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wille44's review
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
Actress in the House as a novel feels very informed by McElroy's preceding behemoth Women and Men, as his first major novel following this sprawling book Actress hones in on the core of Women and Men, the relationships between the sexes, and by narrowing its focus and treating its subjects with more warmth and humanity it manages to supersede it's better known progenitor, and sits as an excellent, woefully underappreciated part of McElroy's oeuvre.
Actress is a reflective novel, it chronicles the first night and then the first week of two people passionately falling in love, a middle aged lawyer, Daley, and a younger hard on her luck actress Becca. As the novel goes the two are forced to grapple with their past traumas and confront their demons, but Actress has potentially the least momentum of any McElroy novel, and takes his style to its quietest extreme. This is not a bad thing, to read a McElroy book is to be immersed in a moment, to be made aware of the plethora of cascading thoughts, impressions, verbal and nonverbal messages, random memories, personal expectations, miscommunications, excitements and frustrations and fears and joys that make up every single instance of communication between two people.
As the reader we are overwhelmed, swept along in a torrent of free association and unconscious thought as McElroy deftly steers our path circuitously, rotating us around and around central events, memories and traumas, which we barely glean on the first pass but the longer the book goes the more we grasp, until suddenly we sit up at the end of the book, rub our eyes, and realize McElroy's layering has accrued into an incredibly vivid, lifelike portrayal of his characters and events.
Besides the hypnotic experimental quality of his work, McElroy paints for us in Actress a strikingly real relationship between two people overloaded with personal baggage and trauma, and the ways in which they help and hurt each other. The book expounds on the abuses, minor and major, that people in relationships inflict upon each other, the power of love to provide structure and support to those who lack it, and the immense challenge personal trauma and grief present to intimacy and trust.
What I love about McElroy is that he marries postmodern metatextual experimentation with a modernist reverence for the human mind and spirit, and in no book is that better exemplified than in Actress. Ultimately Actress is a novel of hope, hope stumbled upon almost in surprise, and a novel that shows people as they are, damaged, defensively performative, and lonely, but always yearning for the opportunity to give and receive love.
Actress is a reflective novel, it chronicles the first night and then the first week of two people passionately falling in love, a middle aged lawyer, Daley, and a younger hard on her luck actress Becca. As the novel goes the two are forced to grapple with their past traumas and confront their demons, but Actress has potentially the least momentum of any McElroy novel, and takes his style to its quietest extreme. This is not a bad thing, to read a McElroy book is to be immersed in a moment, to be made aware of the plethora of cascading thoughts, impressions, verbal and nonverbal messages, random memories, personal expectations, miscommunications, excitements and frustrations and fears and joys that make up every single instance of communication between two people.
As the reader we are overwhelmed, swept along in a torrent of free association and unconscious thought as McElroy deftly steers our path circuitously, rotating us around and around central events, memories and traumas, which we barely glean on the first pass but the longer the book goes the more we grasp, until suddenly we sit up at the end of the book, rub our eyes, and realize McElroy's layering has accrued into an incredibly vivid, lifelike portrayal of his characters and events.
Besides the hypnotic experimental quality of his work, McElroy paints for us in Actress a strikingly real relationship between two people overloaded with personal baggage and trauma, and the ways in which they help and hurt each other. The book expounds on the abuses, minor and major, that people in relationships inflict upon each other, the power of love to provide structure and support to those who lack it, and the immense challenge personal trauma and grief present to intimacy and trust.
What I love about McElroy is that he marries postmodern metatextual experimentation with a modernist reverence for the human mind and spirit, and in no book is that better exemplified than in Actress. Ultimately Actress is a novel of hope, hope stumbled upon almost in surprise, and a novel that shows people as they are, damaged, defensively performative, and lonely, but always yearning for the opportunity to give and receive love.
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