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"I have gone on writing (and perhaps I must stop doing so) mostly about
the warm separateness of men and women, their city, its shifting look, work,
and plan, not only my home town subway that opened in 1904 and all the
details of its construction (and now, if I may be in two times, seven months
after this talk in Orleans?reconstruction) like bridge building, but its
meaning, its habit of passing through an invisible city to let you off and up
to the surface somewhere, action, children, work force (we say) changing
and meeting and not meeting one another, "things here below," the title of a
story I'm writing?but the invisible city past and inside you (what
Bachelard would have done with the New York subway), and patterns
mobile, abstract, and like layer on layer of thought, yet inherent and I've
hoped biophysical, infra-structures scoped by all our precise knowledges
and intuition. This was mixed and a risk, it led me everywhere, it led me by
analogy and question and probably some ear-to-the-ground naturalism of my
own to science, where I had often been anyway.
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The novel is about, at least proximately, fathers and sons, their
simultaneous search for and avoidance of one another; the
uncertainties produced by chronological distortion and metamor-
phosing narration are analogues for David's psychological ambi-
valence. This conflict between father and son is also dramatized in
short interchapters between the eight memoirs. There are two voices
in these interchapters: Brooke's and some godlike or muselike or
authorial voice that has fathered Brooke's voice yet is within it. Their
argument over whether or not to unify the relatively discrete
memoirs helps explain the rationale for McElroy's fracturing his
material, but this conflict of "spirit-author" and author (or Holy
Ghost and narrator) is more important as part of McElroy's
exhaustive extension of the Biblical metaphor.7 Like the Bible, A
Smuggler's Bible is concerned with the historical relation of father
and son, split into separate "books" with different points of view and
styles, and unified by theme and by a single agent of inspiration.
Further, one motive of A Smuggler's Bible is the search for origins
and ends, a continuity between genesis and revelation that would
establish a configurative meaning. On the other hand, a smuggler's
bible is only a means, an empty box used to transport valuables
across frontiers. As the novel proceeds, various kinds of smuggling
and allied dishonesties such as counterfeiting and forging are worked
into the text, and by the end Brooke's manuscript is placed in a
smuggler's bible on shipboard. Smuggling becomes an image for
functional collecting and specious connecting, directly opposed to
the more ambitious Biblical intentions of finding truth and meaning
through separate acts. The metaphor of a smuggler's bible breaks
when McElroy fully develops-overloads-each term's implica-
tions: the terms examine each other and cooperate for partial
meanings but are finally separate as are the sections of the book. Just
as David and his father move both toward and away from each other,
the novel advances upon meaning and attacks its possibility,
constructs and deconstructs itself as it expresses what McElroy
identifies as its theme: "the powerful and mysterious coexistence of
continuity and discontinuity" (NN, p. 204)
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These are the only two Mcelroy's I've read; anyone want to discuss/ask questions/speculate?
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ya he seems like a smart doode. is der a spahrk notes i can red?
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>>9491728
First one is from McElroy interview where he touches on women and men before rambling into another socrates fable:
Socrates on the Beach,
http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/20874855.pdf
and the other is a review:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/pdf/1207862.pdf
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haven't read Women and Men yet, I got a relatively cheap copy though.
a smuggler's bible might be the best debut novel anyone could've written in their college years. that's a nice excerpt you posted and covers a ton of ground of what ASB offers. anything in particular you wanted to talk about? it's just such a dense book that i don't really know where to being, the Gaddis-y conflict between counterfeiting and reality, the physically constraining but mentally introspective nature of the sea, david's apparent schizophrenia as a result of distressing urban life
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I love MBMBaM, kinda got done with The Adventure Zone after that Groundhog's Day storyline.
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>>9491752
How big of a role does the bike messenger character play in Women and Men? I don't have much patience for postmodern doorstoppers but I've been in the messenger industry for way too long and I love New York novels so I just might give this one a shot.
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>>9492475
Holy shit I'm mother banned anymore. I read ancient history and it was amazing. One of the best books I've ever read. I'm reading a smugglers bible and so far it's beautiful. A few passages have really moved me and I sat there re reading them. The Kodak hotel part was super comfy. I can say smugglers is on V's level maybe not as important as the recognitions but so far I am enjoying it more. I will get back to you when I'm done. McElroy is a genious and I'm pissed more people don't read him
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im glad /lit/ likes this guy
only reason his books are out of print is because he's on the wrong side of Dave Eggers and the New York crowd
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>>9493500
What is his water book going to be. I emailed him and am waiting a response. Apparently he always emails back. I'm excited.
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