Women and Men Paperback – 15 April 1993

I love it... now I have to find the time to read it.

I really don't understand why "Infinite Jest" is so famous, whilst this masterpiece is nearly forgotten in the history of contemporary literature. You need constance and a big effort to finish it, but it is time well spent.Try to find a copy!

I absolutely loved it!It is a brilliant book and my son loves it even more!Thank you.Best regardsAnna Aneychik

"What" having at least two dimensions or folds that I can imagine, the extremely narrow corridor of a linear plot, if you could possibly find one that threads through this entire work of endlessly multiplying and repeating schema, trope, sentence-for-sentence repeated, repeated, repeated, nothing like Tolstoy but not really, and the metaphorical, symbolic, one that is composed of many fragments and divisions, but pulls together to form a forest from the trees (and quite beautiful trees at that), along with a luxurious forest that classical literature draws you in with so well, too, but much more importantly,"How" using a seemingly chaotic, fractured yet integrated, run-on of images, memories both personal and supremely ethnographic/anthropological sci-fi-ish, sociological, political, cultural, psychological/psychic, ambient, and also very literal microscopic observations and impressions, as ultimately maximalist as any writer of the century in question, so if everything is a metaphor then the world of this filmic novel , it's contorted diegesis stands in relation to what it meant to be human (read DFW here) in the century in question, as well as now if you bother to view the reader and writer as two communicating entities governed by information entropy over the centuries and reeling years, or as the author would position you always outside of in relation to his work as story, narrative, allegory, unwinding reel of a movie that has the same clips spliced wondrously together a multitude of times, whatever, etc., showing you, demanding of you to step outside of yourself, it is only such (read Derrida here) with as much relevance to your existence as you would give it- but the "Why?" of it is the real crux of the matter, and how would we ever know that, or even hope to fathom anything that bubbled ceremoniously through the authors' brain at the end of the century in question (or the near-end of that century), when it seems most of our best work has taken shape, not only the near end of the century in question, but the one before it, and the one before that... fin de siecle for eternity it is endless and beautiful, futuristic and ancient (read at the same time), ya know I could make up billions of reasons that would motivate someone to create a work as synoptic and hermetic as this, but none of them would be close to the real reason, and by the time you want to ask the author, why of course he'll be dead, and so will I, even though I was born and grew up close to Brooklyn Heights and smell the river as strongly as the one that flows outside my window today, but I can really relate to those endlessly boring days at Queens College repeating the same things to the same people over and over again, ad nauseam, Oh Hallowed be Thy Name. Saavy?

Having recently joined the undoubtedly small list of people who have read Joseph McElroy's Women and Men from start to end (took about a month) am I compelled to write to You Who Are Reading This and tell you that I found this book amazing and endlessly beautiful and endlessly rereadable. Yet be forewarned, not necessarily of its size (any fool can see how big it is), but of its style. If you haven't read McElroy, don't jump into this unless you consider yourself the boldest and bravest of readers (McElroy's A Smuggler's Bible, Lookout Cartridge, and Plus will give you a good idea of his work, though W&M takes the concepts in these earlier novels and not only recycles them, but reconfigures them).The plot of Women and Men is very much tied into the structure of Women and Men, and one can think of the structure as a vast net ballooning outward (think Big Bang) as the novel progresses. Facts, storylines, characters and themes accumulate and swell at an alarming rate, and by the novel's midway point the reader will no doubt feel overwhelmed. But McElroy's Universe appears to be a closed one, and, slowly, eventually, the facts start coming together, storylines mesh (to a degree), characters sort themselves out (mostly), and some resolutions occur (though not all). And if the structure of Women and Men is a ballooning/expanding mesh (it could be, yet is also so much more), and if the characters are the points where this mesh (or "field") crosses, then the connecting mesh between these points could be seen as representing one of the most distinctive aspects of this novel: the first person plural narrative, the "We" who sometimes refer to themselves as angels (during sections titled "Breathers"). Messengers yes, but also Medium. Of the sound (voices) and the light (images) that connect the characters, of how they know one another, of how they become part of each other's lives and are thus reincarnated in others. (Something like that; I'm fudging this, but I'm not far off: they also represent the ultimate "connectors," we the readers.)Main plot points? Two lives: Jim Mayn, an estranged journalist who's mother committed suicide when he was fifteen, and Grace Kimball who lives in the same apartment building and runs a very '70s feminist Body-Self workshop. They never meet, but do influence one another's lives (through the web of characters). There is also woven into this some international conspiracy involving a possible planned assassination of Chilean President Allende (talk about a tangled web!) and a fascinating underlay of Native American myth and "real life" biography involving Mayn's grandmother and a Navaho "prince" who has fallen in love with her and follows her across late 19th century American). And much more, all minutely detailed and told in endless Faulknerian sentences (some over a 1000 words long) that actually speed the reader along. The last 50 pages are breathtaking (including a wonderful, and necessary, dreamstory), the last 10 are as affecting as anything I've ever read.Either give this book up after 100 pages, or read it all the way through; it's a book that's only complete once it's completed, and you should find yourself vastly rewarded and awed as I was, and still am. Few writers put as much into a novel as, say, Beethoven would put into a symphony. Joseph McElroy does. But like all of his novels (excluding his The Letter Left to Me), it does ask a lot of you (this is "cool" media, not "hot"), and it is as good as you, the reader, are willing make it, and I think that is a good thing.I also highly recommend Tom LeClair's The Art of Excess, which has an essay on Women and Men that puts this grasping review to shame. The Dalkey Archive Press's Joseph McElroy Number (Spring '90, Review of Contemporary Fiction) is invaluable too.Joseph McElroy is currently at work on two novels, one of which should be published in the near future. I eagerly await them.