APF

the span of years, stray bits of conversation that act as narrative quilting points, and the frequent
sense that one is getting inside the materials” (electronic book review). To describe McElroy’s
purpose as “accurately and convincingly getting the coordinates right in space and time” is really
to say only that despite what seem to be sudden disjunctions in setting and chronology, these
disjunctions are finally part of an effort to enhance narrative realism by abandoning the
requirements of the linear story, which introduces its own distortions as a method of representing
the world “accurately.” Similarly, invoking McElroy’s emphasis on “the experience of thinking
through events, relationships, and materials” amounts to saying that he is essentially a
psychological realist, often employing a particularly rigorous form of free indirect narration that
frequently borders on the stream-of-consciousness technique used by Joyce and Woolf.
In this way Joseph McElroy is much closer to being a belated modernist than a
postmodernist. His purpose is not to undermine established narrative strategies or question
realism as an ultimate goal, but to use a now established strategy to simulate greater “depth” in
his realism. Unfortunately, if McElroy is in any way “experimental” in his use of psychological
realism, it is only in testing the extent to which it can in its most uncompromising application
sustain such prodigious meganovels as Hind’s Kidnap (1969), Lookout Cartridge (1974), and the
especially gargantuan Women and Men (1987). Ultimately those readers willing to takes on these
daunting books have to make that determination for themselves, but it seems likely to me that
many readers have been defeated by them, even more so than by other notoriously “difficult”
books by Gaddis or William Gass. My own experience reading McElroy’s fiction persuades me
that such a response arises not from a rejection of complexity but from the uncertain reward the
reader receives in attempting to find coherence in the narrative. What the conscientious reader
discovers is that both the narrative fluidity and the verbal density characteristic of these novels
are really just highly elaborated versions of the basic conventions of psychological realism,
making them not examples of aesthetic complexity but of established literary strategies made to
seem complex. McElroy’s fiction is not so much difficult to understand as it is simply laborious
to read.
McElroy’s latest novel (and, as with William Gass’s most recent novel, one wonders
whether it might be the aging writer’s last), Cannonball, unfortunately manifests this quality all
too thoroughly. What at first portends to be a complicated if somewhat strange story
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