Lookout Cartridge

by Joseph McElroy

With Lookout Cartridge, Joseph McElroy established a reputation as one of contemporary fiction's foremost innovators and deft observers into the fissures of modern society. It is a novel of dazzling intricacy, absorbing suspense, and the highest to redeem the great claim of paranoia on the American psyche.

In trying to figure out just who is so threatened by an innocent piece of cinema verité filmed in collaboration with a friend, Cartwright finds himself at the heart of a mystery stretching from New York and London to Corsica and Stonehenge. With each new fact he gathers, both the intricacy of the syndicate arrayed against him and what his search will cost him become alarmingly clear.

Genres: Fiction, Literature, American, 20th Century, Literary Fiction, Novels, United States

531 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1974

About the author

Joseph McElroy is an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist.

McElroy grew up in Brooklyn Heights, NY, a neighborhood that features prominently in much of his fiction. He received his B.A. from Williams College in 1951 and his M.A. from Columbia University in 1952. He served in the Coast Guard from 1952–4, and then returned to Columbia to complete his Ph.D. in 1961. As an English instructor at the University of New Hampshire, his short fiction was first published in anthologies. He retired from teaching in 1995 after thirty-one years in the English department at Queens College, City University of New York.

McElroy's writing is often grouped with that of William Gaddis and Thomas Pynchon because of the encyclopedic quality of his novels, particularly the 1191 pages of Women and Men (1987). Echoes of McElroy's work can be found in that of Don DeLillo and David Foster Wallace. McElroy's work often reflects a preoccupation with how science functions in American society; Exponential, a collection of essays published in Italy in 2003, collects science and technology journalism written primarily in the 1970s and 1980s for the New York Review of Books.

He has received the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and fellowships from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and Ingram Merrill Foundations, and the National Endowment for the Arts.

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lookout Cartridge is an utterly cinematographic novel – a camera flutters seemingly at random filming everything it manages to focus on: every insignificant material object, every casual event and every trifle of existence…

And dark points come and move almost as if sound and speed have become identical, but not quite, for I can see them move. They are like genes in a microphotograph.
This light without sound is not the beginning.
Was there a beginning?
Sound without illumination maybe.
Such a field of noise was coming everywhere, from tile, concrete, the chill-blown street above, the tracks below, and even as if from the change booth where a black girl in blue-smoked cartwheel glasses pushed out tokens without looking up from her paper – that till I was through the turnstile and to the brink of the escalator and put my foot on it hearing behind me the click of steps closing fast yet seeming oddly slow, I didn't guess why the toddling graybeard in a herringbone with the hems drooping who'd preceded me through the turnstile had made for the stairs instead.

The book is an elaborately designed, meandering absurdist mystery. Two friends shoot an ostensibly inconsequential film that seems to be nothing but the crude amateurish garbage…

A softball game in Hyde Park, a bonfire in Wales, a Hawaiian hippie and his girlfriend from Hempstead, Long Island, playing guitar in the London Underground. A suitcase slowly packed. People in a marvelous country mansion doing things inside and outside and ignoring a moonshot on a television set under a table umbrella out on a rainy patio. A Corsican montage featuring an international seminar on ecology. Toward the middle of August, Stonehenge. In the end a U.S. Air Force base. A quick 8-mill. cartridge of some pals of Dagger's the night we got back from shooting at the base.

But despite the obviously trashy qualities of the film some miscreant penetrates into the friend’s house and destroys the tapes. As if shooting this rubbishy movie wasn’t enough, the protagonist has been writing a diary scrupulously describing the process of filming and now the hunt for the diary commences… Chaotic burglaries, purposeless pursuits, rummaged apartments, furtive shadowing and so on… Nothing seems to be accidental and all the miscellaneous participants turn out to be interconnected.
The action consists of the current events and flashbacks, of the incessant travelling from place to place but gradually everything blends: all times become one time, all places become one place…

Still, as my Druid says, in each age arise unlikely tongues which nonetheless may help us: the gods of the body’s warm organs may show themselves now not through a burning bush or a martyr’s funny bone on fire or in the mysteries of appetite, but along intangible electronic canals where slippery loops joining pancreas and lung, bowel and eye, become, for the sake of a diagram’s current, straight lines and right-angle transits, and clarity’s pulse waits for the gate which if open may flip whole futures of gates drawing that pulse like a spasm of the greater body through gods who blink and gods who do not blink until at some crux near the analogic cog or digital core a twinge of harmony is heard like someone else’s pain.

Everything in this world isn’t what it may seem… The sensible world is just a product of maya, a hollow appearance – an illusion dreamt by the omnipotent demon, and no human being can step outside this sensible world.

[Jonathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a masterpiece, as should be clear from both my status updates and the length and rambling nature of this review (it is only the best books, I think, which set our minds rushing off in all sorts of directions). It is a thriller, though seldom thrilling. It is a mystery, though is never truly solved. We move from A to B to C by dancing back and forth between B1.1, -A2.3, B.4.7.3, C3.1 etc. Dot matrix story telling. Slowly an image emerges. McElroy asks for your trust, and your patience. I would recommend you give it to him. I would not, however, suggest starting with this as your first of his (perhaps Smuggler's Bible or Ancient History would work well for that), but it truly is wonderful.

McElroy and Heidegger

" What is there in the room there at home is the table (not “a” table among many other tables in other rooms and other houses) at which one sits in order to write, have a meal, sew, play. Everyone sees this right away, e.g., during a visit: it is a writing table, a dining table, a sewing table—such is the primary way in which it is being encountered in itself. This characteristic of “in order to do something” is not merely imposed on the table by relating and assimilating it to something else which it is not. Its standing-there in the room means: Playing this role in such and such characteristic use. This and that about it is “impractical,” unsuitable. That part is damaged. It now stands in a better spot in the room than before—there’s better lighting, for example. . . . Here and there it shows lines—the boys like to busy themselves at the table. Those lines are not just interruptions in the paint, but rather: it was the boys and it still is. This side is not the east side, and this narrow side so many cm. shorter than the other, but rather the one at which my wife sits in the evening when she wants to stay up and read, there at the table we had such and such a discussion that time, there that decision was made with a friend that time, there that work was written that time, there that holiday celebrated that time. That is the table—as such it is there in the temporality of everydayness. . . .."

Heidegger - The Hermeneutics of Facticity, 1923

"I saw on the hall wall the old enlargement of my children that I hadn't looked at since that mellow morning at eleven just after the County Council man left and just before I followed Lorna up to bed" - McElroy – p133

There is much to say here, but I am not sure if I need to say it. I think one of the unique points about Joe's project is how closely he tries to trace this type of Being in his prose - it makes for "difficult" reading, of course, though I remain convinced that once one has got in sync with its rhythms, it becomes as easy as breathing.

This is also interestingly manifested in the narrator's oft repeated concern that the images captured in the film miss so much of that which they contain for him - using Heidegger's example - I could take a picture of the bed in which my wife died (or, more interestingly still, have a photo of the bed she died in taken before she died) and show it to a stranger. The beds we saw would be different. And so the narrator writes his diary/notes which accompany the film in order to "fill in the gaps", so to speak. Yet this fails too. And he is almost frantic in his desperation, paranoid, muddled and self-confused. The filmed object is never any more than "present-at-hand" perhaps? Or is it even that?

If, as Barthes said, photographs are "a message without a code" and are literally an emanation of the referent, the issue remains that the relationship between image and thing is that between the imprint of a footstep in the sand and the foot that made it. A great deal is lost. As those millions seeking to capture every passing moment on their cameraphones will discover. The lens is a nonliving agent, an intruder between Dasien and that which it is looking-towards. A photograph of a table only possesses tableness when Dasien looks at it, and it will never have the same Being it had when the first Dasien decided to take its picture. All photographs may be memento mori, but, like a death-mask, demonstrate only the extent of what we have lost. I think of the hundreds of photos I have taken of my two year old son, and the illimitable gulf between the child I held in my arms and the image I have on my shelf. That Beingness cannot be captured, cannot be retained, cannot be remembered, cannot be communicated. It has always already abandoned us to our temporal prison, our time-bound existence, propelled endlessly forward and far far away from everything we love.

Does it bring to the foreground our Anxiety? To notice our thrownness from the fact that the Being of the Table I photograph is not transferable to another Dasien - looking over his shoulder at the image I see clearly my aloneness, my ungrounded nature.


And what happens when we look at a photograph of ourselves that we have no memory of?


A McElroy sentence (ramblings written while halfway through the book)

" I couldn’t know for sure that Jim and Claire weren’t linked – hell, the people you know tend to do the same things as you – in New York you see a French bloke you haven't seen in three years suddenly in the lobby at a festival of horror films contemplating popcorn through the glass counter, his hand detached below a leather sleeve; or in London at the end of a bad day you catch an Arts Council Show and in the first of its series of American interiors you sit down in a Vegas madam's 1943 parlor that's traveled from California to Germany and now here to London on the way back home and you listen to the authentic jukebox and you cross eyes with a blue-uniformed guard who looks away as you wonder if he ever heard "Don't Fence Me In" during the Blitz, but now at eye level from Roxy's seedy armchair where you're sitting two new knees materialize and they turn out to be knees that followed yours at the Cinderella Ball in Brooklyn Heights a year later in '44, for you move up past them to a Lincoln green wool hem and thence in a rush to Renée 's russet shag that is not russet now but hot San Francisco copper: Renée – for Christ sake Renée - opens her bright mouth, moans, and reaches at you and as you incredulously get up almost falls into your lap there in the easy chair of your traveling brothel but a moving lap is hard to find and as Renée says quite loud, Missed it in L.A, had to see it here, the russet hair you mouthed on Brooklyn Heights flies back in your face here half a mile from Buckingham Palace at this summer show (where in Days of old, Knights were bold) and the same low-pitched voice you once kissed gives you a twenty-five-year resume and when the Crosby changes in the bright dome of this jukebox that transcends nickels and dimes, the mouth takes a breath, its breasts rise, and it asks where you're staying – and you don't know where to start, here in Merry England, where Knights were bold and ladies not particular." (p44-45)


One of the ways using GR has improved my reading experience is that I have noticed how quickly it is possible to spot a "great work", often by the genius evidenced by single paragraphs or even single sentences. This often means I feel an urge to start writing things in this review space long before have finished reading the book.

And so, if you will forgive the presumption of such a premature commentary, I want to speak for a short while about the sentence quoted above. There are many authors who write long sentences, of course, Bernhard comes to mind, as does Saramago, but none, I would submit, move as effectively through time as Joe. It is clear that he wishes to follow a neuron-driven path through experience, rather than that imposed by post-experiential logic. What I have quoted above is not the most extreme example of his technique I have come across (I quote a paragraph in my review of Cannonball which still blows me away every time I read it), but it is just so filled with story that I was impressed enough at first read to want to type the whole thing up.

Three small points – note the "bloke" (our narrator has spent enough time in London to have picked up this word) and the dynamism of the "Christ sake", which yanks us back again to the incredulous voice of the present-tense narrator, and finally the sudden shift from first to second person as the narrator speaks self back at self.

Finally, for now at least, I know enough of Joe's preoccupations to read the word "linked" in the first line as though it were flashing in neon….

[Nick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Published in 1974, Lookout Cartridge is Joseph McElroy's 4th novel and is rich in Joseph McElroy's burgeoning exploration of narrative and linguistics, syntax and structure.

Reading McElroy’s Women and Men introduced me to writing informed by and structured around a mathematical system, that later novel's construction being based on the pendulum model within Chaos Theory; the curving, swerving, recursive and non chronological shifts in time; unusual temporal and spatial leaps and bounces. Here too, in Lookout Cartridge, the writing is formed around a system(s): computer memory, film memory and the human experience of memory and recording or imprinting. It's non-linear and intricately de-plotted, the complexity of the interconnections and shifts in time are more elaborate and disorienting, the narrative more fragmented and mosaic-like than Women and Men. There is a technological-computer quality to it's form and logical/illogical flow which requires intensive processing on the reader's part, which I enjoyed but less so than the flow of Women and Men.

The novel’s protagonist Cartwright is searching for a film he and his friend Dagger created, which has since vanished under mysterious circumstances. Cartwright’s quest for the cartridge is mirrored by our own, the reader’s, as he attempts to make connections between events, people and places; memories and recordings.

Metaphors of filming, recording and navigating film are used throughout and it’s testament to Joseph McElroy’s writing that every instance feels unique and inspired. And the writing here is what makes this book so compelling and challenging. The sentences are puzzles formed of filmic qualities, they cut, jump, pan, rewind and fast forward through metaphor and context. It’s a challenging novel and for me, someone who has the attention span of a… oh look a bird… I had to read it at home, in peace and quiet, where I could focus properly. It might have film noir and pulp genre qualities, but it's way more complex and detailed and immensely more fun.

This edition is a signed first edition hardback, so I feel quite smug about that. Yep.

[Ian Scuffling · Rating 4 out of 5]

Perhaps even more demanding than Women and Men, Lookout Cartridge is McElroy's talent on full display. Much can be said of the man's prose, which is at times a brick wall and others a raft along a river, but it's really what he's able to do with that prose that wallops you, the dear reader. In LC, there's a noir-ish mystery to be unfurled, and because of McElroy's prose style, he's able to render the truest elements of confusion, incomprehension, and messiness of a real "shaggy dog" story—in true mystery, the tight wrap-ups and effective, clever solutions undermine the veracity of the story-telling, but here, Cartwright's mission never is fully revealed, and our understanding of it can only come through the multi-facet view we're able to access through associations, characters and vagueries. If you want quick, pat solutions, this is not the book for you, but if you're here reading reviews of McElroy's work, then you're probably not that type anyway.

I've come to describe McElroy's prose as stream-of-pre-conscious. I think this best encapsulates what he does and is doing in his artistic use of our language. That is to say, where Joycean stream-of-conscious has a verbalistic quality to it, McElroy's precludes the organizing principles of a consciousness, and therefore he captures the true spontaneity of thought, feeling and mentation. Further, when the reader lives in this pre-conscious thought-world, it has a startling effect of implanting thoughts and memories, so that, while the reader may think s/he is struggling at comprehension, there will, eventually in the book, come a moment, a strand of text, the perfect ordering of words, that fills the gaps and transmogrifies confusion into clearer concepts. In LC, McElroy breaks down time's linearity to reconstruct scenes and moments over and over again, processing the information of a scene in a different, new way each time, so that the reader can slowly acquire the fullest view of a frame—but because it's done so meticulously, it's not until the end of the book that those full frames come all at once, snapping in place, though still obscured, defying omniscient revelation—after all, there is no such thing.

The book, acting like a cartridge itself, can only be deciphered for the screen behind our eyes once it has been inserted into our mechanistic, computer-brain. I'll admit freely that many moments of this book got away from me, and still remain un-begotten, like ripe fruit on the branch after harvest. Perhaps after I've read through the rest of his catalog, I'll revisit this tree and pluck those fruits from their arboreal home. Sweet rewards to look forward to; like any great book, I can't wait to keep coming back.

[Cody · Rating 5 out of 5]

Talk about your overwhelm. Your ‘literature of exhaustion.’ Talk about the passion. This is Joe’s contribution to diode overload: a fetishist’s porn of still and filmic photo jargon and Druidic-cum-Mayan-cum-Kodachrome paranoia-scape that feels every bit its 1974 vintage. (Joe really did predict LCD TV’s, gotta say.) It’s unequal parts cloak-and-dagger, techno-fuckit, post-60’s bum-out survey, art-functionalist inquiry, Colonel Mayonnaise in the breadbox with the red candlestick, man-hunting, woman-done-me-blues epic. It’s Positive Dystopia. It’s very, very Joe, but nowhere near as exclusive as some of his later deals. It has more than a big whiff of Pynchon in it, but that may very well’ve just been the state of the tuned-in artist during the Nixonian Hangover in America.

Put another way: you don’t name primary characters Gene, Jan, Jane, John, John (there’s two), Jen, Jenny, and Jerry (to choose eight from a cast hilariously large) because you’re trying to help your readers to a light and lazy Sunday mystery. But if you’ve read this far you’re already an intrepid Joeist and, to quote our Man from this same byzantine car-crash/car-kiss, “Between this and what happened next, I knew myself to be adequate.”

There’s fun in surrendering.

[Kevin Adams · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a mind blowing book. What a wizard with words. Every single McElroy I read I’m left with the question, “how does one write so well?” While he’ll never be my favorite writer of all-time, he is one of the 3 maybe 5 most impressive writers I’ve ever read. I was stunned at the composition of Lookout Cartridge. Every single page gave me something to be in awe of. That’s all. Oh, and read this if you haven’t. Read paragraphs multiple times. Worth it.

[Jonfaith · Rating 4 out of 5]

Lookout Cartridge resists analysis. It doesn't lend itself to objective models. It lacks a core and periphery. There is little distinction between its exterior and the insular. Hell, as the pages turn, the narrative gathers matter , but not really force.

Where would this kinesis go? We measure in terms of plot development. Within these pages that activity remains suspect.

As pages are read, certain detail accumulate.

Could we be more specific?

Okay, the myriad project of representing reality repeats during the course of this forward reading. The Mercator Projection, the Mayan calendar and the enigma of Stonehenge are featured. These matters are explored, ruminated. How do we afford the aspects of flux to the static? Film uses edits for its gestalt. Painitng uses perspective.

Okay but as narrative project, what actually happens?

Two guys make a film, one of them keeps a diary of the process. Suddenly matters have turned a corner. Something untoward appears to be afoot. Data is flashed both forward and back through the narrative sequence, providing links if not elucidation. McElroy said somewhere that Lookout Cartridge is a computer. It processes imputs.

The name of Richard Nixon appears throughout the narrative, though Dick doesn't haunt like in Gravity's Rainbow. Speaking of paranoiac aesthetics, I found Lookout Cartridge is more Caché than Three Days of the Condor.

3.5/5 Though this reflects my own limitations, not those of the novel.

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

You who have me now will find it incongruous that I be not persuaded by a McElroy novel. And at that, this one which I’d conceived of as his Great had he not written Women and Men by which I still stand. Tom LeClair described McElroy as “our first planetary realist” in regard to W&M and here we have Lookout Cartridge as its nigh opposite (even more so than Letter I dare say), a first person novel of personal social and political connections, interconnections, epistemology, paranoia. This is my own anomaly I am faced with, that the first person, novelistically, is claustrophobic. No fear that McElroy does everything possible to both exploit that claustrophobia and to refuse to allow it to collapse altogether into Holden Caulfield Syndrome. But without that multiplicity of perspectival voices fused into a unity of a loose and baggy cohesion, well, my preferences have not been served.

[Kristian Svane · Rating 5 out of 5]

Joseph McElroy's 1974 novel Lookout Cartridge is a maddening maze=mega-structure of transorbital prose encoding cryptic events surrounding a bad but evidently important amateur film and the people involved perhaps in its disappearance.

A book which "No matter where it took me I would go to the end. Even if only to find myself alone then with someone else's profit system, or state of mind, or shrunken heart." (p.464) but also why not a "closed system growing conscious of itself [Plus?!] till it thinks itself into pause as if it guessed some lightning ought to have preceded it: and it waits breathless: and sometimes it waits too long." (p.477).

A phenomenal literary achievement (etc. etc.) which I now count among my favourites.

[alex · Rating 5 out of 5]

*Second Reading*

Lookout Cartridge is very definitely Joseph McElroy’s “1960’s novel,” engaging heavily with a type of deeply paranoid “Something Bigger Than You Is Out To Get You” plotting that may lead one to situate it alongside other postmodern novels of suspicion such as Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 and DeLillo’s The Names. However, what distinguishes McElroy’s text here (and always, really) is his enduring love of deep and near ceaseless abstraction. Our protagonist, Cartwright, is not a character through which the reader experiences the events of the novel in a traditional sense. Rather, he functions as a sort of handwritten, obsessively edited map (it’s right there in his name) registering events, locations, and people in varying degrees of specificity and from various angles for the reader to attempt to process.

The easiest, and indeed a pretty good, reading of this novel is to understand it as synecdochic of how a film camera itself works- i.e. a device that records images in whatever manner the operator desires, images which can be manipulated, (re)assembled, and altered to suit one’s needs but which carry no innate meaning or readymade plot in and of themselves. A skeptic might say “well that’s all fine and good, but every text requires collaborative meaning creation from its reader.” While this is of course true, McElroy places this relationship front and center, making it a core tenet of how the book functions. That said, don’t be fooled into thinking this is just Robbe-Grillet-ian games or theory-as-fiction- it very definitely is not.

Lookout Cartridge is just as much a “cinema novel” as it is an exercise in applying the mechanics/limitations of the film format to fiction writing. It’s remarkable how many 1960s/70s film archetypes McElroy moves through in this book and I’d love to ask Joe about the films he thought about while writing it (I once asked him on Twitter about a part of Women and Men where environmental/ambient music is evocatively described and he told me it was “fragmentarily Keith Jarrett”)- we get classic noir interrogations and pursuits, British Folk Horror sensibilities in the form of the Bonfire Scene and Cartwright’s excursion to the Hebrides, and, of course, huge dollops of “The Parallax View”/“The Conversation”/Alan Pakula-esque paranoia throughout. If Zeroville encyclopedically (and perhaps only topically) references the annals of film history, Lookout Cartridge successfully embodies the essences of some of its most stylized and intriguing subgenres.

Sidenotes:
-since this is essentially a Joseph McElroy Fan Account, I’d probably be remiss not to say where I rank this among his works. For me it’s his second best novel, I think, falling short of the delirious heights of Women and Men and narrowly eclipsing Plus.
-something in my head broke (fixed?) during my third/most recent reading of Women and Men and Joe’s prose is no longer “difficult” for me. This is a strange and most welcome development! I recommend it!

[Christopher Robinson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Dizzying in the best way possible. Ridiculously intricate and complex, rich in detail to the point of being overwhelming. Long, beautiful, winding sentences that are simultaneously abstract and direct. (Major and specific props to McElroy for the Love Space sequence, one of the most vividly realistically written romantic interludes I’ve ever come across.) Demanding and enigmatic (frequently cryptic, even), but also fast-paced, entertaining and gorgeously written. Demands a reread, and I’ll be happy to oblige at some point. Highly recommended.

Bonus: I finished this book on October 30, 2017. The conclusion of the novel takes place between October 30 and early November of 1971. This was not planned, and I’m very amused at the coincidence. A weird connection across time that seems very much in the spirit of the book itself.

[Nicole · Rating 2 out of 5]

My post Infinite Jest high has led me various places, including this one, that have turned up disappointing. (To be fair, also places I found found greatly rewarding.) I find that many post-modern projects are trying to solve a problem I don't have. The books I love from this category have something more, do something further, something which as yet I can only describe in an I-know-it-when-I-see-it mode, but which has to do with sincerity or humanity or empathy or even something like joy or play. If nothing else, IJ was funny.

I find myself, also, tremendously frustrated with the devoted readers of this little group of authors. I have come to the conclusion that, even though some aspects of our taste in books may overlap to a certain extent, our values do not. We are mismatched. In my worst and most cynical moments, I find myself wondering if there is an aspect of liking a hard book because it's hard, a superiority, a snobbishness: look what I decoded! There does seem to be an awful lot of effort spent on the simple decoding, translating these projects that "challenge traditional narrative" into something that looks an awful lot like traditional narrative so that they may be comprehended.

This project is not enough for me. This discouse is not enough for me.

I try to give examples, as I find this uneasiness easier to articulate in the particular case.

Example: this book plays with or undermines the expectations and structures of movement/narrative strategy/style X.

Okay, I'm with you, and I see what you mean. My next question would be, why? To what purpose? What was wrong with phenomenon X, how does this critique illuminate and possibly even solve that problem?

I, for example, quite enjoy a traditional narrative, or rather have enjoyed many narratives that qualify as traditional. I need some further explanation of what is meant to be wrong with this? Yes, I know that enjoyment is not everything, escapism has its problems. But I trust you are with me, about the spirit of the question? Are we taking this structure down because there is something necessary in the project, or are we taking it down because it's just there?

Example: the tone is satiric.

Uh, maybe, though I suspect often less so than we would hope, especially when the author figures as a character (example the worst, Michel Houellebecq, whom I actively despise. Yes, it would be nicer to think that when he describes himself in one of his own novels as the best person the narrator has ever met that he does not really mean it, but that don't make it true. But I digress.)

In any case, assuming the satire for the sake of argument, what is it a satire of? And, again, in the spirit of the critique, can we maybe get a little detail? Like, what is wrong with item Z object of satire other than that it is, say, bad or, perhaps not even bad but just something we collectively look down on from our perch of higher discernment? The broader the description of the object of satire, the more skeptical I am. VIZ: a description in the following mode "art, materialism, love, and reputation are all themes." Are they indeed? If this were a freshman essay, I'd be getting out my red ink pen right now.

Example: this writing is experimental, or sometimes, this writing is innovative.

Yes. But some experiments are failures, and not all innovation is a positive thing. I need some step beyond this; experimentation is perhaps a good reason for the author to produce the writing, but it is by no means a sufficient reason for me, or anyone else, to read it.

Thus we arrive at Joseph McElroy, recipient of devotion from a small but loyal.

This particular book, the Lookout Cartridge, is, so far, good enough that I may consider finishing it, but offers little enough by way of answer to these questions that I also may consider not finishing it. Much will come down to the library's due date; this is, it seems to me, fairly faint praise. I imagine an author (even an "innovative" one) does not really want to hear that the reader will finish his book if nothing better happens to come along before it is due back.

Or perhaps he doesn't care, though, if true, this may be, in essence, what is missing for me in these books.

[James Dyke · Rating 4 out of 5]

This highly original novel was my first McElroy. It reads like a film in itself, McElroy adopts a highly elusive, labyrinthine style which presents morsels of information (thousands and thousands of morsels) which the reader has to attempt to connect together in order to comprehend what exactly has gone on. Unfortunately, the main character is essentially doing the same thing. An aura of paranoia and everything-is-connectedness pervades as the reader themselves pieces together correctly or incorrectly what the hell is exactly happening to Cartwright.

The information overload essentially means the book runs away a little. There are many gaps to fill, and yes, McElroy makes large demands of the reader, perhaps the most I have ever experienced. For this reading the book is not only exhaustive but exhausting, it's hard work, but that's all part of the game.

This novel is rich for interpretation, and a wonderful text to write about. It's difficult to put into words the experience of reading this book - after all, it's all about the visual. I also believe it's a very personal experience, it plays with how a person reads, gathers information and processes it. Clever.

[Nick · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5/5 - #3 ranking on my McElroy list

1) W&M (will never be topped)
2) Ancient History
3) Lookout
4) Smuggler
5) Plus
6) Actress

Advice: don't read late at night when tired and following very complex prose becomes nearly impossible.

[eric · Rating 3 out of 5]

It's sort of hard to know how to rate this one. I've false-started several times over the past few years. It just never grabbed me. So I took it backpacking and tent confinement due to mosquitoes allowed/forced me to get into it. There is a story here (bizarre but somehow obfuscated into blandness), but you have to be determined to seek it out. This situation is fine by me in many cases, but I spent a fair portion of this book struggling more than I really wanted to. Things jump rapidly and unexpectedly between different time periods. There are many many characters and you don't ever actually meet a large number of them. There's really only the faintest notion of a plot. I'm not necessarily turned off by any (or all) of this. Any Pynchon book has all of this and more. The difference, I think, is in the character of the writing. Pynchon is consistently funny and inventive and just generally fun to read. McElroy's writing rarely pulled me in like that. If all of this In the end, the amount of struggle outweighed the payoff considerably. I doubt I'll actively seek out any more of his books.

[Jackson · Rating 3 out of 5]

The low rating is perhaps partially my fault. This was my ebook for the last few weeks, meaning I read it on my phone between sets at the gym or on my computer at work between calls. I don’t think this book is meant to be read that way. This book demands your full attention every step of the way, otherwise you’re going to get lost and keep getting more and more lost. To me, this book felt like an exercise in creating a story using the most convoluted and tenuous language possible. The plot jumps around like crazy, you will have like bread crumbs from different events in different countries in different decades all sprinkled in the same paragraph. If you feel overwhelmed, McElroy did his job.

At it’s foundation, this novel is about some guy who makes an artistic (plotless) film; the film gets partially destroyed and a labyrinthian search for the perpetrator ensues. In addition to the film, the narrator has kept a diary that is seemingly just as important to the saboteurs as the film itself. Through this, McElroy through Cartwright plays with the idea of photographic (videographic) media vs written media. An image can show every single detail except the subtextual story. A written page can detail everything shown in an image but cannot convey the little details, can not bring a reader to truly see.

Cartwright sees himself as a cartridge of sorts, something that is inserted into a space and makes things happen. This book is full of cartridges, mediums that define, mediums that are the message—liquid crystals, the cast on Jane’s arm, the television sets, the reels of film. The cartridge, Cartwright, is between the mortise and the tenon. “I am on my lookout site keeping watch for those who have gone into the building’s shadowy forms and are to be warned by me if the other forces come from the street outside, so I’m important but I’m struck stationary between the two motions of those inside and those outside but I do not know enough about the two sides, can’t look at both at once.”

I just found this to be convoluted for convolutions sake. I enjoy maximalism and experimental writing but this felt excessive. Maybe, like I said, I would’ve enjoyed it if I could read it as a physical book somewhere I could focus. Oh but physical book? The hardcore costs $2000. Anyways. And have I lulled you who have me?

[Grant · Rating 2 out of 5]

**Suspiciously eyes all the 5-star ratings here** As much as I enjoy McElroy's prose, this one is overly experimental, and too drawn out. Some concepts/ideas just aren't suited to the novel form. This contains, for example, a VERY detailed description of dishwashing. Not sure why and it's certainly not necessary for the narrative. "Plus" is also highly experimental but I enjoyed it more, largely because it's a reasonable length and more focused.

Apparently, McElroy took issue with the statement, "fiction can't compete with film in visual immediacy" and so he set out to write a "cinematic" novel. Well, those are different forms and should be treated as such. Trying to compress the strengths of one form into another is just an odd way to go about things. It also hasn't aged all that well, with references to '70s film technologies that are now little used (8/16/35mm, Xerox, etc.) compared to digital.

I think there is likely something supernatural or at least drug-infused going on with Cartwright as he imagines and dreams himself to be a "lookout between forces" and attempts to describe the world in this quasi-omniscient, uber-detailed manner. This sometimes results in some pretty cool prose stylizations and turns of phrase, but more often, it's exhausting. I did somewhat enjoy the adventure aspect of the novel (even though I wasn't entirely sure what was going on), taking Cartwright from New York to England to Corsica to Scotland, etc. This was fun and it motivated me to do a bit more travel.

[Reid · Rating 3 out of 5]

Whoo, boy...well, this is one of those books I am glad I read because it was extremely well-written, but am also glad to have over with because it is so intricately and confusingly plotted. It is written in a stream-of-consciousness style that obscures as much as it reveals and requires the memory of an elephant to keep all of the players and plot strings in place. Do I recommend this book? Well, if you have the time and energy to take it on, it is a fascinating book, and almost (but not quite) worth the investment. Faint praise, I know, but the best I can do. I admire McElroy's ability to write something of this complexity and reach, and I also cherish a book that makes me work. But there were just far too many places where I found myself asking, "What the hell is he talking about?!" Proceed with caution, but if you are a reader who values a book that makes you use your mind, by all means give it a try.

[David M]

Something about a film. This one got away from me, though I did in fact make it to the end. The only other McElroy I've read is Actress in the House. That was also difficult to follow, yet basically I loved it. There I could feel a warm, human presence coming from behind or beneath the often confusing arrangement of words on the page. With Lookout Cartridge, not so much. Prose with no physiognomy. Is the narrator autistic? It reads like a technically proficient but tone deaf translation from the Polish.

On the very last page: "I knew that even if the police acquired the three filmless tapes the words would be an impenetrable if interesting surface." Which strike me as a bit coy, and I must say I'm not amused. Still, the book was interesting at times, I won't deny it.

[Aloha]

Holding off on this until maybe an eBook comes out. I have enough hardbacks of encyclopedic novels to keep me preoccupied for a long time. Tom LeClair considers this McElroy's best novel. I'm impressed with Women and Men myself.

[Cole · Rating 4 out of 5]

A few stray thoughts:

The film at the center of this book is a sort of avant-garde documentary/political essay vaguely reminiscent of Chris Marker, but less didactic, and therefore, less commercial. The fact that it becomes the centerpiece of sinister players in a (several?) grand conspiracy(ies?) is genuinely hilarious to me.

McElroy has carefully engineered his prose to always feel like it says almost nothing at all. The most interesting trick here is that you feel you've read nothing significant for 10-20 pages at a time, but in the haze of the tangents, descriptions, and memories comes a feeling that, to me, is what the book is most interested in. The prose isn't maximalist poetic writing like Djuna Barnes, or overwhelming intellectualism like Gaddis or Pynchon... but somewhere in between. This is frustrating sometimes because the "vibes" are vague, and the details are often superfluous. But it creates a unique approach to written form that is both extreme and subtle. Hard to really describe.

Much of the prose is designed to feel like montage in a way that I haven't seen done elsewhere. Basically, through his use of language, McElroy has recreated a sensibility best associated with Nicolas Roeg or Alain Resnais: the sense that space and time are irrelevant. Those filmmakers achieve this through movement and montage. McElroy does it with run on sentences and some sort of voodoo magic I haven't put my finger on yet.

A book this committed to cinematographic sensibilities is best considered in the language and history of cinema. I'd say if you want to know what you're getting into, the best point of comparison is Jacques Rivette. He's fascinating, hypnotic, willfully obtuse, boring, and a genius. Even for lovers of the French New Wave, he's going to displease a lot of people. But if you can get on his wavelength there are great rewards. In this analogy I suppose "Women and Men" would be McElroy's "Out 1". "Lookout Cartridge" then, is probably his "Lamour Fou" (or Maybe Noroit?). And for me, just as with Rivette, the first one is the Rosetta stone needed to wade through the later ones. I'm certainly glad I read "A Smuggler's Bible" first... because it was very useful for how I approached the solipsistic philosophy of both film and conspiracy presented in this book.

Also, rating books is dumb.

[Nhat · Rating 2 out of 5]

ok the deal is that mcelroy has a beautiful, labyrinthine style but this narrative wasn't going to go anywhere, and i keep waiting for some kind of pay off.

[Olin Postlethwait · Rating 3 out of 5]

I truly thought/was hoping McElroy and this novel would be a newly discovered Postmodern masterpiece for me and continue the streak of great novels 2021 has started with. Unfortunately it ended up being my momentum killer. Although coming off a good book hangover, the high hopes I had, and personal experiences (buying and moving into a new condo) may have been a large factor in the lack of reading as well.

I really loved parts of this novel, other parts were a string of cold dense prose stopping me from continuing on. This book is a prime candidate for some sort of resource that provides chapter summaries helping you reflect on what's truly happening. But there were none to be found, which could've added to the lack of enthusiasm for reading it.

Overall I think this is a book I'll look back on and possibly read a second time to truly understand it before I completely judge it.

[S̶e̶a̶n̶ · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cartwright, middle-aged businessman of questionable repute, and his friend Dagger, both Americans living in London, decided to make a film together. They shot about 10 scenes of the film and Cartwright kept a written diary of the shooting. But before the film could be processed, someone broke into Dagger’s flat and destroyed most of it. This is the basic premise, or what we know up front. What follows is an ever-widening gyre of Cartwright’s investigation into the circumstances surrounding the film’s destruction, cut in with first-person reports of the shooting of key scenes in the film.

Full review here.

[Luke]

I really wanted to like this b/c many of the people I follow on GR, Insta, and YouTube speak highly of it, and of McElroy, but this was not very fun to read. I had a better time reading reviews and analysis of it (thanks Gale Literature) than I did reading the book. Not for me. I still want to check out Women & Men someday. P.S. instead of spending hundreds of dollars on a copy, try interlibrary loan via your local system, which is how I got a copy. Also, Dzanc Books has an ebook you can buy for like $10.

[Owen DeVries · Rating 5 out of 5]

Perhaps even more demanding than Women and Men, Lookout Cartridge is McElroy's talent on full display. Much can be said of the man's prose, which is at times a brick wall and others a raft along a river, but it's really what he's able to do with that prose that wallops you, the dear reader. In LC, there's a noir-ish mystery to be unfurled, and because of McElroy's prose style, he's able to render the truest elements of confusion, incomprehension, and messiness of a real "shaggy dog" story—in typical mystery writing, the tight wrap-ups and effective, clever solutions undermine the veracity of a story's telling, but here, the protagonist Cartwright's mission never is fully revealed, and our understanding of it can only come through the multi-facet view we can access through associations, characters and vagueries provided by the first-person limited POV. If you want quick, pat solutions, this is not the book for you, but if you're probably not that type if you're reading McElroy, anyway.

I've come to describe McElroy's prose as stream-of-pre-conscious. I think this coinage best encapsulates what he does and is doing in his artistic use of our language. That is to say, where Joycean stream-of-conscious has a verbalistic quality to it, McElroy's precludes the organizing principles of a consciousness, and therefore he captures the true spontaneity of thought, feeling and mentation. Further, when the reader lives in this pre-conscious thought-world, it has a startling effect of implanting thoughts and memories, so that, while the reader may think s/he is struggling at comprehension, there will, eventually in the book, come a moment, a strand of text, the perfect ordering of words, that fills the gaps and transmogrifies confusion into clearer concepts. In LC, McElroy breaks down time's linearity to reconstruct scenes and moments over and over again, processing the information of a scene in a different, new way each time, so that the reader can slowly acquire the fullest view of a frame—but because it's done so meticulously, it's not until the end of the book that those full frames come all at once, snapping in place, though still obscured, defying omniscient revelation—after all, there is no such thing in life and therefore no such thing in belles Lettres.

The book, acting like a cartridge itself, can only be deciphered for the screen behind our eyes once it has been inserted into our mechanistic, computer-brain to decode and process. I'll admit freely that many moments of this book got away from me, and still remain un-begotten, like ripe fruit on the branch after harvest. I'll definitely be revisiting this tree to pluck those fruits from their arboreal home someday. Sweet rewards to look forward to; like any great book, I can't wait to keep coming back.

[Ray Rapp · Rating 5 out of 5]

to be reviewed. at some point in time. when it has been absorbed. one could wonder why the television was thrown out the window? was it a bomb? did it result in killing Incremona or were the two events, the tv hitting the cab and the cab hitting Incremona unrelated. but then none of this may matter. if what matters is the procession of image thoughts which flash through the mind unrelenting, exposed, discontinuous.....

[Alexander Weber · Rating 3 out of 5]

Man I wanted to like this. but it was dense and boring. it could have been 200-300 pages shorter. there just wasn't much that was interesting. I speed read the last 100 pages, which actually made it better. but basically the writing was good, but the content was.... meh

[Nick · Rating 5 out of 5]

Had to return it to the library D;

Will get it back soon!!!!!!!!!!!

[Ben · Rating 5 out of 5]

Review forthcoming