Turn the Upstage Cheek

I've hadn't heard of Joseph McElroy, but it turns out he's been around for a long time, and has been compared to Pynchon, DeLillo, Barth, and Barthleme for an equally long time, and for an English major to not have heard of him, I'm gathering, is basically unspeakable. What if you'd never heard of your own birthday? Yeah, this is like that. Disaster.

There are only a couple of books that I've almost started reading again right after having finished them, and this is one of those books. It's not my favorite book, and in fact there were times when I had to consciously persevere, but the book is smart enough and I insecure enough that I'm convinced I only retained about one third of the text. So basically the book is the cool crowd and I'm the uninvited nerd trying to find a space at it's crowded lunch table and feeling ridiculous. I can say for sure that at some point there was an actress in a house.

As you may have guessed from the cover, the catalyzing event in the novel is a slap. You might also guess that the narrator is a fly, or at least has fly-vision, but you'd be wrong. The picture of the slap is tiled repetitiously because the cover designer didn't want to finish his job, apparently.

Really, what I have to say about this book is that it often seems that McElroy has more letters in his alphabet than the rest of us. He combines sounds in a single sentence that have never before been combined, and I can't imagine how this is possible unless he's creating sounds. These complex sentences kind of leave one feeling, well, slapped, and the way they disorient the reader is compounded by the way that contiguous sentences don't always seem conceptually related. Conversations between characters are especially disconnected; I certainly have no idea what the characters are talking about, usually, and it's unclear if they understand each other or not. They might as well be throwing rocks at each other from opposite sides of the Grand Canyon.

I have no idea what it is, or if I like it, but I recommend it. If you like a good slap.