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A review by wille44
Women and Men by Joseph McElroy
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.