable to complete the book because I both don't want it to end and because I know when it is done I will start it over again. And I'm not interested in reading anything else. It's my Infinite Jest loop. Women and Men and Women and Men and...
...there are many gods, and when we organize and rank them we go too far, we ask too much of them.
I want to become a better reader, the attendant appropriate to this novel, a book without equal.
for you are some earlier thing's future
I am not worthy.
people = matter
people R matter
people are the matter
Most books you read. There are some, however, that read you. Women and Men read me, and found me lacking.
Everything got an explanation: the difference is you pick some things to not explain.
It began with a birth and a word: Breathe. In the beginning was the Word. You can live without breathing, you can't live without breath. Teach me, Jim Mayn, about special reincarnation, about the Choor Monster, the Anasazi Healer, the Hermit-Inventor of New York. Can you be both yourself and another? Your grandmother, the Navajo prince, Spence?
But we do. We are. Angels of change, seeking human limit.
Unearthed from a box of several hundred pictures received from my uncle two years ago, this is a photo of Ira and Margaret Dice on their farm in Atalissa, Iowa (pop. 311) - early 1900s. My paternal great-great grandparents stand in front of their farmhouse; long-shadowed late in the day and posing for a picture they don't look happy to take. I Breathe in, connect myself to them - I become them. I Breathe out and connect myself to my great-great grandchildren 100 years from now, become them. I am Jim Mayn from the past, Jim Mayn from the future. I have seen the joining of genders into one. I have experienced the special reincarnation.
Presentiment is that long shadow on the lawn - Dickinson
Which is the journey, which the destination?
But I've missed it. I know I have. I'm 200 pages from the end of this novel that isn't, this book that is like a literary toxin. I have a Word-infection that feels terminal; I am unable to complete the book because I both don't want it to end and because I know when it is done I will start it over again. And I'm not interested in reading anything else. It's my Infinite Jest loop. Women and Men and Women and Men and...
...there are many gods, and when we organize and rank them we go too far, we ask too much of them.
I want to become a better reader, the attendant appropriate to this novel, a book without equal.
for you are some earlier thing's future
I am not worthy.
shesnorikkiducornet's review
3.0
I feel like after almost 3 1/2 years of plodding through this, I should say some words about it THAT AREN’T AS BLOATED AND OBTUSE AS THE TEXT. *suspiciously eyes all the 5* ratings for this*
It is long, it is tedious, and if you have unmedicated ADHD, this WILL be brutal as there are sentences that stretch over pages with no breaks and plenty of parentheticals and changing voices that lack a distinct feel to them like Gaddis’s JR. This is aggressively obtuse and VERY repetitive.
Sure, I get my longest-novel-written-in-blah-blah-blah badge of honor. But, like, what’s that really amount to? I already feel superior to people who solely read YA.
It is long, it is tedious, and if you have unmedicated ADHD, this WILL be brutal as there are sentences that stretch over pages with no breaks and plenty of parentheticals and changing voices that lack a distinct feel to them like Gaddis’s JR. This is aggressively obtuse and VERY repetitive.
Sure, I get my longest-novel-written-in-blah-blah-blah badge of honor. But, like, what’s that really amount to? I already feel superior to people who solely read YA.
jamesyouwere's review against another edition
challenging
mysterious
reflective
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.25
Content Warnings
Moderate: Sexual content, Suicide, Pregnancy, and Death of parent
Minor: Rape and Murder
wille44's review
3.0
Women and Men is a novel rarely spoken of, and on such occasions, it is almost always merely to point out its difficulty and obscurity. This vaunted difficulty is multifaceted, the sentence-by-sentence flow of the novel, its deeply strange and murky structure, the very action of the story itself, the messages and themes McElroy seeks to convey, and its sheer length (the longest single volume novel written in North America) combine as a myriad of reasons for its obscurity. One more reason to toss on the pile is that for all its demands of the reader, it is ultimately unsatisfying as (to use McElroy's words) a "fully articulated structure."
The best part of Women and Men are McElroy’s sentences. His prose is a stream of unconsciousness, half of his chapters take us inside the minds of his characters, where we sift through disparate thoughts, memories, and emotions, and form connections and ideations in real time along with them. I was familiar with McElroy’s work already and deeply appreciative of it, the way he is able to write language as process, to write language as the formation of thought, is phenomenal and always impressive no matter how much of him you read. Here in Women and Men he takes this up several notches with his concept of the Colloidal Unconscious, this idea of a conjoined cultural unconsciousness all churning in unison, in this novel voiced by what he calls angels, who occupy both people themselves and the spaces between them, through this device McElroy builds a massive, stretching framework of thought and feeling that underlies the movements of people on a societal level.
The novel itself moves in fits and starts, following main character Jim Mayne as he flits unstuck through time, from his childhood, to failed marriage, to present day, to distant sci-fi future. McElroy radiates focus out from Jim, as he moves into the unconsciousness of all those surrounding him, friends, family, enemies, neighbors, often crossing over in these relations with his secondary character, Grace Kimball. Jim, Grace, and the Colloidal Unconscious trade focused chapters early in the book, but Grace quickly drops away as a mainstay, only showing up briefly in relation to those who have relations with Jim.
Much of the plot of the book is concerned with Jim’s family history, his mother and grandmothers suicides, why they happened, and how they affected the rest of his family and himself. We bounce throughout between these childhood scenes and a present day conspiracy, widely reaching and involving Jim and those close in relation to him in a Chilean power struggle in which the US government has involvement. On top of all this is a study of the eponymous relationships between women and men, painted as a contrast between Jim and Grace, as we see many instances of them interacting with their own and the opposite sex. Underneath all this is Navajo folk stories, created in large part by Jim’s grandmother, the idea being to shape one’s own life and future through created mythology, mythology as prophecy.
These are a lot of disparate threads, and somehow the book still moves at a glacial pace. McElroy’s conspiracy plot is cloudy and ambiguous through the book, enough is never revealed of it for it to feel dangerous or even particularly relevant to the characters it supposedly entwines. Jim’s family history, which is easily the lion’s share of the novel, is fascinating initially, but as the book circles the same few events over and over again it loses steam. While it does provide much insight into the minds of his family members, we quickly realize that Jim himself is a totally boring character. For spending so much time submerged in his thoughts, one walks away from the novel with no impression of him at all, he is totally devoid of any character and seems to only be a vehicle for McElroy's big ideas and prosaic movements.
The Navajo mythology as well was a very involved, lengthy part of the book, and while it was an allegory for the more current stories and actions of the characters, it was a painfully bland slog to read through, as there was no interiority or character to these myths, they were just a recitation of meandering events. As for the title of the book itself, it serves as a poor examination of women and men, particularly poor in its assessment of women.
Jim, our man, sees a future in which man and woman step on a platform together and are beamed across space, upon landing they are united as one whole person. Grace, our woman, is a sex obsessed feminist who wants total separation of the sexes, and conducts classes for women to masturbate together and rediscover their bodies and sexual freedom together. Grace’s character is a bitter caricature by McElroy, bizarre since her portions are the only ones that are satirical in the whole book, all other characters are treated with seriousness and weight. Grace on the other hand, just has sex and farts and tells us “I’m going to purify my system so that eventually I will be able to eat even shit.”
Grace is also the only lively character in the entire book, and the most charitable reading of her is that McElroy likes her as a character but portrays her as possessed by “the goddess” she refers to within herself during sex acts. The other women in the book are written with the same dignity, respect, and seriousness he affords his male characters, so Grace’s chapters mostly read as McElroy lashing out at the prevailing second wave feminism of the era in which Women and Men was written. While that movement covered a great many issues, such as women’s right to work, addressing domestic abuse in the home, and rights to medical procedures, McElroy exclusively addresses and lampoons the movement’s idea of sexual equality and independence.
To be clear, he is under no obligation as an author to engage with any of these points, but the title of the book itself is Women and Men, clearly the relation of the sexes in the wake of this movement in the 70s was a major focus of his, and it seems he largely ignores the women’s concerns of the day in this dynamic, only focusing on the part that he clearly found worthy of scorn. Not to say the men are done much justice, in that all the men he focuses on: Jim, Larry, Gordon, and Foley, all talk and think the same, they feel like the same man, utterly bland and banal, all conduits for esoteric reflections on mathematics and philosophy and little else.
For all the complaints I have with Women and Men as a novel, it does consistently put forth stretches of gorgeous, mind bending prose, and countless passages of fascinating concepts and bits and bobs of academic theory ranging from the economic to the psychologic. His moment to moment writing often crackles, but it suffers severe diminishing returns as he circles the same moments and concepts ad nauseum, there just isn’t enough development and momentum to justify the amount of time he spends on his scenes.
I cannot help but feel it is almost unfair to assess Women and Men as a traditional novel as I have here. It is unlike any other novel I've seen, and perhaps should not be considered one, as it works far better as a grandiose prose experiment than a cohesive novel. The sum of Women and Men is so very much less than its parts, but those parts, those page long sentences of a choir of angels of colloidal unconsciousness, ringing across characters and time periods and events and feeling and thought, are absolutely brilliant. So I don't really know where this leaves me. Women and Men sparkles when read line by line, and the less you worry about how it's structure coalesces the better. Even with this refocusing there are still flat and lifeless passages of repetition that could have been removed, but it is certainly a more compelling experience the more you fixate on McElroy's "multiplicity of small scale units." It left me conflicted, equal parts frustrated and amazed, the only thing I can say for sure is that Women and Men is exclusively written for those who want to submerge themselves in McElroy's prose and never resurface.
I cannot help but feel it is almost unfair to assess Women and Men as a traditional novel as I have here. It is unlike any other novel I've seen, and perhaps should not be considered one, as it works far better as a grandiose prose experiment than a cohesive novel. The sum of Women and Men is so very much less than its parts, but those parts, those page long sentences of a choir of angels of colloidal unconsciousness, ringing across characters and time periods and events and feeling and thought, are absolutely brilliant. So I don't really know where this leaves me. Women and Men sparkles when read line by line, and the less you worry about how it's structure coalesces the better. Even with this refocusing there are still flat and lifeless passages of repetition that could have been removed, but it is certainly a more compelling experience the more you fixate on McElroy's "multiplicity of small scale units." It left me conflicted, equal parts frustrated and amazed, the only thing I can say for sure is that Women and Men is exclusively written for those who want to submerge themselves in McElroy's prose and never resurface.
ianlumsden's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
emotional
hopeful
inspiring
mysterious
reflective
sad
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
5.0
george_salis's review against another edition
5.0
Made my dream come true and met one of my favorite writers of all time, the legendary Joseph McElroy!
He showed me around his place, took me to lunch, then we went for a walk by the Hudson River. It was a significant meeting for many reasons which I’ll be writing about in an epic essay. Memories I’ll cherish for a lifetime. Simply put, Joe is as wise as he is kind.
***
I interviewed Joseph McElroy here: https://thecollidescope.com/2021/04/04/a-chaotic-science-an-interview-with-joseph-mcelroy/
"We read—the plural for the few as well as for the potential, the connected for the ostensibly disconnected—we read Women and Men, by we we mean you, by you we mean I, us, read it…. The we is not lost on us though perhaps it is lost on literature, for how many novels make use of this inclusive if not presumptive multitude? We, The Drowned is but one in which we the readers drown in a sea of stories with Danish sailors and their families, but Women and Men, this “loose-strung grand opus,” is not as clear-cut as that. “‘We’? we ask.” Oui oui."
You can read in full what is my longest review to date here (it was also the most difficult to write): https://thecollidescope.com/2021/06/01/women-and-men-by-joseph-mcelroy/
***
He showed me around his place, took me to lunch, then we went for a walk by the Hudson River. It was a significant meeting for many reasons which I’ll be writing about in an epic essay. Memories I’ll cherish for a lifetime. Simply put, Joe is as wise as he is kind.
***
I interviewed Joseph McElroy here: https://thecollidescope.com/2021/04/04/a-chaotic-science-an-interview-with-joseph-mcelroy/
"We read—the plural for the few as well as for the potential, the connected for the ostensibly disconnected—we read Women and Men, by we we mean you, by you we mean I, us, read it…. The we is not lost on us though perhaps it is lost on literature, for how many novels make use of this inclusive if not presumptive multitude? We, The Drowned is but one in which we the readers drown in a sea of stories with Danish sailors and their families, but Women and Men, this “loose-strung grand opus,” is not as clear-cut as that. “‘We’? we ask.” Oui oui."
You can read in full what is my longest review to date here (it was also the most difficult to write): https://thecollidescope.com/2021/06/01/women-and-men-by-joseph-mcelroy/
***
wesleychien's review against another edition
I loved and was deeply moved by many of the small-scale units, but struggled to grasp the larger, articulated structure. I know I’ll be back to reread this someday, hopefully when I have less obligations and after reading more of McElroy’s work.
seanwatson's review against another edition
as i was coming to the end of women and men, i started thinking about why a book like this -- originally put out in hardcover by knopf, of all publishers -- might be forgotten. not just forgotten, but culturally erased: do even the slightest research and you’ll find that, now out of print, even paperback copies of this book go for a minimum of $100 USD on abebooks. philip roth said shortly before he died that while the medium of the novel may endure as capitalism accelerates, the act of reading “serious” fiction is doomed to become an esoteric, even cult-like activity. it’s hard to imagine a more apt emblem of this than the feverish community that this book has spawned on this website and elsewhere online. but i don’t think it’s the “seriousness” of this book that has lead to its obscurity. other examples of obscure, difficult 20th century fiction have endured. why not this one?
my theory is that while the authors he is so often compared to conspicuously engage with literary traditions and contemporary movements, in women and men mcelroy resists this apparent imperative and instead creates something totally new, radical, and unparalleled. you would think this would work in the book’s favour, but in effect it means that nobody (myself included) really knows how to talk about it. books with similar reputations borrow from and react against what came before them. they have their own seemingly preordained talking points: critics know to say that the recognitions works as some conduit between modernism and postmodernism, that gravity’s rainbow represents the high point of postmodernism, and infinite jest signifies the beginning of something new. but what about this thing? this big, strange, forgotten thing that happened somewhere in the middle of it all?
you can’t lump this book in with the other ones. beyond its size, it has nothing in common with them, or anything else in 20th century writing. much of the time, mcelroy seems kind of unconcerned with producing a "literary" text as we might usually conceive of it, and as a result, it resists typical critical approaches to understanding it. how do you begin to talk about mcelroy’s depiction of the interrelations of consciousness, history, discourse? how do you talk about his technique of simultaneity? the use of specialist language? multiple voicings?
my experience with this novel has been a long one. i got my copy in 2012, when its reputation was just starting to be rehabilitated online. i think i paid around $50 for a signed first edition, which was then the cheapest copy available. i tried reading it, got around 400 pages in, and gave up, having not been ready for it. six years later, after becoming interested in mcelroy again, i drove to my parents’ house to pick up my copy, this time determined to get through the whole thing. i read it obsessively for around five weeks, flipping back through chapters, reading page-long sentences again and again, researching Shiprock, the Navajo people, Chilean political history, second wave feminism, etc. at times, as i had been lead to expect, i was exhausted by it. totally confused, bored, frustrated. but at others, i was astonished. barely able to contain my outrage that such a unique achievement has been buried and allowed to go out of print. during its final stretch i read this book in a kind of dream state, totally surrendered to it.
i read a recent (one star) review on this website that claimed mcelroy was attempting to write beautiful, graceful prose, and failing on both counts. i think if you approach mcelroy’s writing expecting it to have the musicality of william gass or the lyricism of faulkner then you will be disappointed. there are extended sections in women and men where the prose isn’t only jarring to the ear, it is visually ugly: the cold times new roman typeface is littered with semicolons, erratic capitalisations, brackets, graphs, and jargon. but this isn’t baroque literature, and it’s not modernist stream of consciousness either. part of mcelroy’s project in this novel is to illustrate how the panoply of discourses in modern life (economics, mythology, geology, neuroscience, feminism, and Marxism to name a few) permeate experience. this isn’t to say that there aren’t breathtaking sections, or that mcelroy is excessively cerebral (well, you might disagree). some of the later sections in particular contain some of the most powerful writing i’ve ever read. but the prose is always attempting to accommodate a number of voices at any one time, and is almost never singular. while this was at first baffling to me, the long term effect was like nothing else i’ve experienced in reading fiction. it was due to, and not in spite of, the book’s nonlinearity and radical approach to form that i felt it take shape in my mind and body.
this is not to say that mcelroy’s achievement in women and men is exclusively aesthetic. it’s one thing to hybridise the language of specialist disciplines, it’s another to do so to specific ends. i think mcelroy has developed his particular style with a view to making the reader reckon with the unique epistemological problems of our age. while the concept of the “colloidal unconscious” might seem kind of ridiculous out of context, the way it is used as metaphor in this book is deeply profound. mcelroy understands that the peculiar quality of scientific discourse is its pretense to “unconcealing” the truth. but how can we know the truth of another’s experience? with keynesian economics so deeply ingrained in the speech of everyday life, how do its logics encroach upon interpersonal relationships? how can we know a stable sense of self while living with capital’s rupturing of temporality (“and isn’t this hard when we ourselves are always becoming ourselves”)?
the book does have failings. if you have read any of the “plot summaries” you’ll know that it supposedly takes as its protagonists jim mayn, a business/tech journalist, and grace kimball, a feminist who runs a “body-self” workshop, and that it investigates the nexus between women and men during the second wave feminism of the 1970s. i think this is a wishful and generous misreading of (or reading into) the book. while grace kimball is the subject of one long early chapter, the remainder of the book is almost exclusively concerned with jim mayn. though the two characters have countless connections, grace receives very little screen time. not only that, but mcelroy frequently reduces the feminist movement to the butt of a joke, depicting kimball’s workshop as an absurd and politically performative space and ridiculing the movement with the workshop’s “cunthooks” (coathooks) and indulgent naked confessionals. in his recent article in the paris review on this book, adam dalva asked mcelroy about his portrayal of feminism, to which the author responded that during the period when he was writing the book the feminist movement had impacted his personal life (doesn’t specify how), and that he had “terrible anger” towards some women similar to those depicted in women and men. this anger is palpable in certain sections of the book, and clashes with its prevailing spirit of generosity and fascination towards human struggle. of course, second wave feminism was plagued with issues (some of which we have inherited), and deserves criticism; but it is virtually the only subject that the book blindly satirises without offering any redemptive insight. it is one of the book’s failures that it sets itself up as an examination of the relations, connections and distances between women and men (or women-and-men), but then ultimately deprives the feminist movement of dignity.
the question of whether i would recommend women and men to anybody seems kind of redundant. if you’re here, you probably know whether or not it’s for you. you will probably have to pay more than you would like to, but if you want to read it, you will. questions as to whether it is too long or too hard or too weird are besides the point in the face of a novel like this: women and men just is. despite its failings, in a world as hellish as this one it’s a miracle that it exists at all. it deserves to be remembered, but most of all it deserves to be read.
my theory is that while the authors he is so often compared to conspicuously engage with literary traditions and contemporary movements, in women and men mcelroy resists this apparent imperative and instead creates something totally new, radical, and unparalleled. you would think this would work in the book’s favour, but in effect it means that nobody (myself included) really knows how to talk about it. books with similar reputations borrow from and react against what came before them. they have their own seemingly preordained talking points: critics know to say that the recognitions works as some conduit between modernism and postmodernism, that gravity’s rainbow represents the high point of postmodernism, and infinite jest signifies the beginning of something new. but what about this thing? this big, strange, forgotten thing that happened somewhere in the middle of it all?
you can’t lump this book in with the other ones. beyond its size, it has nothing in common with them, or anything else in 20th century writing. much of the time, mcelroy seems kind of unconcerned with producing a "literary" text as we might usually conceive of it, and as a result, it resists typical critical approaches to understanding it. how do you begin to talk about mcelroy’s depiction of the interrelations of consciousness, history, discourse? how do you talk about his technique of simultaneity? the use of specialist language? multiple voicings?
my experience with this novel has been a long one. i got my copy in 2012, when its reputation was just starting to be rehabilitated online. i think i paid around $50 for a signed first edition, which was then the cheapest copy available. i tried reading it, got around 400 pages in, and gave up, having not been ready for it. six years later, after becoming interested in mcelroy again, i drove to my parents’ house to pick up my copy, this time determined to get through the whole thing. i read it obsessively for around five weeks, flipping back through chapters, reading page-long sentences again and again, researching Shiprock, the Navajo people, Chilean political history, second wave feminism, etc. at times, as i had been lead to expect, i was exhausted by it. totally confused, bored, frustrated. but at others, i was astonished. barely able to contain my outrage that such a unique achievement has been buried and allowed to go out of print. during its final stretch i read this book in a kind of dream state, totally surrendered to it.
i read a recent (one star) review on this website that claimed mcelroy was attempting to write beautiful, graceful prose, and failing on both counts. i think if you approach mcelroy’s writing expecting it to have the musicality of william gass or the lyricism of faulkner then you will be disappointed. there are extended sections in women and men where the prose isn’t only jarring to the ear, it is visually ugly: the cold times new roman typeface is littered with semicolons, erratic capitalisations, brackets, graphs, and jargon. but this isn’t baroque literature, and it’s not modernist stream of consciousness either. part of mcelroy’s project in this novel is to illustrate how the panoply of discourses in modern life (economics, mythology, geology, neuroscience, feminism, and Marxism to name a few) permeate experience. this isn’t to say that there aren’t breathtaking sections, or that mcelroy is excessively cerebral (well, you might disagree). some of the later sections in particular contain some of the most powerful writing i’ve ever read. but the prose is always attempting to accommodate a number of voices at any one time, and is almost never singular. while this was at first baffling to me, the long term effect was like nothing else i’ve experienced in reading fiction. it was due to, and not in spite of, the book’s nonlinearity and radical approach to form that i felt it take shape in my mind and body.
this is not to say that mcelroy’s achievement in women and men is exclusively aesthetic. it’s one thing to hybridise the language of specialist disciplines, it’s another to do so to specific ends. i think mcelroy has developed his particular style with a view to making the reader reckon with the unique epistemological problems of our age. while the concept of the “colloidal unconscious” might seem kind of ridiculous out of context, the way it is used as metaphor in this book is deeply profound. mcelroy understands that the peculiar quality of scientific discourse is its pretense to “unconcealing” the truth. but how can we know the truth of another’s experience? with keynesian economics so deeply ingrained in the speech of everyday life, how do its logics encroach upon interpersonal relationships? how can we know a stable sense of self while living with capital’s rupturing of temporality (“and isn’t this hard when we ourselves are always becoming ourselves”)?
the book does have failings. if you have read any of the “plot summaries” you’ll know that it supposedly takes as its protagonists jim mayn, a business/tech journalist, and grace kimball, a feminist who runs a “body-self” workshop, and that it investigates the nexus between women and men during the second wave feminism of the 1970s. i think this is a wishful and generous misreading of (or reading into) the book. while grace kimball is the subject of one long early chapter, the remainder of the book is almost exclusively concerned with jim mayn. though the two characters have countless connections, grace receives very little screen time. not only that, but mcelroy frequently reduces the feminist movement to the butt of a joke, depicting kimball’s workshop as an absurd and politically performative space and ridiculing the movement with the workshop’s “cunthooks” (coathooks) and indulgent naked confessionals. in his recent article in the paris review on this book, adam dalva asked mcelroy about his portrayal of feminism, to which the author responded that during the period when he was writing the book the feminist movement had impacted his personal life (doesn’t specify how), and that he had “terrible anger” towards some women similar to those depicted in women and men. this anger is palpable in certain sections of the book, and clashes with its prevailing spirit of generosity and fascination towards human struggle. of course, second wave feminism was plagued with issues (some of which we have inherited), and deserves criticism; but it is virtually the only subject that the book blindly satirises without offering any redemptive insight. it is one of the book’s failures that it sets itself up as an examination of the relations, connections and distances between women and men (or women-and-men), but then ultimately deprives the feminist movement of dignity.
the question of whether i would recommend women and men to anybody seems kind of redundant. if you’re here, you probably know whether or not it’s for you. you will probably have to pay more than you would like to, but if you want to read it, you will. questions as to whether it is too long or too hard or too weird are besides the point in the face of a novel like this: women and men just is. despite its failings, in a world as hellish as this one it’s a miracle that it exists at all. it deserves to be remembered, but most of all it deserves to be read.
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