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A Smuggler's Bible
"A Smuggler's Bible is the novel that launched the career of one of the most daring and original writers of modern fiction. Driven by despairs as terrible as they are comic, David Brooke sets out to "project" himself into the lives of other people. One may wonder what ties connect the figures whose diverse experiences are conjured up by Brooke's uncanny necromancy, what are the sad or bizarre or lunatic strands that draw together characters as disparate as the endearing monster Duke Amerchrome, the controlled Oxonian Harry Tindall, reserved English bookseller Peter St. John, and Brooke's own detached father, among others. Gradually there emerges an intricate and fascinating pattern of meaning, at the heart of which lies a single metaphor that in a thousand ways tells us who we are.
435 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1966
9 people are currently reading
1757 people want to read
About the author
Joseph McElroy
32 books234 followersJoseph 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.
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.
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March 11, 2023
A Smuggler’s Bible is a very complex and multilayered novel and it is a tortuous voyage to the world of falsehood and delusion.
“…but the amount of smuggling that gets carried on even on a ship like this!”
Right away Joseph McElroy postulates that everyone in this world is a smuggler. Wherever one goes, one smuggles there one’s ego and identity. Wherever we go, we smuggle along our memories and our past.
Some are trying to smuggle in and some are trying to smuggle out.
Reading a book one tries to smuggle something in from this book. Writing a book one tries smuggle something out into this book.
The main character of A Smuggler’s Bible doesn’t feel whole, he feels split and hollow and solipsistic so he tries to smuggle identities of the other people inside his consciousness and transform them into his own ego.
But after smuggling too much of information, of fashion, of ideology, of milieu into one’s own consciousness, one becomes a travesty of a person. One loses individuality. One ends up turning into a fake.
“…but the amount of smuggling that gets carried on even on a ship like this!”
Right away Joseph McElroy postulates that everyone in this world is a smuggler. Wherever one goes, one smuggles there one’s ego and identity. Wherever we go, we smuggle along our memories and our past.
Seeing a person or place after many years, we’re saddened if there’s been a great change; yet if there hasn’t been a change, we’re also saddened. And the second sorrow is sharper than the first, for the unchanged takes us back the more surely.
Some are trying to smuggle in and some are trying to smuggle out.
Reading a book one tries to smuggle something in from this book. Writing a book one tries smuggle something out into this book.
The main character of A Smuggler’s Bible doesn’t feel whole, he feels split and hollow and solipsistic so he tries to smuggle identities of the other people inside his consciousness and transform them into his own ego.
So we try to digest the lonely and the lovely and the monstrous of our American age. Accept the mass proliferation of all colors of salesmanship. Yet scoff at it simultaneously. Write and publish our autobiographies while simultaneously scoffing at self-advertisement. But to embrace is to be embraced. So do we risk losing our wills? Yes, of course. But the key is to embrace and at the same moment reject; love as we scorn, choose to be both conscious and unconscious parodies of our age and thus both body it forth and stay half free of it.
But after smuggling too much of information, of fashion, of ideology, of milieu into one’s own consciousness, one becomes a travesty of a person. One loses individuality. One ends up turning into a fake.
July 6, 2013
Ho. Lee. Shitsnacks, I am in love.
I initially decided to read this book for two reasons: The first, to see if I like McElroy enough to warrant dropping a hearty lump of money on one of those few exorbitantly priced copies of Women and Men floating around the internet; the second, to justify preordering Cannonball. When I realized that a three-digit price tag is a bargain for the pleasure of feeding both my library and my brainmeats more than a thousand pages of McElroy's words and heady but human observations, and when I ordered his newest novel within a few dozen pages of being enthusiastically enchanted by his debut one (and then danced with joy when I found out its release date had advanced by a week), I knew I had found something special. To say nothing of the fact that I eschewed all other books (save for 33 pages of Proust) and, truthfully, all other uses of my time while rolling in the myriad readerly pleasures to be found in A Smuggler's Bible. This book consumed me and my desire to do anything that didn't involve reading it.
If pressed, I would insist that this is a book about solipsism. It's about how the effects of which drive the self to seek certainty of others while looking for assurance of the self's existence in examining the lives of others. It's a road map through the pains one takes to accomplish both while really only achieving one and it's a testament to the discoveries that can't avoid materializing into stark clarity during such a journey. It is, strangely, proof that we'll only learn the true nature of our own selves by taking an objective stroll through the daunting terrain of self-assessment via others' perspectives, as we are just as uncertain of everyone's existences as they are of ours.
As a wholly unexpected bonus, the influence McElroy had on DFW is practically dripping from every page: It is so evident, in fact, that I didn't even need the internet to assure me of the former's impact on the writing of the latter (though I do get a thrill from those always-welcome times when facts actually validate my suspicions). There are so many moments when the main character, David Brooke, sounds eerily like Hal Incandenza that it delivered a swift kick of déjà vu right to the heart, from David's attempts to be of the same world as those around him while knowing that he's just going through the motions to his tendency to be in a moment merely in the physical sense while existing everywhere but the immediate now. Another character, who also bears a striking resemblance to Himself's youngest son in the way they both devour and retain dictionary entries with a prodigious recall, makes the following observation:
... he verbalizes easily. Yet David doesn't really know how to talk to you. Either he butts in and speaks for ten minutes straight--intense and blind and using phrases like "Of course, ultimately," "complex awareness," "in fact in my opinion." Or he doesn't come back to you at all, just gives you "um-hum, um-hum" after each of your sentences and sometimes in the middle.
There is, indeed, a Wallace-colored thread binding together the characters and voices that comprise A Smuggler's Bible, and it is Hal's thirty-years-prior doppelgänger. David unites the key figures from various points in his existence first by assembling a slice-of-life biography in eight parts about a number of them -- some told from the person's perspective, some with him assuming the second-person voice to narrate the story of another, some expressed in a choir of commingling voices (which results in pages of unattributed text that is conveyed flawlessly, thanks to how distinctly McElroy draws all of his characters and shapes their voices in the context of their roles -- which I can only guess is a taste of the Women and Men to come), all assuming that he knows enough about them (and, with a total recall that alienates him from them, he actually does) to get into their heads well enough to speak for them. He then takes it one step further: Not content to let their voices join in such a passive manner as dictated by his pen alone, he creates a chain letter of sorts to force them all into awareness of each other, forcing each link in his epistolary string to acknowledge those before and after themselves with a letter of their own (and in one deliciously hateful character's case, some religious tracts).
David, for all of his laborious efforts in cataloging the memories of those who have unknowingly provided the fodder for his eight manuscripts, is, indeed, completely unsure of himself. While each of his eight ostensibly non-autobiographical stories blossom and influence each other in ways that I couldn't help but compare to the later works of Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveller and also, of course, David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, the narratives wedged between each longer reflection reflect how David can't even find cohesion in his own mind. He speaks of himself in a wholly schizophrenic manner, almost violently chastising himself as a voice outside his primary consciousness for allowing his wife to look at his eight memoirs before he's even allowed himself to give them one last editorial perusal of approval -- he, in fact, seems to hate his wife when he speaks of her as this voice that exists separately from but still inside himself.
There are so many roads to take to self-discovery -- say, like half-faking amnesia to see what the get-well letters from others will reveal about the times you've spent together or being allowed otherwise off-limits peeks into acquaintances' and family members' honest impressions of you (though these letters will persistently, disappointingly, though perhaps unintentionally betray more about the writers and their concerns about the parts of their own existences that don't pertain to their relationship with you) or half-listening to everyone to whom you speak, knowing full well that you'll retain every word they speak and every non-verbal cue they issue regardless of how insincere or distracted or downright cold you appear to them.
Writing eight installments of memories ranging from one's own parents and wife to the single-voiced crescendo of a boardinghouse's tenants and staff may seem like an attempt to see the world from other pairs of eye but inserting oneself into each story to varying degrees of importance and purity of intention eventually becomes obvious as another tool of self-examination, proof that one can reach certainty of one's own existence by proving one's significance or prominence, however fleeting, in the Venn diagram of shared personal experience. Each narrative is, indeed, a different way of expressing uncertainty of others on a large-scale and how such doubt is mirrored on the smaller, intensely personal level. Can you trust your own past, both the one you've lived and the one you've inherited from your progenitors? Is the group opinion more valid than the individual's, bearing in mind that the group is objective but the individual knows the difference between how it looks and what it is? Is a person really two different people when you consider their supporting role in your life but their leading on in their own?
This book is one of the few times I read the introduction before diving headfirst into the novel proper, and it was enough to encourage me to continue with that trend. Or it may leave me woefully unfulfilled from the high expectations with which it has burdened me, as I landed on the TOC page already breathless with a cramp in my scrawling hand and having crammed miles of annotations choking the margins of the Roman-numeraled pages. This is the kind of book that encourages long-winded discussions about absolutely everything because it has that broad of a scope and that imperative of a message. This is what required reading for humanity looks like.
I initially decided to read this book for two reasons: The first, to see if I like McElroy enough to warrant dropping a hearty lump of money on one of those few exorbitantly priced copies of Women and Men floating around the internet; the second, to justify preordering Cannonball. When I realized that a three-digit price tag is a bargain for the pleasure of feeding both my library and my brainmeats more than a thousand pages of McElroy's words and heady but human observations, and when I ordered his newest novel within a few dozen pages of being enthusiastically enchanted by his debut one (and then danced with joy when I found out its release date had advanced by a week), I knew I had found something special. To say nothing of the fact that I eschewed all other books (save for 33 pages of Proust) and, truthfully, all other uses of my time while rolling in the myriad readerly pleasures to be found in A Smuggler's Bible. This book consumed me and my desire to do anything that didn't involve reading it.
If pressed, I would insist that this is a book about solipsism. It's about how the effects of which drive the self to seek certainty of others while looking for assurance of the self's existence in examining the lives of others. It's a road map through the pains one takes to accomplish both while really only achieving one and it's a testament to the discoveries that can't avoid materializing into stark clarity during such a journey. It is, strangely, proof that we'll only learn the true nature of our own selves by taking an objective stroll through the daunting terrain of self-assessment via others' perspectives, as we are just as uncertain of everyone's existences as they are of ours.
As a wholly unexpected bonus, the influence McElroy had on DFW is practically dripping from every page: It is so evident, in fact, that I didn't even need the internet to assure me of the former's impact on the writing of the latter (though I do get a thrill from those always-welcome times when facts actually validate my suspicions). There are so many moments when the main character, David Brooke, sounds eerily like Hal Incandenza that it delivered a swift kick of déjà vu right to the heart, from David's attempts to be of the same world as those around him while knowing that he's just going through the motions to his tendency to be in a moment merely in the physical sense while existing everywhere but the immediate now. Another character, who also bears a striking resemblance to Himself's youngest son in the way they both devour and retain dictionary entries with a prodigious recall, makes the following observation:
... he verbalizes easily. Yet David doesn't really know how to talk to you. Either he butts in and speaks for ten minutes straight--intense and blind and using phrases like "Of course, ultimately," "complex awareness," "in fact in my opinion." Or he doesn't come back to you at all, just gives you "um-hum, um-hum" after each of your sentences and sometimes in the middle.
There is, indeed, a Wallace-colored thread binding together the characters and voices that comprise A Smuggler's Bible, and it is Hal's thirty-years-prior doppelgänger. David unites the key figures from various points in his existence first by assembling a slice-of-life biography in eight parts about a number of them -- some told from the person's perspective, some with him assuming the second-person voice to narrate the story of another, some expressed in a choir of commingling voices (which results in pages of unattributed text that is conveyed flawlessly, thanks to how distinctly McElroy draws all of his characters and shapes their voices in the context of their roles -- which I can only guess is a taste of the Women and Men to come), all assuming that he knows enough about them (and, with a total recall that alienates him from them, he actually does) to get into their heads well enough to speak for them. He then takes it one step further: Not content to let their voices join in such a passive manner as dictated by his pen alone, he creates a chain letter of sorts to force them all into awareness of each other, forcing each link in his epistolary string to acknowledge those before and after themselves with a letter of their own (and in one deliciously hateful character's case, some religious tracts).
David, for all of his laborious efforts in cataloging the memories of those who have unknowingly provided the fodder for his eight manuscripts, is, indeed, completely unsure of himself. While each of his eight ostensibly non-autobiographical stories blossom and influence each other in ways that I couldn't help but compare to the later works of Italo Calvino's If on a Winter's Night a Traveller and also, of course, David Mitchell's Cloud Atlas, the narratives wedged between each longer reflection reflect how David can't even find cohesion in his own mind. He speaks of himself in a wholly schizophrenic manner, almost violently chastising himself as a voice outside his primary consciousness for allowing his wife to look at his eight memoirs before he's even allowed himself to give them one last editorial perusal of approval -- he, in fact, seems to hate his wife when he speaks of her as this voice that exists separately from but still inside himself.
There are so many roads to take to self-discovery -- say, like half-faking amnesia to see what the get-well letters from others will reveal about the times you've spent together or being allowed otherwise off-limits peeks into acquaintances' and family members' honest impressions of you (though these letters will persistently, disappointingly, though perhaps unintentionally betray more about the writers and their concerns about the parts of their own existences that don't pertain to their relationship with you) or half-listening to everyone to whom you speak, knowing full well that you'll retain every word they speak and every non-verbal cue they issue regardless of how insincere or distracted or downright cold you appear to them.
Writing eight installments of memories ranging from one's own parents and wife to the single-voiced crescendo of a boardinghouse's tenants and staff may seem like an attempt to see the world from other pairs of eye but inserting oneself into each story to varying degrees of importance and purity of intention eventually becomes obvious as another tool of self-examination, proof that one can reach certainty of one's own existence by proving one's significance or prominence, however fleeting, in the Venn diagram of shared personal experience. Each narrative is, indeed, a different way of expressing uncertainty of others on a large-scale and how such doubt is mirrored on the smaller, intensely personal level. Can you trust your own past, both the one you've lived and the one you've inherited from your progenitors? Is the group opinion more valid than the individual's, bearing in mind that the group is objective but the individual knows the difference between how it looks and what it is? Is a person really two different people when you consider their supporting role in your life but their leading on in their own?
This book is one of the few times I read the introduction before diving headfirst into the novel proper, and it was enough to encourage me to continue with that trend. Or it may leave me woefully unfulfilled from the high expectations with which it has burdened me, as I landed on the TOC page already breathless with a cramp in my scrawling hand and having crammed miles of annotations choking the margins of the Roman-numeraled pages. This is the kind of book that encourages long-winded discussions about absolutely everything because it has that broad of a scope and that imperative of a message. This is what required reading for humanity looks like.
July 15, 2013
The Smuggled Self
There are, one could argue, two main types of complexity that can exist in a novel: textual and structural. Most complex novels tend to use the former, or a combination of the two. "A Smuggler's Bible" is the first novel I have read that is structurally highly complex, whilst its prose is clear and precise (apart from some interesting moments, which I will discuss below).
It is a novel designed around a theoretical/philosophical investigation (namely that of solipsism and the impossible, alien Other), Its meta-textual nature is foregrounded by both the frame narrative (the "author" and the author) and the (occasionally a little heavy-handed) central metaphor of the Self Smuggled within our own stories – smuggled within the tales we tell ourselves of our own history, and the Self we hide in our memories of others.
He is right, of course, that there is an unbreachable barrier between us and the Truth of the Other, that we are blinded by absorption, receiving un-traceable, origin-less signals from the World. If one does not doubt the existence of this World (and some do, or did, though I will not go that far) how does one not become mortifyingly depressed at the impossibility of actual interaction with it? What does it mean to have a relationship with someone whose existence is entirely a construct of my own, fundamentally flawed, brain?
David attempts, by carrying out the writer's trick of donning the mask of the Other, to not only bridge this gap, but also attempt to create a complete image of himself which incorporates his position as Other to those countless Others he encounters.
It is not a spoiler to note that he fails, as his task is an impossible one, though his failure is fascinating, and moving, and a joy to read.
There are times, too, when the prose strains at its binding, slips and stumbles, fractures. This is not only a very apt reflection of the increasing desperate mental state of David himself, but also a sign (which I believe his later work demonstrates) of McElroy's desire to push the Novel, both structurally and textually, to a place where it can most effectively engage with his concerns.
I look forward to reading more of his work, and would thoroughly recommend this as a place to start, as it was for me, for those requiring a similar, gentle, de-flowering.
There are, one could argue, two main types of complexity that can exist in a novel: textual and structural. Most complex novels tend to use the former, or a combination of the two. "A Smuggler's Bible" is the first novel I have read that is structurally highly complex, whilst its prose is clear and precise (apart from some interesting moments, which I will discuss below).
It is a novel designed around a theoretical/philosophical investigation (namely that of solipsism and the impossible, alien Other), Its meta-textual nature is foregrounded by both the frame narrative (the "author" and the author) and the (occasionally a little heavy-handed) central metaphor of the Self Smuggled within our own stories – smuggled within the tales we tell ourselves of our own history, and the Self we hide in our memories of others.
He is right, of course, that there is an unbreachable barrier between us and the Truth of the Other, that we are blinded by absorption, receiving un-traceable, origin-less signals from the World. If one does not doubt the existence of this World (and some do, or did, though I will not go that far) how does one not become mortifyingly depressed at the impossibility of actual interaction with it? What does it mean to have a relationship with someone whose existence is entirely a construct of my own, fundamentally flawed, brain?
David attempts, by carrying out the writer's trick of donning the mask of the Other, to not only bridge this gap, but also attempt to create a complete image of himself which incorporates his position as Other to those countless Others he encounters.
It is not a spoiler to note that he fails, as his task is an impossible one, though his failure is fascinating, and moving, and a joy to read.
There are times, too, when the prose strains at its binding, slips and stumbles, fractures. This is not only a very apt reflection of the increasing desperate mental state of David himself, but also a sign (which I believe his later work demonstrates) of McElroy's desire to push the Novel, both structurally and textually, to a place where it can most effectively engage with his concerns.
I look forward to reading more of his work, and would thoroughly recommend this as a place to start, as it was for me, for those requiring a similar, gentle, de-flowering.
September 28, 2015
A mine swamp. Leveled, the terrain cleared. Post nuclear. Looking about one reaps the holiness of solitude while gasping for the cling of others.
The stories in a Smuggler's Bible revolve around this or as the main character David would state, to move outside oneself and attempt an encounter is to meet with collision while to remain alone, within oneself, is to be immersed in contentment. Yet, he has begun a project. Through the writing of stories (coincidentally, what we are reading) he tries to project himself from his alienation, isolation, into those from his history who may have impacted him. This happens on a trip on a schooner. The stories find themselves in an empty bible, its bottom carved out. A smuggler's bible generally used for contraband. His hopes is to project himself into each of these formative others and those not so formative. Then, he holds out hope that in the end he can sew these experiences of his life into an identity which can be smuggled into the world. This papered identity then may frolic in life while he remains safe at home tucked within. The emptied bible now filled with his sheathes, charmed new self emblazoned by dots connected, is destined for London and to be presented to an elderly man-himself as older? McElroy? Death awaiting him? (Don't look at me. I'm just writing this and trying to sound cool.)
The amazement of the book is the total engagement each story anoints and rewards. McElroy gives everything to each. His sweat lines the paper, the print, the astonishing characters which appear, reappear, the titular suspense ground into all actions and expectations continuously pulsing the narrative forward.
David both narrates the story and is writing the story-a psychological study, memoir of himself, an attempt to collate his history, experiences, important people, factors, which in itself is a project of alienation and isolation. It is disarming to be caught within a story, listening to these real people, living their life with them, the totality of the world zoomed within the content of their world, then when it ends to realize this was written by David, another part of his project, even as he is a character in the story he has written about. But, is he the writer or is it the voice in the book telling him what to write, David merely an emanuesis, the voice his creative self? Muse? McElroy? But the voice is within the text and therefore a character as well. A character perhaps written by David.
McElroy may have little to do, possibly nothing with writing this elegant book of profound thought and craft. David is a character, which the voice acknowledges, that has gotten away on his own and creating his singular, unguided, unsupervised directions. The true writer may lay somewhere between McElroy and David. The reader? I hope not. It wasn't that I was swept along as that I was immersed so deeply in the weave of the stories that most of the time I had no idea where I was.
McElroy did. Yet the book and he seemed to be distanced from each other, moments, traces of disconnection, as did his chapters. They lived on this moon shattered desert finding means of guided connections, leaving them disconnected at the same time.
This was early meta-fiction, a daring escapade for its time. While reading I saw the many disparate stitches sewn into the cloth which on their own pointed over and again, why doesn't the man just buy a fucking sewing machine. But no. He didn't. I stood a little further back watching him bent over with his despaired lighting, needle and thread, bringing the stitches patiently into an embroidered weave; shifting colors, forms, shapes, that cohered according to unspoken words filling the quiet currents of the room.
My thesis is that through the disarming of a true narrator, McElroy has distanced and provided an authorial disconnection with his work that simulates and creates the theme of this archival novel. In his spare time he explores the vast battle between our need for solitude against the need to not be left but to be with others, Our need to project ourselves while rapidly connecting all the haphazard dots to constitute, smuggle in, an identity to project.
A book, an author, I find myself attached to, absorbing the reader into the pathos, predicaments and pain of our existence wrapped in paradox.
January 23, 2014
We begin with David Brooke, on a boat, anxious about some manuscripts he's delivering to London. How simple.
Not.
As a renowned (in some circles) author of the "metafictional" persuasion, McElroy tricked me into approaching his book with certain preconceptions. I expected a winking, knowing, cooly distanced narrative voice who would, through a clever multi-lensed telescope, observe the actions of his characters. Over there. Way over there, where actions such as "construction of character" occur.
Next thing I know a couple dozen or so very real people are milling about in the crowded apartment of my mind while I peer out the window through binoculars, at a distant character named David Brooke, being all far-away and metafictional in my observation of how he supposedly "is" as a character, which I mostly learn about by overhearing the conversations in my mind-apartment so busy with people authored by David as he attempts, after mistaking advice from a psychoanalyst, to render in writing the important people in his life, usually from their own points of view, as a way of understanding his own life.
These are those people:
Peter St. John, a bookseller who, like David, like us, fetishizes books and luxuriates in the written word, who finds that a young boy is stalking him. His curiosity festers and he resists only a little while the urge to stalk the little boy back, finding out the source of the strange attachment, and then finding a way to tread the un/healthy slash/line of companionship and denial.
Then there's my fave section, a hilarious cacophone of the floorful of residents living in David's day-to-day way in the closest scene: his boarding house. A gossipy farce with a cast of diverse personalities swirls around an unfair charge of counterfeiting.
David's own mother, in an extraordinary accomplishment of cross-gender first-person fiction, is poignantly rendered with fewer than 0.00 grams of sentimentality. Her role in life has muted her eccentric and curious intelligence, which is so unique and engaging I can't help but give you a taste:
Michael, an eighteen year old neighbor of David's, the son of a faddish celebrity professor whose fans, fame, and selfish pursuits strain the foundation of familial support to collapse. Easily summarized. Most uneasily rendered.
The following two stories do portray things from David's point of view, but in the first he is a marginal voice chronicling the mis-matched coupling of his academic housemate--mired in the past--and his tempestuous artist girlfriend--myopically present-tense; in the second it switches between David's to his new English bride's perspective during their honeymoon. "David slept. He needed it. Ellen leaned to kiss his eyelids lightly, drily, wishing his lids would close all the way and hide that rim of deadish white."
The final two manuscripts contain a stunt so outlandish I'll let you discover it for yourself; trust me, it's really something.
In his mission to "project himself" into the lives of these others David succeeds to a degree that would make any self-aware would-be writer dissolve in an orgasm of self-fulfillment, but neurotic David is unable to find the key that would interlock these eight accounts into a coherent account of his own selfhood.
This all affects a cool trick: we do not experience the main character, David Brooke, as self-obsessed as we would if the whole book were written from his point of view. I don't know about you, but it takes some flashy style, imaginative content, and a fascinating character for me to willingly stay trapped in the head of a self-absorbed protagonist for very long, and the fact that the book is largely comprised of other people's stories--to which David is often merely a tangential personality--means we are never bogged down in his solipsism. It doesn't hurt that the other individual accounts are extremely engaging themselves, to a degree that sometimes it's not hard to momentarily forget about poor anxious David.
This results in the paradoxical situation of being distanced from David's point of view by these first-person accounts by other characters which are actually written by David so that we haven't really left his point of view; we've been with it the whole time, but it's been smuggled to us within these other fascinating vignettes about the lives of others.
David feels no small amount of anxiety about being unable to write convincing transitions that would fuse each of these busy characters' narratives together, between which we return to where we began, with David on a boat crossing the Atlantic to deliver these manuscripts to a mysterious Uber-Daddy-Symbol-Guy in London, while we're foggy-eyed and still smarting from the whiplash of being yanked out of one of these characters' lives back into the consciousness of David, worrying about transitions, futzing with the placement of sentences, overhearing shipmates, avoiding a loquacious co-passenger obsessed with smuggling.
The smuggling theme/motif is a feint, within which is smuggled the real theme/motif: counterfeiting. A smuggler's Bible is one whose core is cut out to provide room for contraband. David's real contraband is counterfeit authenticity, his own being a source of some of that anxiety.
McElroy might have rendered David's boat-trip inter-chapters with naive simplicity, a stable frame to scaffold these disjointed stories, but Ohhh nooo, David is influenced moment-to-moment by a disembodied narrator who might be a muse-like supernatural entity, or his subconscious, or McElroy himself; it plays like it is one or an other depending upon what it wants to draw our attention to, the way a close-magic card expert draws our attention to what he is not doing.
McElroy is not one of those writers who's like I'm so bored with characterization and traditional plot that I eschew them altogether. He's more like I'm so unsatisfied with being GOOD at characterization and traditional plot that I crave to supersede them. And he BRINGS IT. When it comes to characterization and interpersonal family dynamics he very casually out-does Salinger and Roth, in my opinion, effortlessly bracketed within a larger ambition, without a single showy note. I'm not averse to well-deserved showy notes, but McElroy never deigns. He's as relentlessly matter-of-fact as Kafka, without the surrealism.
People often claimed that modernists like Jackson Pollock did what they did because they weren't very good at the "real" thing (I'd claim they were right in his case). Metafictionists faced the same charge, but McElroy proves here that he was not only capable of it, he was unsatisfied with being merely good (I'd say great) at it, using an approach that humbly relies on that fact rather than spotlighting it. There is a pathos to this that I cannot begin to express. I am simply unable.
Not.
As a renowned (in some circles) author of the "metafictional" persuasion, McElroy tricked me into approaching his book with certain preconceptions. I expected a winking, knowing, cooly distanced narrative voice who would, through a clever multi-lensed telescope, observe the actions of his characters. Over there. Way over there, where actions such as "construction of character" occur.
Next thing I know a couple dozen or so very real people are milling about in the crowded apartment of my mind while I peer out the window through binoculars, at a distant character named David Brooke, being all far-away and metafictional in my observation of how he supposedly "is" as a character, which I mostly learn about by overhearing the conversations in my mind-apartment so busy with people authored by David as he attempts, after mistaking advice from a psychoanalyst, to render in writing the important people in his life, usually from their own points of view, as a way of understanding his own life.
These are those people:
Peter St. John, a bookseller who, like David, like us, fetishizes books and luxuriates in the written word, who finds that a young boy is stalking him. His curiosity festers and he resists only a little while the urge to stalk the little boy back, finding out the source of the strange attachment, and then finding a way to tread the un/healthy slash/line of companionship and denial.
Then there's my fave section, a hilarious cacophone of the floorful of residents living in David's day-to-day way in the closest scene: his boarding house. A gossipy farce with a cast of diverse personalities swirls around an unfair charge of counterfeiting.
David's own mother, in an extraordinary accomplishment of cross-gender first-person fiction, is poignantly rendered with fewer than 0.00 grams of sentimentality. Her role in life has muted her eccentric and curious intelligence, which is so unique and engaging I can't help but give you a taste:
"She imagines herself taking shape under soft chemicals in B-G's darkroom. She regrets not having gone to medical school. But her wish was never strong enough. For years she's attended operations. But that is one thing. The young novelist she's heard in a colloquium has proclaimed that writers must refer to scapula not shoulder blades, clavicle not collar bone. That is another thing. It isn't for that that she sits in a dark observation room to watch through a kind of skylight as masked actors twelve feet below her perform a thyroidectomy: a woman's neck gently peeled; the thoroughness, apparently casual and hence inhuman and removed; the talk, heard through the intercom; the pauses; the one red animal ditch in the loneliness of the sheeted patient."
Michael, an eighteen year old neighbor of David's, the son of a faddish celebrity professor whose fans, fame, and selfish pursuits strain the foundation of familial support to collapse. Easily summarized. Most uneasily rendered.
The following two stories do portray things from David's point of view, but in the first he is a marginal voice chronicling the mis-matched coupling of his academic housemate--mired in the past--and his tempestuous artist girlfriend--myopically present-tense; in the second it switches between David's to his new English bride's perspective during their honeymoon. "David slept. He needed it. Ellen leaned to kiss his eyelids lightly, drily, wishing his lids would close all the way and hide that rim of deadish white."
The final two manuscripts contain a stunt so outlandish I'll let you discover it for yourself; trust me, it's really something.
In his mission to "project himself" into the lives of these others David succeeds to a degree that would make any self-aware would-be writer dissolve in an orgasm of self-fulfillment, but neurotic David is unable to find the key that would interlock these eight accounts into a coherent account of his own selfhood.
This all affects a cool trick: we do not experience the main character, David Brooke, as self-obsessed as we would if the whole book were written from his point of view. I don't know about you, but it takes some flashy style, imaginative content, and a fascinating character for me to willingly stay trapped in the head of a self-absorbed protagonist for very long, and the fact that the book is largely comprised of other people's stories--to which David is often merely a tangential personality--means we are never bogged down in his solipsism. It doesn't hurt that the other individual accounts are extremely engaging themselves, to a degree that sometimes it's not hard to momentarily forget about poor anxious David.
This results in the paradoxical situation of being distanced from David's point of view by these first-person accounts by other characters which are actually written by David so that we haven't really left his point of view; we've been with it the whole time, but it's been smuggled to us within these other fascinating vignettes about the lives of others.
David feels no small amount of anxiety about being unable to write convincing transitions that would fuse each of these busy characters' narratives together, between which we return to where we began, with David on a boat crossing the Atlantic to deliver these manuscripts to a mysterious Uber-Daddy-Symbol-Guy in London, while we're foggy-eyed and still smarting from the whiplash of being yanked out of one of these characters' lives back into the consciousness of David, worrying about transitions, futzing with the placement of sentences, overhearing shipmates, avoiding a loquacious co-passenger obsessed with smuggling.
The smuggling theme/motif is a feint, within which is smuggled the real theme/motif: counterfeiting. A smuggler's Bible is one whose core is cut out to provide room for contraband. David's real contraband is counterfeit authenticity, his own being a source of some of that anxiety.
McElroy might have rendered David's boat-trip inter-chapters with naive simplicity, a stable frame to scaffold these disjointed stories, but Ohhh nooo, David is influenced moment-to-moment by a disembodied narrator who might be a muse-like supernatural entity, or his subconscious, or McElroy himself; it plays like it is one or an other depending upon what it wants to draw our attention to, the way a close-magic card expert draws our attention to what he is not doing.
McElroy is not one of those writers who's like I'm so bored with characterization and traditional plot that I eschew them altogether. He's more like I'm so unsatisfied with being GOOD at characterization and traditional plot that I crave to supersede them. And he BRINGS IT. When it comes to characterization and interpersonal family dynamics he very casually out-does Salinger and Roth, in my opinion, effortlessly bracketed within a larger ambition, without a single showy note. I'm not averse to well-deserved showy notes, but McElroy never deigns. He's as relentlessly matter-of-fact as Kafka, without the surrealism.
People often claimed that modernists like Jackson Pollock did what they did because they weren't very good at the "real" thing (I'd claim they were right in his case). Metafictionists faced the same charge, but McElroy proves here that he was not only capable of it, he was unsatisfied with being merely good (I'd say great) at it, using an approach that humbly relies on that fact rather than spotlighting it. There is a pathos to this that I cannot begin to express. I am simply unable.
May 29, 2019
5/5
I must admit I began reading McElroy’s 1966 first novel, A Smuggler’s Bible, with some trepidation. McElroy is one of those guys who writes big post-modernist meta-fictional books, think (JR Gaddis, David Foster Wallace, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLilo) that take lots of time and energy to read because they are always challenging the reader and operating on multiple levels, often trying to conceal or somehow prove their own existence. But I figured I was up for it, and so I opened the book and read the epigraph:
Nature has made all her truths
independent of one another.
Our art makes one depend on another;
but this is unnatural.
Each has its own place.
--David Brooke, quoting Pascal.
What? McElroy is quoting Pascal (or so he says) but he attributes the quotation to his central character, David, saying David is quoting Pascal. This seemed too clever by half, and I second-guessed my decision to read this book by this (apparently) annoying writer. But then I turned back to the title page and saw that Richard Howard (I love Richard Howard) wrote the introduction, so I decided to give the book another chance and went ahead and read the introduction. Howard was at his erudite best: “We have learned, in this century, two great things about memory: it contains—or invents—more than we are at first conscious of having received—it functions involuntarily (Proust); and it functions voluntarily—we remember what we want to remember, in the way we want to remember it (Freud). In consequence, forgetting is equally significant: the process of dismembering, we should say, is what gives remembering its point. To scatter makes possible to recollect” (vii). And so on. What he says makes sense, and Howard introduces the book well. Even though I often think we should skip introductions entirely or at least not read them until after finishing the book, this time I was glad to have read Howard’s four pages. All five big book writers (Gaddis, Pynchon, etc.) are writers I admire. Even so, there are times I just want to smack them up side of the head with a two-by-four for their loud and annoying arrogance. This time I decide to go ahead and read anyway, but I must admit my guard was still partially up.
I read slowly, taking my time, stopping in between chapters. But I have to admit that page-by-page McElroy started winning me over. He may be a member of the annoying-and-arrogant-boy-writer-club, but he can write. This is a wonderful book. I’ll tell you a bit about my first reading, and I say first because this book demands rereading. Many rereadings. Even then, who knows what I’ll know.
I learned about Joseph McEroy on Goodreads. Friends whom I admire wrote pages about Women and Men, which unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately—the book is 1,192 pages long) was out of print and available only at great cost for a used copy. But then I heard about A Smuggler’s Bible and picked it up four years ago for a reasonable price. When I recently pulled it off the shelf, I looked online and saw that three of my Goodreads friends whose judgment I admire (Stephen P, Ian “Marvin” Graye, and Paul) all gave it a five. Despite my doubts, I went ahead and read the book.
The way the book is built and the outrageously ambitious goal it has for itself make it quite the challenge. That smuggler’s bible, that hollowed-out-book, contains eight manuscripts, and you will get to read all eight. David, people who know him, know about him, are present everywhere. There are multiple threads continuously interweaving (or breaking off?). And somehow by putting the manuscripts together, a man (or a text) emerges.
At the same time that man, David Brooke, is carrying those manuscripts. Is he the construction or constructor of what he carries? Not sure yet. And that’s why rereading is so important. I know I missed way too much early on, and even as I read the last fifty pages (which can get quite Joycean at times), I wasn’t so sure about many things. But even without full understanding, there is so much beauty and power. Characters sound like grad students and professors, playing about origins of texts and making endless chains of slight yet solid connections across historical periods, subject matters, arts, and sciences. They argue about naming everything. Or like cranky old ladies or mysterious friends from the past. Multiple and magnificent voices. Not everything you’ll read is necessarily “true,” but some of what is presented I’ve read about in many other places outside this text. And then in the seventh manuscript, which is a collection of letters sent to David during an alleged bout of amnesia, there are at least a dozen references to a book named Wisdom, Madness, and Folly by Custace, which is passed among many of the letter writers and the people they know. I’d not heard of the book, but it turns out to be an actual book first published in 1951 and entitled Wisdom, Madness, and Folly: The Philosophy of a Lunatic written by John Custace. The book was “written under a pseudonym in an English insane asylum by a manic-depressive psychotic who has subsequently been discharged as sane.” I learned that by reading a brief review in The New York Times: (https://www.nytimes.com/1952/09/07/ar...) Are all those characters reading and/or passing along this book in that marvelous seventh narrative meant to be recovering insane people or is that insanity the lot of all humanity? And there are individualized voices for dozens of characters. Amazing. The book is not hard to read line-by-line most of the way through, but there is just so much to figure out, and tie together.
P.S.: Oh, and by the way, I did check. That epigraph is from Pascal: thought #21 on page 10 of Pascal’s Thoughts. In case you wanted to know. And the fact that McElroy attributes it to David who is quoting Pascal makes much more sense now that I’m at the end of the book: McElroy’s really hiding out here. Open the book and hang on; it’s quite a ride.
I must admit I began reading McElroy’s 1966 first novel, A Smuggler’s Bible, with some trepidation. McElroy is one of those guys who writes big post-modernist meta-fictional books, think (JR Gaddis, David Foster Wallace, Thomas Pynchon, Don DeLilo) that take lots of time and energy to read because they are always challenging the reader and operating on multiple levels, often trying to conceal or somehow prove their own existence. But I figured I was up for it, and so I opened the book and read the epigraph:
Nature has made all her truths
independent of one another.
Our art makes one depend on another;
but this is unnatural.
Each has its own place.
--David Brooke, quoting Pascal.
What? McElroy is quoting Pascal (or so he says) but he attributes the quotation to his central character, David, saying David is quoting Pascal. This seemed too clever by half, and I second-guessed my decision to read this book by this (apparently) annoying writer. But then I turned back to the title page and saw that Richard Howard (I love Richard Howard) wrote the introduction, so I decided to give the book another chance and went ahead and read the introduction. Howard was at his erudite best: “We have learned, in this century, two great things about memory: it contains—or invents—more than we are at first conscious of having received—it functions involuntarily (Proust); and it functions voluntarily—we remember what we want to remember, in the way we want to remember it (Freud). In consequence, forgetting is equally significant: the process of dismembering, we should say, is what gives remembering its point. To scatter makes possible to recollect” (vii). And so on. What he says makes sense, and Howard introduces the book well. Even though I often think we should skip introductions entirely or at least not read them until after finishing the book, this time I was glad to have read Howard’s four pages. All five big book writers (Gaddis, Pynchon, etc.) are writers I admire. Even so, there are times I just want to smack them up side of the head with a two-by-four for their loud and annoying arrogance. This time I decide to go ahead and read anyway, but I must admit my guard was still partially up.
I read slowly, taking my time, stopping in between chapters. But I have to admit that page-by-page McElroy started winning me over. He may be a member of the annoying-and-arrogant-boy-writer-club, but he can write. This is a wonderful book. I’ll tell you a bit about my first reading, and I say first because this book demands rereading. Many rereadings. Even then, who knows what I’ll know.
I learned about Joseph McEroy on Goodreads. Friends whom I admire wrote pages about Women and Men, which unfortunately (or perhaps fortunately—the book is 1,192 pages long) was out of print and available only at great cost for a used copy. But then I heard about A Smuggler’s Bible and picked it up four years ago for a reasonable price. When I recently pulled it off the shelf, I looked online and saw that three of my Goodreads friends whose judgment I admire (Stephen P, Ian “Marvin” Graye, and Paul) all gave it a five. Despite my doubts, I went ahead and read the book.
The way the book is built and the outrageously ambitious goal it has for itself make it quite the challenge. That smuggler’s bible, that hollowed-out-book, contains eight manuscripts, and you will get to read all eight. David, people who know him, know about him, are present everywhere. There are multiple threads continuously interweaving (or breaking off?). And somehow by putting the manuscripts together, a man (or a text) emerges.
At the same time that man, David Brooke, is carrying those manuscripts. Is he the construction or constructor of what he carries? Not sure yet. And that’s why rereading is so important. I know I missed way too much early on, and even as I read the last fifty pages (which can get quite Joycean at times), I wasn’t so sure about many things. But even without full understanding, there is so much beauty and power. Characters sound like grad students and professors, playing about origins of texts and making endless chains of slight yet solid connections across historical periods, subject matters, arts, and sciences. They argue about naming everything. Or like cranky old ladies or mysterious friends from the past. Multiple and magnificent voices. Not everything you’ll read is necessarily “true,” but some of what is presented I’ve read about in many other places outside this text. And then in the seventh manuscript, which is a collection of letters sent to David during an alleged bout of amnesia, there are at least a dozen references to a book named Wisdom, Madness, and Folly by Custace, which is passed among many of the letter writers and the people they know. I’d not heard of the book, but it turns out to be an actual book first published in 1951 and entitled Wisdom, Madness, and Folly: The Philosophy of a Lunatic written by John Custace. The book was “written under a pseudonym in an English insane asylum by a manic-depressive psychotic who has subsequently been discharged as sane.” I learned that by reading a brief review in The New York Times: (https://www.nytimes.com/1952/09/07/ar...) Are all those characters reading and/or passing along this book in that marvelous seventh narrative meant to be recovering insane people or is that insanity the lot of all humanity? And there are individualized voices for dozens of characters. Amazing. The book is not hard to read line-by-line most of the way through, but there is just so much to figure out, and tie together.
P.S.: Oh, and by the way, I did check. That epigraph is from Pascal: thought #21 on page 10 of Pascal’s Thoughts. In case you wanted to know. And the fact that McElroy attributes it to David who is quoting Pascal makes much more sense now that I’m at the end of the book: McElroy’s really hiding out here. Open the book and hang on; it’s quite a ride.
November 11, 2015
Project Yourself
Like his protagonist (the parenthetical David Brooke who hails from the neighbourhood of Brooke-lyn Heights), Joseph McElroy uses his first novel (from 1966) to project himself into the lives of others. Indeed, this is his methodology as well. He analyses, synthesises, assimilates, projects.
He defines (and re-defines) himself by projecting himself into a community of people surrounding him. He locates links and pursues them along the chain of interconnectedness (pre-HTML and artificial neural networks).
While there must be an element of self-obsession in writing any work of fiction, here Brooke and McElroy use it to escape solipsism (via wisdom, madness and folly) towards "the massed actualities of ordinary life".
When we meet them both, they are mere shadows (in Brooke's case, a shadow of his former self). By the time they finish their project(-ion), they have illuminated both our lives and theirs. They convince us that this book, itself a smuggler's Bible of sorts, has conveyed something valuable, something precious, to us, across the boundary between author and reader, between creator and creation.
McElroy assembles and describes the meaning of a life. In doing so, he also suggests the meaning of life. And, perhaps, death. And, perhaps too, eternity.
"A Smuggler's Bible" is a new kind of creation myth that emerges from the re-creation of the protagonist, but achieves much more than the recreation of its audience.
By book's end, McElroy attains a level of beauty and perfection that might just make you want to cry.
Appetite for Construction
McElroy's novel illustrates the difference between deconstruction and construction.
Some fiction presents to us as a completed work and invites us to deconstruct it, piece by piece, like the leaves of an artichoke. Paradoxically, it disappears as it is consumed.
This novel is different. We watch over McElroy's shoulder as he assembles it. He shows us the ingredients, one by one, but neither the recipe nor what to expect.
It turns out to be a degustation menu. There are eight courses, each representing a retrieved memory, a recollection or a reconstruction.
Before each course is a tasting note. Initially, they're relatively innocuous, or at least they seem to be. Only later, when you've finished the meal and review it, do you realise how much was given away and the significance of each clue.
The meal comes alive, it becomes. If we digest it, it becomes part of us, at the same time it is most becoming of and for the chef.
I started my meal, questioning the chef and his project. There were times when I thought this performance of a lifetime, these pieces of eight would only warrant three stars. However, McElroy builds layer upon layer of sophistication and delight on your plate. Gradually, inevitably, he builds towards a five star crescendo that helps you to understand the place of each course and why it had to be that way.
The Possibility of Elucidation
A third of the way through, McElroy writes:
"In the age of explanation, a veritable chaos of elucidation is possible."
There's much to mull over, much to write about, much to explain in "A Smuggler's Bible". However, ultimately, it's a dining experience I'd rather recommend that you embrace, taste and savour, one course at a time, without expectation, other than the confidence that you're in the hands of an exceptional chef who doesn't want to disappoint. You will know intuitively how best to craft an order from the chaos of plenitude.
"MY CREATION":
Like his protagonist (the parenthetical David Brooke who hails from the neighbourhood of Brooke-lyn Heights), Joseph McElroy uses his first novel (from 1966) to project himself into the lives of others. Indeed, this is his methodology as well. He analyses, synthesises, assimilates, projects.
He defines (and re-defines) himself by projecting himself into a community of people surrounding him. He locates links and pursues them along the chain of interconnectedness (pre-HTML and artificial neural networks).
While there must be an element of self-obsession in writing any work of fiction, here Brooke and McElroy use it to escape solipsism (via wisdom, madness and folly) towards "the massed actualities of ordinary life".
When we meet them both, they are mere shadows (in Brooke's case, a shadow of his former self). By the time they finish their project(-ion), they have illuminated both our lives and theirs. They convince us that this book, itself a smuggler's Bible of sorts, has conveyed something valuable, something precious, to us, across the boundary between author and reader, between creator and creation.
McElroy assembles and describes the meaning of a life. In doing so, he also suggests the meaning of life. And, perhaps, death. And, perhaps too, eternity.
"A Smuggler's Bible" is a new kind of creation myth that emerges from the re-creation of the protagonist, but achieves much more than the recreation of its audience.
By book's end, McElroy attains a level of beauty and perfection that might just make you want to cry.
Appetite for Construction
McElroy's novel illustrates the difference between deconstruction and construction.
Some fiction presents to us as a completed work and invites us to deconstruct it, piece by piece, like the leaves of an artichoke. Paradoxically, it disappears as it is consumed.
This novel is different. We watch over McElroy's shoulder as he assembles it. He shows us the ingredients, one by one, but neither the recipe nor what to expect.
It turns out to be a degustation menu. There are eight courses, each representing a retrieved memory, a recollection or a reconstruction.
Before each course is a tasting note. Initially, they're relatively innocuous, or at least they seem to be. Only later, when you've finished the meal and review it, do you realise how much was given away and the significance of each clue.
The meal comes alive, it becomes. If we digest it, it becomes part of us, at the same time it is most becoming of and for the chef.
I started my meal, questioning the chef and his project. There were times when I thought this performance of a lifetime, these pieces of eight would only warrant three stars. However, McElroy builds layer upon layer of sophistication and delight on your plate. Gradually, inevitably, he builds towards a five star crescendo that helps you to understand the place of each course and why it had to be that way.
The Possibility of Elucidation
A third of the way through, McElroy writes:
"In the age of explanation, a veritable chaos of elucidation is possible."
There's much to mull over, much to write about, much to explain in "A Smuggler's Bible". However, ultimately, it's a dining experience I'd rather recommend that you embrace, taste and savour, one course at a time, without expectation, other than the confidence that you're in the hands of an exceptional chef who doesn't want to disappoint. You will know intuitively how best to craft an order from the chaos of plenitude.
"MY CREATION":
November 12, 2015
Do we not use each other to slip across the frontiers of self-scrutiny as something other than lonely people?
I found The Smuggler's Bible to be a rumination on parasite and host. Much like an article on deconstruction, and even more like a slugfest between Bellow protagonists: imagine Herzog and Mr. Sammler in a practical death struggle over influence and affectation. Imagine constructing a musical canon and adding middlebrow references in maddening sequences. Listen to Roger Waters cover REM's Strange Currencies and consider the ironies. The Smuggler's Bible transports and imprints, much like the protagonist's penchant for chain letters, each confesses, obscures and by proxy contributes to these Chinese Whispers of life.
I found The Smuggler's Bible to be a rumination on parasite and host. Much like an article on deconstruction, and even more like a slugfest between Bellow protagonists: imagine Herzog and Mr. Sammler in a practical death struggle over influence and affectation. Imagine constructing a musical canon and adding middlebrow references in maddening sequences. Listen to Roger Waters cover REM's Strange Currencies and consider the ironies. The Smuggler's Bible transports and imprints, much like the protagonist's penchant for chain letters, each confesses, obscures and by proxy contributes to these Chinese Whispers of life.
April 10, 2012
Published in 1966, Joseph Mcelroy's debut novel was met with such disdain/lack of interest that it is now commonly compared to both William Gaddis's the Recognitions and Malcolm Lowry's Under the Volcano. While both Gaddis and Lowry share much more general acknowledgement than Mcelroy, all three have written mid-century masterpieces that have acquired more esteem as time moves on. In many ways, a Smuggler's Bible almost seems marketed to the whole postmodern tome set, which it pretty much is, albeit in an odd way.
Even by the standards of the books that his contemporaries (Gaddis, Pynchon, Barth, Barthelme, Coover, et all.) were writing around the same time, A Smuggler's Bible is an extremely high-concept novel. The basic premise involves one David Brooke, who is on a cruise ship with his wife Ellen. Also on board is a mysterious, metaphysical sort of voice that introduces itself as David's creator. I interpreted this voice as his subconscious, or Mcelroy's alter-ego as narrator, transcending the whole death of the author dynamic in what seems to be a meta-narrative joke that is about as layered as a Charlie Kaufman script. Either way, important thing is: this voice is basically telling David to project into the lives of others in order to discover his own identity. David has apparently accomplished this already, and is carrying an "East Lite Box-File" containing eight manuscripts that are basically short memories that are about people that David has known, and that also more or less involve him as a character. So there you have it. After the first part (every vignette or "Principle Part of David Brooke" basically plays out like a chapter, and every time there is a break for a few pages which are narrated by David's creator, as these little interludes accumulate throughout the book they cover every letter of the alphabet, with Z being the last page (subtext?; you got me)) the reader is led on a journey of one man's personal journey through his own identity. Having no previous knowledge of this Brooke character, the reader has no bias, thus allowing them to determine who exactly David Brooke is by voyeuristically listening to the subjective bias of everyone that he has known, including his creator, who has supposedly known David longer than he has know of himself.
As that explanation was long-winded enough (and as I notice my irrepressible inclination in this review to employ a ridiculous amount of parentheses, dash marks, and scare quotations), I'll avoid any attempt at recapitulating the eight Principle parts of David Brooke. However, I will say that they are all painfully anti-climactic. Which brings me to my conclusion about Mcelroy's book, and more or less every book attempting to be specifically like it. It's all hermeneutics. Books like these are the High-Modernist, interpretive equivalent to those Choose Your Own Adventure books. I hope that makes sense. All fiction is obviously open to interpretation. I'm definitely not complaining about an author encouraging interpretation here, but in Mcelroy's willful decision to eschew more or less every semblance of a linear narrative, plot, or a resolution for his protagonist, he creates a novel that more or less reads like human consciousness. This invariably evokes a sense of universal interconnectedness in his book. It encourages the reader to ponder the important relationship that people as readers have with certain books; also the ways in which we identify or choose not to identify with stories or characters. This has its merits, but it can also be detrimental. It's also been pulled off with much more whimsy by Italo Calvino.
My problem with all of this is that "removal of subject from object" aside, Mcelroy seems to lack any sort of thematic conviction. Unlike Pynchon, Gaddis, or Delillo, Mcelroy writes without a clear intention. His novels have often been described as "experienced happenings" rather than novels. In my opinion, it's a language flood with a loose theme, which leaves so much of the effort up to the reader that one must wonder why they didn't just write their own book.
Even by the standards of the books that his contemporaries (Gaddis, Pynchon, Barth, Barthelme, Coover, et all.) were writing around the same time, A Smuggler's Bible is an extremely high-concept novel. The basic premise involves one David Brooke, who is on a cruise ship with his wife Ellen. Also on board is a mysterious, metaphysical sort of voice that introduces itself as David's creator. I interpreted this voice as his subconscious, or Mcelroy's alter-ego as narrator, transcending the whole death of the author dynamic in what seems to be a meta-narrative joke that is about as layered as a Charlie Kaufman script. Either way, important thing is: this voice is basically telling David to project into the lives of others in order to discover his own identity. David has apparently accomplished this already, and is carrying an "East Lite Box-File" containing eight manuscripts that are basically short memories that are about people that David has known, and that also more or less involve him as a character. So there you have it. After the first part (every vignette or "Principle Part of David Brooke" basically plays out like a chapter, and every time there is a break for a few pages which are narrated by David's creator, as these little interludes accumulate throughout the book they cover every letter of the alphabet, with Z being the last page (subtext?; you got me)) the reader is led on a journey of one man's personal journey through his own identity. Having no previous knowledge of this Brooke character, the reader has no bias, thus allowing them to determine who exactly David Brooke is by voyeuristically listening to the subjective bias of everyone that he has known, including his creator, who has supposedly known David longer than he has know of himself.
As that explanation was long-winded enough (and as I notice my irrepressible inclination in this review to employ a ridiculous amount of parentheses, dash marks, and scare quotations), I'll avoid any attempt at recapitulating the eight Principle parts of David Brooke. However, I will say that they are all painfully anti-climactic. Which brings me to my conclusion about Mcelroy's book, and more or less every book attempting to be specifically like it. It's all hermeneutics. Books like these are the High-Modernist, interpretive equivalent to those Choose Your Own Adventure books. I hope that makes sense. All fiction is obviously open to interpretation. I'm definitely not complaining about an author encouraging interpretation here, but in Mcelroy's willful decision to eschew more or less every semblance of a linear narrative, plot, or a resolution for his protagonist, he creates a novel that more or less reads like human consciousness. This invariably evokes a sense of universal interconnectedness in his book. It encourages the reader to ponder the important relationship that people as readers have with certain books; also the ways in which we identify or choose not to identify with stories or characters. This has its merits, but it can also be detrimental. It's also been pulled off with much more whimsy by Italo Calvino.
My problem with all of this is that "removal of subject from object" aside, Mcelroy seems to lack any sort of thematic conviction. Unlike Pynchon, Gaddis, or Delillo, Mcelroy writes without a clear intention. His novels have often been described as "experienced happenings" rather than novels. In my opinion, it's a language flood with a loose theme, which leaves so much of the effort up to the reader that one must wonder why they didn't just write their own book.
November 30, 2020
My second McElroy after Ancient History. This one is more
Impressive than Enjoyable. Lots of interesting things going on in terms of structure and content—and it leaves you a little cold as solipsism should.
There’s a frightening truth in this work about the existence of self as unknowable, and identity as narrative. The “meta” aspect of the novel (wherein the authorial voice breaks in and speaks to and of the main character) as well as the title raises the question of where we should look to extract an interpretation—into the nestedness [the main character, David Brooke, “wrote” a series of 8 “memories” that compose the novel, yet they are referenced by both the “characters” and the “author”, in other words the story that DB wrote is smuggled inside the novel figuratively, and literally (DB is gifted a Smuggler’s Bible at one point, and physically places his manuscript inside) just as the words and sentences that compose the novel itself are nestled between the covers emblazoned with the title (label?) a Smuggler’s Bible, which itself raises suspicions of a false bottom because to mark a smuggler’s Bible as such would be to defeat the purpose, (which is to move something across a border unnoticed, without consequence) not to mention DB’s father’s reading of DB’s old Bible, despite his agnosticism in order to make his wife feel as if he’s found religion in the face of death (but this is DB’s interpretation, that his father uses the actual Bible to smuggle himself across death’s threshold (“to pass out of life without paying the full fear” (398)”)] or into the structure [DB attempts to recreate the memories in their fullest reality (he even claims total recall, which is why he practices selective listening) by projecting his self from multifarious perspectives, but this must of course fail as no one can experience themselves from the experiences of others, no matter what epistolaries we can generate through our entreaties, conceits, chain letters, lists, or wills, our memories become memoirs through the impossibility of curation—as every curation forms a conscious narrative, we collapse back into the first person, the I of lived experience, but yet another narrative vehicle, another facsimile, another smuggler’s Bible?]?
Impressive than Enjoyable. Lots of interesting things going on in terms of structure and content—and it leaves you a little cold as solipsism should.
There’s a frightening truth in this work about the existence of self as unknowable, and identity as narrative. The “meta” aspect of the novel (wherein the authorial voice breaks in and speaks to and of the main character) as well as the title raises the question of where we should look to extract an interpretation—into the nestedness [the main character, David Brooke, “wrote” a series of 8 “memories” that compose the novel, yet they are referenced by both the “characters” and the “author”, in other words the story that DB wrote is smuggled inside the novel figuratively, and literally (DB is gifted a Smuggler’s Bible at one point, and physically places his manuscript inside) just as the words and sentences that compose the novel itself are nestled between the covers emblazoned with the title (label?) a Smuggler’s Bible, which itself raises suspicions of a false bottom because to mark a smuggler’s Bible as such would be to defeat the purpose, (which is to move something across a border unnoticed, without consequence) not to mention DB’s father’s reading of DB’s old Bible, despite his agnosticism in order to make his wife feel as if he’s found religion in the face of death (but this is DB’s interpretation, that his father uses the actual Bible to smuggle himself across death’s threshold (“to pass out of life without paying the full fear” (398)”)] or into the structure [DB attempts to recreate the memories in their fullest reality (he even claims total recall, which is why he practices selective listening) by projecting his self from multifarious perspectives, but this must of course fail as no one can experience themselves from the experiences of others, no matter what epistolaries we can generate through our entreaties, conceits, chain letters, lists, or wills, our memories become memoirs through the impossibility of curation—as every curation forms a conscious narrative, we collapse back into the first person, the I of lived experience, but yet another narrative vehicle, another facsimile, another smuggler’s Bible?]?
Read
December 7, 2020“In the age of explanation a veritable chaos of elucidation is possible.”
The bookstore was about to close and so I grabbed the single copy of A Smuggler's Bible. I opened it up to a random page and, after only reading a paragraph, felt that sensation of a sudden memory. I felt like I've been in those words before. I tucked the book under my arm and I walked out without paying. The passage I read was about the feminine versus the masculine way to study your own fingernails. I recognized the recognitions.
“Yet if some way he could hypnotize himself ostrich-style apparently out of his own existence, then he could hypnotize himself into another person, into 'another'—thus to love, thus to escape the wild divisions inside him, subliminal, supraliminal...”
This book sat on the shelf in my apartment for years. If any of my neighbors had come into my room, they'd have seen it resting on top of my bookcase, like I had singled it out for some reason. But I never wanted any of my neighbors in my place. There was the lady across the hall that worked at the prison and talked to everyone like they were convicts. Then there was the guy next door that would keep his door open and blast Billy Graham sermons. The lady that lived below me had this angry chow that was so obese that you couldn't see his neck. She introduced bed bugs to the whole building. There was a guy that boiled cabbage. And there was an old hippie couple that kept bowls of Borax on the floor of each room in their place. I didn't get to know any of them, but I was always curious about them. I was curious what got them out of bed in the morning and what they thought about when they had time to think. I was also curious what they would think if they walked into my apartment – A Smuggler's Bible resting on top of a bookcase.
“I'm a snooper. That's my disease. It's sheer egotism, for when I find out about a person I find all I've done is come face to face with a thick mirror.”
I suppose if there was some reason to finally open this novel, it was that I harbor this notion that everything is connected and I was hoping someone way smarter than I'll ever be could show me how. Actually, I didn't so much want McElroy to show this to me, I wanted to somehow squeeze myself into his consciousness and experience it as he would. Or if there was some way to sneak his brain into my cranium, then maybe that might work. But, all the mechanics of that aside, I guess it really wouldn't matter because my mind would have been replaced. So I wouldn't have access to his experience. Maybe a book is as close to that kind of operation as we can get. The author smuggles their mind into the pages. The reader then smuggles themselves in between the pages.
“Not because you might hate it but because this way you won't be tempted to turn into what your past might tell you you are.”
Have you ever read a novel where you don't really understand the protagonist? You're just sort of hanging back watching them and listening to them and they feel almost unknowable to you? You watch what they do and you can't fathom a reason why they'd be doing those things. You're wondering what it is that you're even looking for. And you're wondering what it is that they are looking for. But then, all of a sudden, say on page 299, you realize that you've somehow sort of slipped into the protagonist's place. You find yourself watching them as you watch yourself – that is, from your very own head, able to see everything but your very own self. Maybe you're just lying to yourself and you don't actually feel as if you are the protagonist. But still, you keep reading it as if you might be.
“Don't try to connect them; you'll never manage it. The causes exist, but most of them we just can't know.”
There are some sections in Ulysses that made me weep. Like truly weep. Some of the episodes I've read seven or eight times and I still cry when I read a certain passage. I think one of the saddest lines is, “A brother is as easily forgotten as an umbrella.” We lose touch with people. We sometimes forget the people that might have been, at one time, the most important people in our lives. In the hope that those connections won't disintegrate, it's worth sharing books with those people. Then they share books with you. But you don't read them. You put them on your shelf. And then, when you look at them, you feel really awful that you still haven't read them. And you think sympathetically and charitably about the people that have sent them.
“'don't you see? These connections are just a form of subjective anesthesia. They keep us from seeing something else.'”
It's worth considering just how difficult it is to actually hollow out a book. Really, there's nothing easy about removing the sections of pages and aligning the removals perfectly, page after page. Eventually, you'll have created a cavity large enough to stow away something important or precious or valuable or contraband or embarrassing. I once was embarrassed about a book I was reading and so I took the dust jacket from another book and slipped it over the cover of the shameful book. I still felt embarrassed, but at least I could read it in public without fear of ignominy. It's not just before falling asleep that I imagine slicing open the pages in A Smuggler's Bible and creating a void enormous enough that I could cram myself into it. In my mind, the book stretches itself out foot by foot to accommodate me.
“'What's your point?' I asked.”
I don't remember how I heard of Joseph McElroy. In a way, I can't remember not knowing of him in some oblique way. His voice on the page instills a feeling of memory but there's nothing there that I can actually remember. I suppose, if I'm honest with myself, I could admit that there were connections to his work everywhere I looked. Harry Mathews wrote an essay on one of his novels. Nicholas Mosley's Impossible Object has a blurb by McElroy. As does Dow Mossman's The Stones of Summer. McElroy had an essay on William Gaddis in Paper Empire. Really, now that I think of it, he's been ubiquitous, omnipresent.
“So many questions that want answering, and we had the experts here with us one time or other, could have—well these questions that remain are partly why we dream, but translated into some other illogical language.”
I had this weird dream where my father showed me some sort of therapy exercise he wrote. I was surprised because I didn't really know if the man was capable of writing. Or even reading. I just thought he could maybe write simple, structureless notes. “Went to bank.” But in my dream, he wrote this exercise about why he gets out of bed in the morning and it was strangely moving. It's not that it was poetic or anything like that. It wasn't at all. It was just that it revealed that there was something else in there. In there – in his mind. It was reflective. I felt, for less than half a moment, that maybe I would start crying. But not because I was moved by the content or because I felt some special affinity towards the man that I hadn't felt before. I think what it was was that recognition of something contained but not revealed.
“You looked for a person and touched him and figured him and questioned; but then you got back one day a brand-new look foreign to all you knew; and you knew that even if you had in fact been in that other person feeling what he felt, knowing his impulses and how he contrived to live, you would have been alive only in yourself...”
The bookstore was about to close and so I grabbed the single copy of A Smuggler's Bible. I opened it up to a random page and, after only reading a paragraph, felt that sensation of a sudden memory. I felt like I've been in those words before. I tucked the book under my arm and I walked out without paying. The passage I read was about the feminine versus the masculine way to study your own fingernails. I recognized the recognitions.
“Yet if some way he could hypnotize himself ostrich-style apparently out of his own existence, then he could hypnotize himself into another person, into 'another'—thus to love, thus to escape the wild divisions inside him, subliminal, supraliminal...”
This book sat on the shelf in my apartment for years. If any of my neighbors had come into my room, they'd have seen it resting on top of my bookcase, like I had singled it out for some reason. But I never wanted any of my neighbors in my place. There was the lady across the hall that worked at the prison and talked to everyone like they were convicts. Then there was the guy next door that would keep his door open and blast Billy Graham sermons. The lady that lived below me had this angry chow that was so obese that you couldn't see his neck. She introduced bed bugs to the whole building. There was a guy that boiled cabbage. And there was an old hippie couple that kept bowls of Borax on the floor of each room in their place. I didn't get to know any of them, but I was always curious about them. I was curious what got them out of bed in the morning and what they thought about when they had time to think. I was also curious what they would think if they walked into my apartment – A Smuggler's Bible resting on top of a bookcase.
“I'm a snooper. That's my disease. It's sheer egotism, for when I find out about a person I find all I've done is come face to face with a thick mirror.”
I suppose if there was some reason to finally open this novel, it was that I harbor this notion that everything is connected and I was hoping someone way smarter than I'll ever be could show me how. Actually, I didn't so much want McElroy to show this to me, I wanted to somehow squeeze myself into his consciousness and experience it as he would. Or if there was some way to sneak his brain into my cranium, then maybe that might work. But, all the mechanics of that aside, I guess it really wouldn't matter because my mind would have been replaced. So I wouldn't have access to his experience. Maybe a book is as close to that kind of operation as we can get. The author smuggles their mind into the pages. The reader then smuggles themselves in between the pages.
“Not because you might hate it but because this way you won't be tempted to turn into what your past might tell you you are.”
Have you ever read a novel where you don't really understand the protagonist? You're just sort of hanging back watching them and listening to them and they feel almost unknowable to you? You watch what they do and you can't fathom a reason why they'd be doing those things. You're wondering what it is that you're even looking for. And you're wondering what it is that they are looking for. But then, all of a sudden, say on page 299, you realize that you've somehow sort of slipped into the protagonist's place. You find yourself watching them as you watch yourself – that is, from your very own head, able to see everything but your very own self. Maybe you're just lying to yourself and you don't actually feel as if you are the protagonist. But still, you keep reading it as if you might be.
“Don't try to connect them; you'll never manage it. The causes exist, but most of them we just can't know.”
There are some sections in Ulysses that made me weep. Like truly weep. Some of the episodes I've read seven or eight times and I still cry when I read a certain passage. I think one of the saddest lines is, “A brother is as easily forgotten as an umbrella.” We lose touch with people. We sometimes forget the people that might have been, at one time, the most important people in our lives. In the hope that those connections won't disintegrate, it's worth sharing books with those people. Then they share books with you. But you don't read them. You put them on your shelf. And then, when you look at them, you feel really awful that you still haven't read them. And you think sympathetically and charitably about the people that have sent them.
“'don't you see? These connections are just a form of subjective anesthesia. They keep us from seeing something else.'”
It's worth considering just how difficult it is to actually hollow out a book. Really, there's nothing easy about removing the sections of pages and aligning the removals perfectly, page after page. Eventually, you'll have created a cavity large enough to stow away something important or precious or valuable or contraband or embarrassing. I once was embarrassed about a book I was reading and so I took the dust jacket from another book and slipped it over the cover of the shameful book. I still felt embarrassed, but at least I could read it in public without fear of ignominy. It's not just before falling asleep that I imagine slicing open the pages in A Smuggler's Bible and creating a void enormous enough that I could cram myself into it. In my mind, the book stretches itself out foot by foot to accommodate me.
“'What's your point?' I asked.”
I don't remember how I heard of Joseph McElroy. In a way, I can't remember not knowing of him in some oblique way. His voice on the page instills a feeling of memory but there's nothing there that I can actually remember. I suppose, if I'm honest with myself, I could admit that there were connections to his work everywhere I looked. Harry Mathews wrote an essay on one of his novels. Nicholas Mosley's Impossible Object has a blurb by McElroy. As does Dow Mossman's The Stones of Summer. McElroy had an essay on William Gaddis in Paper Empire. Really, now that I think of it, he's been ubiquitous, omnipresent.
“So many questions that want answering, and we had the experts here with us one time or other, could have—well these questions that remain are partly why we dream, but translated into some other illogical language.”
I had this weird dream where my father showed me some sort of therapy exercise he wrote. I was surprised because I didn't really know if the man was capable of writing. Or even reading. I just thought he could maybe write simple, structureless notes. “Went to bank.” But in my dream, he wrote this exercise about why he gets out of bed in the morning and it was strangely moving. It's not that it was poetic or anything like that. It wasn't at all. It was just that it revealed that there was something else in there. In there – in his mind. It was reflective. I felt, for less than half a moment, that maybe I would start crying. But not because I was moved by the content or because I felt some special affinity towards the man that I hadn't felt before. I think what it was was that recognition of something contained but not revealed.
“You looked for a person and touched him and figured him and questioned; but then you got back one day a brand-new look foreign to all you knew; and you knew that even if you had in fact been in that other person feeling what he felt, knowing his impulses and how he contrived to live, you would have been alive only in yourself...”
March 24, 2016
Every once in a long while, a book comes into you life that rearranges your understanding of the possibilities of the novel at an almost cellular level. A Smuggler's Bible was that for me. It is an embarrassingly rich book whose postmodern reach never exceeds the masterful grasp of its author. I noted in the discussion group that it may be more assured than V. I didn't mean to say that one is necessarily better than the other, just that McElroy's comparably paginated first book has little to no bloat. Each of the 435 pages are necessary to the arch of the story.
And what a story! McElroy weaves an impossible tale using concentric Venn diagrams to slink around the idea of authorial authority and the flux state of the Ego. Chapter V, "Anglo-American Chronicle," is one of the most self-assured and virtuosic displays I've read in quite some time. Excised from ASB, it could stand alone as a novella every bit as self-contained as Pafko at the Wall. Chapter VIII, "Smuggler's Harbor, or Halsey Lives Again," is nothing short of a valedictory lap.
Perhaps the most striking thing to me about this book is that, despite its obvious affiliation with postmodernism, it lacks any trace of ennui. There is true passion and verve; something that other postmodernists have been accused of lacking (though I disagree). I recommend it to anyone with the slightest interest in the other 'name' authors who wrote in a similar vein: Gaddis, Pynchon, DeLillo, etc. (i.e., encyclopedic knowledge coupled with a heart-rending ability to manipulate, fold, and explode language from both within and outside of itself).
And what a story! McElroy weaves an impossible tale using concentric Venn diagrams to slink around the idea of authorial authority and the flux state of the Ego. Chapter V, "Anglo-American Chronicle," is one of the most self-assured and virtuosic displays I've read in quite some time. Excised from ASB, it could stand alone as a novella every bit as self-contained as Pafko at the Wall. Chapter VIII, "Smuggler's Harbor, or Halsey Lives Again," is nothing short of a valedictory lap.
Perhaps the most striking thing to me about this book is that, despite its obvious affiliation with postmodernism, it lacks any trace of ennui. There is true passion and verve; something that other postmodernists have been accused of lacking (though I disagree). I recommend it to anyone with the slightest interest in the other 'name' authors who wrote in a similar vein: Gaddis, Pynchon, DeLillo, etc. (i.e., encyclopedic knowledge coupled with a heart-rending ability to manipulate, fold, and explode language from both within and outside of itself).
April 14, 2013
Reviewing this will not be easy as there is more to it than meets the eye. The title relates to the sort of hollowed out book that smugglers used in the eighteenth century.
It involves David Brooke and his wife Ellen who are on a liner crossing the Atlantic. The narrative is split into eight parts joined together by a bridging narrative which takes place on the boat. The eight parts reflect a different aspect of Brooke’s life. Each of the parts are separate enough for them almost to stand alone as short stories. Thinking about the whole, the best way I can describe it, is to compare it with a quilt or counterpane made up of separate discrete sections. You can look at them individually, but they are sewn together and can be looked at as a greater whole.
Each of the separate parts can be seen as aspects of David’s self; but he is not the main character in any one of them. You see David as he is perceived by a series of others; illuminating different aspects of his personality. In the bridging narrative there is a fellow passenger who talks to David about smuggling and who encourages him to insert himself into the lives of others. This David has done in the eight manuscripts that illustrate his life. This makes the novel unusual. Usually a novel is filtered through a particular main character in a linear sort of way; or one story is told through a variety of perspectives. Here McElroy uses what William Smith Wilson calls a “field model”. Put simply, instead of following a path; you’re in a field with the potential of lots of different interconnections. David’s involvement in some of the stories is often incidental or tangential and he is not the main character in most of them. McElroy focuses on identity; its disintegration and reconstruction (one of many focuses) and it is quite difficult to get a real handle on David Brooke; he seems a little elusive. Some of the minor characters seem much more fleshed out; especially Duke Amerchrome and his son Mike; even Harry Tindall. The point is, you can only get a sense of David by looking at the whole rather than the separate parts.
There are so many different leads to follow; you have the contrast of the narratives (we don’t know how reliable a narrator David is; it is implied he is rather unreliable as he inserts himself into the lives of those around him) being placed inside the “absolute truth” of the Bible. I also got a sense, when looking at David’s relationship with his father Halsey, that there was an element of a prodigal son narrative; there is certainly an exile motif within.
The bridging narrative contains two voices, one of which is detached and seemingly within David; possibly the authorial voice, but also interpreted as godlike (I would also posit possibly the opposite of godlike and to continue the smuggling motif inserting the fallen/human within the Bible). The other interesting point about the voice in the bridging narrative is that it is immanent, rather than transcendent. This suggests that the godlike argument may be problematic. The whole record has also been likened to a black box, as you would find on an aeroplane. However there is an overload of data contained within and the reader is left with several different trails to follow.
Of course McElroy leads clues all over; there is one in particular that is little mentioned. The seventh narrative is made up of letters written to David after he has had some sort of breakdown with an element of amnesia in it. A particular book is mentioned a number of times; Wisdom, Madness and Folly by John Custance. It is an actual book; now little known. Custance tells the story, of what was then called manic depression (now bi-polar). It is a cerebral examination of the condition written over many years and in a variety of states of mind (some of it whilst in hospital recovering from acute phases of illness). Custance talks of the contrast between the “universe of bliss” and the “abyss of isolation”. The contrast is similar to Yin/Yang and to the Nietzschean concept of the Dionysian and Apollonian modes of being. It’s about trying to separate illusion from reality and developing a philosophical response to the illness. I have a vague recollection of skimming it and making some notes in the 80s when studying theology. It may of course be a red herring, but I suspect McElroy places it there for a reason and David’s breakdown reads suspiciously similar to that of Custance.
The whole is a remarkable achievement with a cast of vivid and powerful characters who revolve around the elusive David Brooke. Read it and see what you make of it; it’s an interesting journey. I suspect i have missed a good deal and if it ever becomes a group read I may come back to it.
It involves David Brooke and his wife Ellen who are on a liner crossing the Atlantic. The narrative is split into eight parts joined together by a bridging narrative which takes place on the boat. The eight parts reflect a different aspect of Brooke’s life. Each of the parts are separate enough for them almost to stand alone as short stories. Thinking about the whole, the best way I can describe it, is to compare it with a quilt or counterpane made up of separate discrete sections. You can look at them individually, but they are sewn together and can be looked at as a greater whole.
Each of the separate parts can be seen as aspects of David’s self; but he is not the main character in any one of them. You see David as he is perceived by a series of others; illuminating different aspects of his personality. In the bridging narrative there is a fellow passenger who talks to David about smuggling and who encourages him to insert himself into the lives of others. This David has done in the eight manuscripts that illustrate his life. This makes the novel unusual. Usually a novel is filtered through a particular main character in a linear sort of way; or one story is told through a variety of perspectives. Here McElroy uses what William Smith Wilson calls a “field model”. Put simply, instead of following a path; you’re in a field with the potential of lots of different interconnections. David’s involvement in some of the stories is often incidental or tangential and he is not the main character in most of them. McElroy focuses on identity; its disintegration and reconstruction (one of many focuses) and it is quite difficult to get a real handle on David Brooke; he seems a little elusive. Some of the minor characters seem much more fleshed out; especially Duke Amerchrome and his son Mike; even Harry Tindall. The point is, you can only get a sense of David by looking at the whole rather than the separate parts.
There are so many different leads to follow; you have the contrast of the narratives (we don’t know how reliable a narrator David is; it is implied he is rather unreliable as he inserts himself into the lives of those around him) being placed inside the “absolute truth” of the Bible. I also got a sense, when looking at David’s relationship with his father Halsey, that there was an element of a prodigal son narrative; there is certainly an exile motif within.
The bridging narrative contains two voices, one of which is detached and seemingly within David; possibly the authorial voice, but also interpreted as godlike (I would also posit possibly the opposite of godlike and to continue the smuggling motif inserting the fallen/human within the Bible). The other interesting point about the voice in the bridging narrative is that it is immanent, rather than transcendent. This suggests that the godlike argument may be problematic. The whole record has also been likened to a black box, as you would find on an aeroplane. However there is an overload of data contained within and the reader is left with several different trails to follow.
Of course McElroy leads clues all over; there is one in particular that is little mentioned. The seventh narrative is made up of letters written to David after he has had some sort of breakdown with an element of amnesia in it. A particular book is mentioned a number of times; Wisdom, Madness and Folly by John Custance. It is an actual book; now little known. Custance tells the story, of what was then called manic depression (now bi-polar). It is a cerebral examination of the condition written over many years and in a variety of states of mind (some of it whilst in hospital recovering from acute phases of illness). Custance talks of the contrast between the “universe of bliss” and the “abyss of isolation”. The contrast is similar to Yin/Yang and to the Nietzschean concept of the Dionysian and Apollonian modes of being. It’s about trying to separate illusion from reality and developing a philosophical response to the illness. I have a vague recollection of skimming it and making some notes in the 80s when studying theology. It may of course be a red herring, but I suspect McElroy places it there for a reason and David’s breakdown reads suspiciously similar to that of Custance.
The whole is a remarkable achievement with a cast of vivid and powerful characters who revolve around the elusive David Brooke. Read it and see what you make of it; it’s an interesting journey. I suspect i have missed a good deal and if it ever becomes a group read I may come back to it.
December 22, 2020
more subtle than any book of the field
September 13, 2015
Doesn't have the same "holy shit, my head is swimming" factor as Women & Men does, but still gets by just fine on its own. McElroy rips through a series of unique and authentically rendered characters, drops in the occasional moments of conversation-based entropy, and ties it all together with an astonishing device that might seem like a first-novel gimmick but, by gum, works. Fits nicely on your "postmodern urban alienation" shelf alongside V. and the Recognitions.
March 2, 2015
Dear Remarkable Joseph McElroy,
You have written an extraordinary novel about smuggling. I missed probably half of what you wanted to say(if not more), but what I did understand, and you write beautifully I must say, was not difficult to comprehend. I enjoyed trying to discover who David Brooke was through the use of the supporting characters(including the supporting character of David himself). Your structure in the novel was a treat to read; it broke up the story to make it more complex. Your prose was thought provoking, and mesmerizing:
"But is it true a weak will mightn't be able to direct the Outer Mind to remain quiescent? What is your problem, Mr. Brooke? and will my hypnosis be succeeded, when I wake, by amnesia? If there's rapport between us-But why do you come to me?Oh doctor, would you use the palm-shoulder-blade method to establish magnetic rapport so that when-? Do you mean, when my hands are withdrawn the subject will be irresistibly attracted after them-? Yes, that's what I meant-But please now tell me why you're here? How can you tell if I'm faking or not? It's the iris, the iris should roll upward a bit and perhaps the pupil won't contract when a bright light is shone on it, but Mr. Brook, tell me-Did you say "perhaps"? Yes, I did. You must tell me why you came and what you want. But doctor first you tell me Doesn't William James say something about a double consciousness, das doppel ich, doesn't Myers say-Hold it, Mr. Brooke-Doesn't Myers say our habitual consciousness may be a mere selection from a sea of thoughts and sensations and that-Please, Mr. Brook!-And doesn't Myers suggest that at both ends of the subliminal self the spectrum of consciousnesses is indefinitely extended?Mr. Brooke, please explain why you came?"
There are layers, upon layers embedded into your novel, and will hope to read it again, when I am a little more intelligent(if I can achieve that), to gain what you are saying in A Smuggler's Bible. I loved how you could seamlessly discuss thermal dynamics using Winnie the Pooh at Christmas time. I am not sure if that has ever been attempted, but I do not think it could ever be replicated, or surpassed.
You were able to pose a lot of great questions, and points; a few of my favorites:
"Do we not use each other to slip across the frontiers of self-scrutiny as something other than lonely people?"
"God implies; man infers; man is himself one of God's implications!"
"Don't you see that this smuggling idea has been close to your consciousness for a long time?"
Even though you have a lot of complexity in your novel, it is not difficult to read. You made me laugh, and enjoy myself completely, and I plan on journeying into your other novels, hopefully sooner, rather than later. You are an amazing writer, and I wish you were more widely read; other need to enjoy your novels as I have.
a newly devoted fan,
George
You have written an extraordinary novel about smuggling. I missed probably half of what you wanted to say(if not more), but what I did understand, and you write beautifully I must say, was not difficult to comprehend. I enjoyed trying to discover who David Brooke was through the use of the supporting characters(including the supporting character of David himself). Your structure in the novel was a treat to read; it broke up the story to make it more complex. Your prose was thought provoking, and mesmerizing:
"But is it true a weak will mightn't be able to direct the Outer Mind to remain quiescent? What is your problem, Mr. Brooke? and will my hypnosis be succeeded, when I wake, by amnesia? If there's rapport between us-But why do you come to me?Oh doctor, would you use the palm-shoulder-blade method to establish magnetic rapport so that when-? Do you mean, when my hands are withdrawn the subject will be irresistibly attracted after them-? Yes, that's what I meant-But please now tell me why you're here? How can you tell if I'm faking or not? It's the iris, the iris should roll upward a bit and perhaps the pupil won't contract when a bright light is shone on it, but Mr. Brook, tell me-Did you say "perhaps"? Yes, I did. You must tell me why you came and what you want. But doctor first you tell me Doesn't William James say something about a double consciousness, das doppel ich, doesn't Myers say-Hold it, Mr. Brooke-Doesn't Myers say our habitual consciousness may be a mere selection from a sea of thoughts and sensations and that-Please, Mr. Brook!-And doesn't Myers suggest that at both ends of the subliminal self the spectrum of consciousnesses is indefinitely extended?Mr. Brooke, please explain why you came?"
There are layers, upon layers embedded into your novel, and will hope to read it again, when I am a little more intelligent(if I can achieve that), to gain what you are saying in A Smuggler's Bible. I loved how you could seamlessly discuss thermal dynamics using Winnie the Pooh at Christmas time. I am not sure if that has ever been attempted, but I do not think it could ever be replicated, or surpassed.
You were able to pose a lot of great questions, and points; a few of my favorites:
"Do we not use each other to slip across the frontiers of self-scrutiny as something other than lonely people?"
"God implies; man infers; man is himself one of God's implications!"
"Don't you see that this smuggling idea has been close to your consciousness for a long time?"
Even though you have a lot of complexity in your novel, it is not difficult to read. You made me laugh, and enjoy myself completely, and I plan on journeying into your other novels, hopefully sooner, rather than later. You are an amazing writer, and I wish you were more widely read; other need to enjoy your novels as I have.
a newly devoted fan,
George
August 20, 2014
Me : (reading page after page of A Smuggler’s Bible) What was that!? An exhibition??
ASB: huh?
Me: We need emotional content. Try again.
ASB: (more and more interminable prose)
Me: I said “emotional content”, not anger!! Now try again, with me.
ASB: (words, words, words, then section VIII, Halsey Lives Again)
Me: That’s it!! How did it feel to you?
ASB: Let me think…
Me: (cracks ASB against the corner of the desk)
Don’t think!!! Feeeeel……
It is like a finger pointing a way to the moon. (crack)
Don’t concentrate on the finger or you will miss all that heavenly glory!
Do you understand?
It’s difficult to rate a book like this, especially so many years after it was published. At the time post/modernism was going full steam ahead and I’m sure a young novelist would have felt the pressure to be formally innovative (aka “the finger”) and as a result, missed/obfuscated all that heavenly glory.
McElroy can write, as sections V and VIII show very well. Harry Tindall and Halsey Brooke will be in my memory for a long time. But the rest of the characters? Not so much. In reading the other sections, I had the feeling I had found a stranger’s diary/photo album, and as I read the pages, I found no way to really care about or connect with Ellen, Julia, or even David Brooke. The whole Duke Amerchrome clan – no idea WTF was going on. Mary, Pennit, character x, y, and z – strangers in a lost and found diary. So then the question becomes, if he is able to show me all the heavenly glory in section V and VIII, why was he giving me the finger in the rest of the book?
I suspect I will have to look at this book again in the future. Maybe I’ll reread it after I’ve read some of his other work, and possibly after I reread The Recognitions. But for now, I’m giving it a low rating to reflect my own reading experience, rather than as a condemnation of McElroy. To be revisited in the future…
ASB: huh?
Me: We need emotional content. Try again.
ASB: (more and more interminable prose)
Me: I said “emotional content”, not anger!! Now try again, with me.
ASB: (words, words, words, then section VIII, Halsey Lives Again)
Me: That’s it!! How did it feel to you?
ASB: Let me think…
Me: (cracks ASB against the corner of the desk)
Don’t think!!! Feeeeel……
It is like a finger pointing a way to the moon. (crack)
Don’t concentrate on the finger or you will miss all that heavenly glory!
Do you understand?
It’s difficult to rate a book like this, especially so many years after it was published. At the time post/modernism was going full steam ahead and I’m sure a young novelist would have felt the pressure to be formally innovative (aka “the finger”) and as a result, missed/obfuscated all that heavenly glory.
McElroy can write, as sections V and VIII show very well. Harry Tindall and Halsey Brooke will be in my memory for a long time. But the rest of the characters? Not so much. In reading the other sections, I had the feeling I had found a stranger’s diary/photo album, and as I read the pages, I found no way to really care about or connect with Ellen, Julia, or even David Brooke. The whole Duke Amerchrome clan – no idea WTF was going on. Mary, Pennit, character x, y, and z – strangers in a lost and found diary. So then the question becomes, if he is able to show me all the heavenly glory in section V and VIII, why was he giving me the finger in the rest of the book?
I suspect I will have to look at this book again in the future. Maybe I’ll reread it after I’ve read some of his other work, and possibly after I reread The Recognitions. But for now, I’m giving it a low rating to reflect my own reading experience, rather than as a condemnation of McElroy. To be revisited in the future…
March 3, 2014
Some books I can get absorbed in, losing myself in the story, or the characters, or the structure, or the style. A very few books I can read without being interested in any of this in anything other than a purely intellectual way, and this is one of them. 'A Smuggler's Bible' is more or less seven often quite bad novellas and short stories connected in so many ways that my mind, at least, was boggled; the novel that comprises these short fictions is mainly a frame designed to investigate questions of identity and solipsism.
The frame itself is intriguing [plot spoilers ahead, but if you're reading for plot, you should just skip this book]. A man has some kind of psychotic break and decides he needs to reconstitute his identity. He decides to do this by writing the aforementioned stories/novellas, which are told from the perspectives of his friends, his wife, his family and finally himself. He takes these narratives to an 'old man,' probably a friend's father, certainly a mythical stand-in for at least one god, in the U.K. He reads and edits the narratives on the way. We are told all of this by the narrator of the frame story, who is possibly a demiurge creator of David Brooke (the man in question), or a part of David Brooke's mind, which makes sense to anyone who's ever written a narrative through another person's voice.
The links between the stories are as small as individual words ('infusoria', implausibly, shows up multiple times) and as large as mythical structural parallels (a lot of people being followed, a lot of father/son strife, and so on). It was first published in 1966, so there's an unfortunately large amount of existential nonsense and bad philosophizing (note to those who still get worried by Descartes' demons or Sartre's nausea: the very possibility of these problems has been refuted many, many, many times since). Luckily, treating these problems in literature can be more rewarding than just treating them philosophically, and McElroy almost succeeds in making it interesting here.
He doesn't entirely succeed because most of the stories David Brooke writes about others/himself aren't all that interesting, with the exception of the glorious 'An American Hero,' which would make a great self-standing realist novella. This is hardly surprising. McElroy is out for much bigger game than realism can bring down; he's not likely to waste energy on writing good realism; the realism is therefore not very good. And you're left with an interesting intellectual game, part cod-existentialism, part Joyce (endless mythic analogues).
Foster Wallace was still trying to solve these non-existent problems decades later. 'Smuggler's Bible' is most interesting at the end, when the difficulties of subjectivity are tied to the difficulties of religious faith (Brooke's stories are, at one point, stored in a smuggler's bible, a bible from which a hole has been cut, to act as a small box).
"Do you not see how Christ was in fact hte most remarkable contraband of all time, and was simultaneously himself an arch-smuggler? And the Virgin Mary, too?... (Sartre's wrong: *God* is other people!)"
Some people believe in god, some people do not; in any case, god's existence cannot be proven or disproven. Similarly, the fact that we're existentially alone cannot be proven or disproven; to state that we're existentially alone is as much a theological statement as the statement that we are in a state of divine grace, and, strictly speaking, about as meaningful/less, depending on your assumptions.
So 'A Smuggler's Bible' gives you lots of space to think about what it means to be an individual subject, and how that subjectivity is related to other people, without forcing you to take one position or another. That's a pretty great achievement. It's worth checking out for its formal ingenuity. But you can easily skip the stories that aren't holding your interest without losing much; in a sense, this is a piece of conceptual art, and it's more fun to think about the concept than it is to experience the art. That might be a problem.
The frame itself is intriguing [plot spoilers ahead, but if you're reading for plot, you should just skip this book]. A man has some kind of psychotic break and decides he needs to reconstitute his identity. He decides to do this by writing the aforementioned stories/novellas, which are told from the perspectives of his friends, his wife, his family and finally himself. He takes these narratives to an 'old man,' probably a friend's father, certainly a mythical stand-in for at least one god, in the U.K. He reads and edits the narratives on the way. We are told all of this by the narrator of the frame story, who is possibly a demiurge creator of David Brooke (the man in question), or a part of David Brooke's mind, which makes sense to anyone who's ever written a narrative through another person's voice.
The links between the stories are as small as individual words ('infusoria', implausibly, shows up multiple times) and as large as mythical structural parallels (a lot of people being followed, a lot of father/son strife, and so on). It was first published in 1966, so there's an unfortunately large amount of existential nonsense and bad philosophizing (note to those who still get worried by Descartes' demons or Sartre's nausea: the very possibility of these problems has been refuted many, many, many times since). Luckily, treating these problems in literature can be more rewarding than just treating them philosophically, and McElroy almost succeeds in making it interesting here.
He doesn't entirely succeed because most of the stories David Brooke writes about others/himself aren't all that interesting, with the exception of the glorious 'An American Hero,' which would make a great self-standing realist novella. This is hardly surprising. McElroy is out for much bigger game than realism can bring down; he's not likely to waste energy on writing good realism; the realism is therefore not very good. And you're left with an interesting intellectual game, part cod-existentialism, part Joyce (endless mythic analogues).
Foster Wallace was still trying to solve these non-existent problems decades later. 'Smuggler's Bible' is most interesting at the end, when the difficulties of subjectivity are tied to the difficulties of religious faith (Brooke's stories are, at one point, stored in a smuggler's bible, a bible from which a hole has been cut, to act as a small box).
"Do you not see how Christ was in fact hte most remarkable contraband of all time, and was simultaneously himself an arch-smuggler? And the Virgin Mary, too?... (Sartre's wrong: *God* is other people!)"
Some people believe in god, some people do not; in any case, god's existence cannot be proven or disproven. Similarly, the fact that we're existentially alone cannot be proven or disproven; to state that we're existentially alone is as much a theological statement as the statement that we are in a state of divine grace, and, strictly speaking, about as meaningful/less, depending on your assumptions.
So 'A Smuggler's Bible' gives you lots of space to think about what it means to be an individual subject, and how that subjectivity is related to other people, without forcing you to take one position or another. That's a pretty great achievement. It's worth checking out for its formal ingenuity. But you can easily skip the stories that aren't holding your interest without losing much; in a sense, this is a piece of conceptual art, and it's more fun to think about the concept than it is to experience the art. That might be a problem.
September 22, 2014
A smuggler's bible is an artifact that has been hollowed out to contain contraband while retaining it's holy appearance. David Brooks, self-confessed romantic solipsist, protagonist and author, smuggles himself into the point of view of eight of his most significant others. In this way, through the lens of his projections, he comes not only to inhabit a different perspective and to bridge"the dark apartness" of humans one from another,(p341) but mostly to catch sight of himself as he appears in each crystal fragment of memory selected (by himself) to emphasize an undetermined facet in the jewel of his consciousness.
Part of the trick was to"project into someone else...not his own voice but himself-so his own voice would become that of the self temporarily housing him."p98
If this sounds a lot like sci-fi or rape, its not at all.
McElroy is a voice of assurance, and one could call it meta- fiction, but it is the metaphysical and psychological questions that he raises that fascinate me, every bit as much as the cast of eccentrics
that we meet on board, including the mysterious inhabitant of Davids's own mind,possibly his id or his ego even, it's not clear to me (and indeed this "entity" obstructed my entrance into the book) Quite probably the book is full of references and metaphors that floated right past me. That did not detract from my enjoyment.
There is something of Fernando Pessoa in McElroys attempt to chart a "geography of the soul" by anchoring it in movable reality. A splendid, lively and brilliantly conceived and written opus.
Part of the trick was to"project into someone else...not his own voice but himself-so his own voice would become that of the self temporarily housing him."p98
If this sounds a lot like sci-fi or rape, its not at all.
McElroy is a voice of assurance, and one could call it meta- fiction, but it is the metaphysical and psychological questions that he raises that fascinate me, every bit as much as the cast of eccentrics
that we meet on board, including the mysterious inhabitant of Davids's own mind,possibly his id or his ego even, it's not clear to me (and indeed this "entity" obstructed my entrance into the book) Quite probably the book is full of references and metaphors that floated right past me. That did not detract from my enjoyment.
There is something of Fernando Pessoa in McElroys attempt to chart a "geography of the soul" by anchoring it in movable reality. A splendid, lively and brilliantly conceived and written opus.
March 22, 2024
Goddamn did McElroy put me through the fucking ringer here, and though I did not in any conventional sense "enjoy" every page of this from start to last, I am very glad I took my time to immerse myself in this befuddling beast of a debut. I went into this with a certain level of arrogance surrounding my capability of tackling it, considering I've experienced plenty experimental art to the point where I feel I've grown accustomed to authorly eccentricities, and this misguided confidence was reinforced by how relatively easy to read the first manuscript here was. But it wasn't long before McElroy put me in my place and began not only boggling my mind, but one-upping himself with every major section here in just how much he could throw me for a loop. There's something I can't quite put my finger on about what made this book so difficult, but it just compels me to the universe it builds all the more... this is somehow at once totally locked in and dedicated to all its divergent derangements, yet also weirdly way more restrained than any of these other "ambitious pomo debuts" that you can name. A novel like Pynchon's "V." is probably a go-to comparison, but while the ambition of Pynchon's debut sprawls outward as tends to be his forte, McElroy's is instead distinctly and endlessly moving inward and folding back in on itself... appropriately as it is fundamentally about the unreliability of memory, McElroy sort of imbues this whole book with an ambiguity, an uncertainty that is certainly approached in a different way from his postmodern contemporaries. There's a distinct and seemingly deliberate lack of big setpieces unlike Pynchon and Gaddis etc., its own metaphysical Autism Splurges are way more patient and measured, there's a specific focus on realism and mundanity which only makes the integration of Meta Unreality more disorienting and strange, especially because it integrates so well, because it's primarily a story about the fictions we build out of the conscious awareness of ourselves and everyone and everything around us, and the impossibility of really being able to "tell anyone's story" in a way that would fit the criteria of some kind of Higher Universal Truth. McElroy builds off this idea to justify these excursions into the oneiric, it's almost as though David's subconscious is more of the central character than "David" himself is, an idea that they are both two distinct entities yet also One, same with the rest of the cast circling this psychological puzzle... All that is to say; it's delightfully up its own ass, so if you don't enjoy that then this is not the novel for you.
But whereas, for example, the aforementioned "V." has a straightforwardness and Viscerality [it's a word now] that's more betraying of the mindset of a young author who wants to Make an Impact On the Landscape of Literature, McElroy comes off quite a bit wiser and more emotionally and intellectually balanced, which I guess makes sense as he was nearly 40 when he debuted. It's still indulgent in ways that at points feel like McElroy was writing it primarily for himself with comparatively less thought paid to any specific potential audience, yet somehow, its the book's seemingly total lack of confidence in adequately answering its own most self-indulgent questions that keeps it from really getting too far into the weeds. He does get far into them at points, but there's enough of an obvious ineffable ambition pulsing at the core of the narrative here that always ends up pulling everything back in on itself, which the author seems acutely aware of the risk of at every turn here. The amount of effort that clearly went into scaling this back to humble his own narrative aspirations is clear, but McElroy accepts that by the very nature of what this is he's not going to succeed at that a lot of the time, and allows the itching ambition necessary for a debut to spread its wings and fly into some pretty wild metaphysical wankery. The honesty and sincerity that radiates from the book as a result of McElroy clearly knowing how insane this idea is and either playing it up or scaling it back when it suits him best is really palpable, and it gives an intimacy to this that only begins to really sink in once you've read a lot of it, because of how cold that Seemingly Self-Involved narrative voice and deceit is at first, McElroy really sort of teaches you to know him as you work your way through this thing, and come to know how he's not as cold or self-obsessed as he appears at first, once you just get used to all his quirks.
As you can imagine, no matter how admirable the mind behind this and its goals as art, its Inward Sprawl doesn't always work. That early sense of coldness, while ultimately transformed and rectified by the end, leads the initial chapters to being head-scratching and difficult to have any emotional investment in, where it sort of seems like these characters openly being Projected by David makes them feel really blatantly more like empty constructs than people. This changes, in a way that's best to experience for oneself, in particular during the centerpiece ostensibly self-contained novella here, "An American Hero" which is a fantastic piece of writing, and sort of fires on all cylinders in terms of the themes and ideas that the book orbits around to a really satisfying extent that sustains the rest of the novel after it. But there's quite a bit of frustration involved in getting there and I can see a lot of people dropping this before they find any reason to really care about it, at least if you're like me. Again, McElroy's audacity to just drop the reader headfirst into this Bewildering Brain Puzzle without handholding is admirable as an artist, but doesn't completely fly as a reader, because at times it can feel less like he's doing this out of respect for the reader and more so because his unabashedly internal focus can feel more like its sidelining the reader. As I said, McElroy ultimately redeems this, but only after a significant amount of alienation that is practically necessary to the narrative. Like anything, YMMV.
If there's any abiding atmosphere or tone to this entire thing then I think it's one very familiar concept - anxiety. Anxiety over the incommunicable gaps between our understanding of ourselves and others [however fabricated that separation may be in reality] and the impossibility of a singular truth as I mentioned, but also a lot of really potent Cold War subtext... lots of really subtle but brilliant thematic circling around the atom bomb, the inherent brittleness of identity when it could all just be blown to pieces any second, and the anxiety surrounding strengthening our personal connections when the modern struggle for existence makes it more tenuous than ever. These ideas really come to a head in the last section here which is totally wonderful and fully sold me on what McElroy was going for here, no matter how much I sort of stumbled my way to that point at times. In any case, this is certainly a great book, with blemishes that, although sometimes irritating, end up contributing to an irreplaceable creative vision. I had struggled knowing where to start with McElroy for awhile, and I can't help but feel starting with his debut was a good choice because I suspect his work can only go up from here.
[Last thing and more of a sidenote I couldn't fit into the rest; I also have to pay some mention to the interlude chapters, which are more directly narrated by the subconscious (that is, him) sort of "shadow self" of David that is "in and behind" him throughout the narrative, because they're when the book gets the most fun and just have the best excuse to take the reader to the more completely out-there parts of McElroy's imagination, which are by design more restrained and smoothly integrated during the central manuscripts. David's shadow self is a ridiculous little self-criticizing invisible jester in David's spirit whose way of speaking is insanely off-kilter but a lot of fun, it kinda reminded me of "Darkmans" by Nicola Barker but less British, especially with all the emphasis on grammatical fuckery and syntax silliness, and more delightfully paranoid. Not a lot to say about it specifically at least on read #1, just a really enjoyable aspect of the book whenever it cropped up again, and used sparingly enough to feel welcome every time it showed up.]
But whereas, for example, the aforementioned "V." has a straightforwardness and Viscerality [it's a word now] that's more betraying of the mindset of a young author who wants to Make an Impact On the Landscape of Literature, McElroy comes off quite a bit wiser and more emotionally and intellectually balanced, which I guess makes sense as he was nearly 40 when he debuted. It's still indulgent in ways that at points feel like McElroy was writing it primarily for himself with comparatively less thought paid to any specific potential audience, yet somehow, its the book's seemingly total lack of confidence in adequately answering its own most self-indulgent questions that keeps it from really getting too far into the weeds. He does get far into them at points, but there's enough of an obvious ineffable ambition pulsing at the core of the narrative here that always ends up pulling everything back in on itself, which the author seems acutely aware of the risk of at every turn here. The amount of effort that clearly went into scaling this back to humble his own narrative aspirations is clear, but McElroy accepts that by the very nature of what this is he's not going to succeed at that a lot of the time, and allows the itching ambition necessary for a debut to spread its wings and fly into some pretty wild metaphysical wankery. The honesty and sincerity that radiates from the book as a result of McElroy clearly knowing how insane this idea is and either playing it up or scaling it back when it suits him best is really palpable, and it gives an intimacy to this that only begins to really sink in once you've read a lot of it, because of how cold that Seemingly Self-Involved narrative voice and deceit is at first, McElroy really sort of teaches you to know him as you work your way through this thing, and come to know how he's not as cold or self-obsessed as he appears at first, once you just get used to all his quirks.
As you can imagine, no matter how admirable the mind behind this and its goals as art, its Inward Sprawl doesn't always work. That early sense of coldness, while ultimately transformed and rectified by the end, leads the initial chapters to being head-scratching and difficult to have any emotional investment in, where it sort of seems like these characters openly being Projected by David makes them feel really blatantly more like empty constructs than people. This changes, in a way that's best to experience for oneself, in particular during the centerpiece ostensibly self-contained novella here, "An American Hero" which is a fantastic piece of writing, and sort of fires on all cylinders in terms of the themes and ideas that the book orbits around to a really satisfying extent that sustains the rest of the novel after it. But there's quite a bit of frustration involved in getting there and I can see a lot of people dropping this before they find any reason to really care about it, at least if you're like me. Again, McElroy's audacity to just drop the reader headfirst into this Bewildering Brain Puzzle without handholding is admirable as an artist, but doesn't completely fly as a reader, because at times it can feel less like he's doing this out of respect for the reader and more so because his unabashedly internal focus can feel more like its sidelining the reader. As I said, McElroy ultimately redeems this, but only after a significant amount of alienation that is practically necessary to the narrative. Like anything, YMMV.
If there's any abiding atmosphere or tone to this entire thing then I think it's one very familiar concept - anxiety. Anxiety over the incommunicable gaps between our understanding of ourselves and others [however fabricated that separation may be in reality] and the impossibility of a singular truth as I mentioned, but also a lot of really potent Cold War subtext... lots of really subtle but brilliant thematic circling around the atom bomb, the inherent brittleness of identity when it could all just be blown to pieces any second, and the anxiety surrounding strengthening our personal connections when the modern struggle for existence makes it more tenuous than ever. These ideas really come to a head in the last section here which is totally wonderful and fully sold me on what McElroy was going for here, no matter how much I sort of stumbled my way to that point at times. In any case, this is certainly a great book, with blemishes that, although sometimes irritating, end up contributing to an irreplaceable creative vision. I had struggled knowing where to start with McElroy for awhile, and I can't help but feel starting with his debut was a good choice because I suspect his work can only go up from here.
[Last thing and more of a sidenote I couldn't fit into the rest; I also have to pay some mention to the interlude chapters, which are more directly narrated by the subconscious (that is, him) sort of "shadow self" of David that is "in and behind" him throughout the narrative, because they're when the book gets the most fun and just have the best excuse to take the reader to the more completely out-there parts of McElroy's imagination, which are by design more restrained and smoothly integrated during the central manuscripts. David's shadow self is a ridiculous little self-criticizing invisible jester in David's spirit whose way of speaking is insanely off-kilter but a lot of fun, it kinda reminded me of "Darkmans" by Nicola Barker but less British, especially with all the emphasis on grammatical fuckery and syntax silliness, and more delightfully paranoid. Not a lot to say about it specifically at least on read #1, just a really enjoyable aspect of the book whenever it cropped up again, and used sparingly enough to feel welcome every time it showed up.]
July 4, 2012
If you've read all of William Gaddis and are wondering where to get more of a similar thing, Joseph McElroy will do perfectly. This one is reminiscent of The Recognitions at times with its preoccupations with forgeries and questions of what constitutes authenticity in a broader philosophic context.
I also enjoyed the extremely specific Brooklyn Heights and Upper West Side geography, calling to mind Paul Auster a tiny bit.
I also enjoyed the extremely specific Brooklyn Heights and Upper West Side geography, calling to mind Paul Auster a tiny bit.
July 14, 2017
Quasimetaphysical ponderings. Self-imprisonment. Solipsism. Disconnectedness. Yay! What fun to read.
August 1, 2014
A beautiful meditation on intersubjectivity and memory and a fantastic entry point into Joe's superlative catalog. What's perhaps most remarkable is how accessible/playful this novel is while expertly laying the ground for the author's later increasingly abstract/difficult, though thematically akin, novels (W&M and Hind's, in particular). Highly recommended.
December 11, 2009
A cover blurb suggested A Smuggler's Bible resembles The Recognitions. Other than the prose being symphonic--full, rich--in the same way, I failed to see the resemblance. A Gaddis novel is difficult. But the reader can follow the narrative and its nests of allusion and themes fairly easily. A McElroy novel is different. This is my 3d, following Women and Men, his 6th novel, and Actress in the House, his 8th. Unable to finish the latter, I should have known I'd have trouble with this one. Made up of 8 autobiographical fictions composed by the protagonist, I thought it didn't cohere very well at all. Maybe worse, it didn't interest me for long. I think the novel has a certain reputation. This is McElroy's 1st novel and dates from 1966. This edition carries an Introduction by the heavyweight poet Richard Howard, and in it he lists several framing themes around which the walls and roof of the novel have been erected. Only a few mythological references stood out for me. The rest either went under my attention or over my head. McElroy's novel probably deserved a better reader than I was able to be.
October 12, 2023
Don’t quite know where to start with this one. Perhaps with manuscript V protagonist Harry Tindall’s favorite word? So: a prolegomenon.
Highly biased review. Eager and anxious to start McElroy’s magnum opus Women & Men, new edition fresh off the print, no longer $300 on eBay but, what, $35? from publisher Dzanc, false start followed by several months off the shelf on the bedside table, there being no soft and sensible section to dig your fingernails into, at least, not within the first 40 pages. So I thought to begin in the same place as McElroy, his first book. I’d rather learn to read the guy when the stakes are lower, 1200 pages is a gamble if you can’t decipher the first sentence. So, A Smuggler’s Bible. This book is out of print, has been out of print for a while. Long enough to run upwards of $200 a copy. Jumped on a $84 copy and I’ll be damned if I don’t 5 star a book I spent that much money on. McElroy’s signature smuggled on the title page, by the way, neat surprise. So maybe I had to force myself to fall in love to circumambulate the pit in my stomach that come’s with spending money. Well! The write-up now.
Chapters alternate between present-day David Brooke (or, technically, an unnamed inhabitant of DB’s brain, in him, behind him, but apart from him) and eight manuscripts he is writing and editing on a transatlantic cruise. Each manuscript is a story involving David Brooke but not centered on him. Colleagues, housemates, family members, slices of their lives in which David is just a side character. David is smuggling himself, his essence, in his manuscripts.
Smuggling is a major major major theme here, if you can even believe that. Most important boundary is time. Okay, hold on, first, on time: we are meant to be seeing time as three dimensional in terms of this novel. Time isn’t a line we progress down, McElroy is asserting we are static, we do not move, we go nowhere. So I’m thinking of time as a plane slowly expanding outward center-of-the-universe style from the solipsistic self. Things get harder to see as they are pushed further away, hey? Simply: we forget. So David wants to smuggle himself, take the past with him, take it through time’s infinite checkpoints. Or something like that! David intends to smuggle the entire, the epistemological whole, a concise replica of himself, done so by a multitude of narrators whose varying perceptions can be synthesized into a single David.
David Brooke recognizes death as a dead end, it just stops there, we do not go anywhere. Christ, Brooke suggests, is the great smuggler, the only to ever transcend it, the only to ever go anywhere. So maybe the manuscripts are an attempt at a loophole, to preserve his memory (or to preserve him) after he dies.
McElroy tosses around a whole mess of dichotomous juxtapositions. Like, remember, the different perspectives? “…Be drugged by the world’s fair of verbal ambiguities in which we live, yet at the same time being aware, aware, aware, and intensifying your victimization by the age you live in and, more, by the nation you live in, this can you, as Spinoza says, preserve yourselves, be conscious of the trap you can never skip and the part you can never doff…”. This coming from academic fraud Duke (Manuscript IV), Duke sees personhood, particularly American personhood, as the embrace of paradox. We drive our cars to work and we hate every second! And DB himself on perspective—“Do we not use each other to slip across the frontiers of self-scrutiny as something other than lonely people? Once I thought of killing myself—to get out. But instead I chose another way of leaving myself—projecting into the lives, the consciousness of others.”
McElroy uses dichotomy and recurring symbols in ways I don’t understand. Man, isn’t literary comprehension difficult without sparknotes? Like, McElroy mentions this screwdriver DB stole several times, then, later, his father (or David writing from his father’s perspective) reflects on the Manhattan Project’s Louis Slotin, the slip of a screw driver and subsequent prompt-critical that resulted in Slotin’s death. And, okay, what about the church in Norway vs the church on Oake’s land? Aaaand the smuggler’s Bible from the cruise ship smuggler vs the one from St. John? Ellen repeats, mantra-like, this beach could be anywhere, Corfu, Cornwall, Casco Bay. Yes, I think McElroy has intentions with this, but it’s beyond me.
A lot of it is beyond me and probably beyond the scope of reasonable understanding. This being because this is McElroy’s first book! And it has that special quality we find in many masters’ first artistic endeavors where they seem to be fighting for their fucking lives to get something out that has GOT to get out, like, absolutely swinging for the fences, come along or don’t, there is real heart and soul, real meaning, whether it can be made sense of or not. And that is my main basis for the 5 star rating. I feel desperation in this book, despite the domesticity of subject matter and the awfully steady (beautiful at times, but basically emotionless) prose, there is real desperation somewhere and I just adore being able to feel that in a work.
Edit: I forgot I wanted to talk about Sartre a bit. Recurring fragment of a Sartre quote comes up several times, “devoid of secret fragments,” coming from “I have never before had such a strong feeling that I was devoid of secret dimensions, confined within the limits of my body, from which airy thoughts float up like bubbles. I build memories with my present self. I am cast out, forsaken in the present: I vainly try to rejoin the past: I cannot escape.” Really works into McElroy’s ideas on the psyche as something static. Alienation from the past, desire to carry it with. And, working Sartre into the perspective angle: Sartre says hell is other people, well, right near the end of the novel we get “GOD is other people.” Salvation in this idea of the self only existing as a kaleidoscope of viewpoints!
Highly biased review. Eager and anxious to start McElroy’s magnum opus Women & Men, new edition fresh off the print, no longer $300 on eBay but, what, $35? from publisher Dzanc, false start followed by several months off the shelf on the bedside table, there being no soft and sensible section to dig your fingernails into, at least, not within the first 40 pages. So I thought to begin in the same place as McElroy, his first book. I’d rather learn to read the guy when the stakes are lower, 1200 pages is a gamble if you can’t decipher the first sentence. So, A Smuggler’s Bible. This book is out of print, has been out of print for a while. Long enough to run upwards of $200 a copy. Jumped on a $84 copy and I’ll be damned if I don’t 5 star a book I spent that much money on. McElroy’s signature smuggled on the title page, by the way, neat surprise. So maybe I had to force myself to fall in love to circumambulate the pit in my stomach that come’s with spending money. Well! The write-up now.
Chapters alternate between present-day David Brooke (or, technically, an unnamed inhabitant of DB’s brain, in him, behind him, but apart from him) and eight manuscripts he is writing and editing on a transatlantic cruise. Each manuscript is a story involving David Brooke but not centered on him. Colleagues, housemates, family members, slices of their lives in which David is just a side character. David is smuggling himself, his essence, in his manuscripts.
Smuggling is a major major major theme here, if you can even believe that. Most important boundary is time. Okay, hold on, first, on time: we are meant to be seeing time as three dimensional in terms of this novel. Time isn’t a line we progress down, McElroy is asserting we are static, we do not move, we go nowhere. So I’m thinking of time as a plane slowly expanding outward center-of-the-universe style from the solipsistic self. Things get harder to see as they are pushed further away, hey? Simply: we forget. So David wants to smuggle himself, take the past with him, take it through time’s infinite checkpoints. Or something like that! David intends to smuggle the entire, the epistemological whole, a concise replica of himself, done so by a multitude of narrators whose varying perceptions can be synthesized into a single David.
David Brooke recognizes death as a dead end, it just stops there, we do not go anywhere. Christ, Brooke suggests, is the great smuggler, the only to ever transcend it, the only to ever go anywhere. So maybe the manuscripts are an attempt at a loophole, to preserve his memory (or to preserve him) after he dies.
McElroy tosses around a whole mess of dichotomous juxtapositions. Like, remember, the different perspectives? “…Be drugged by the world’s fair of verbal ambiguities in which we live, yet at the same time being aware, aware, aware, and intensifying your victimization by the age you live in and, more, by the nation you live in, this can you, as Spinoza says, preserve yourselves, be conscious of the trap you can never skip and the part you can never doff…”. This coming from academic fraud Duke (Manuscript IV), Duke sees personhood, particularly American personhood, as the embrace of paradox. We drive our cars to work and we hate every second! And DB himself on perspective—“Do we not use each other to slip across the frontiers of self-scrutiny as something other than lonely people? Once I thought of killing myself—to get out. But instead I chose another way of leaving myself—projecting into the lives, the consciousness of others.”
McElroy uses dichotomy and recurring symbols in ways I don’t understand. Man, isn’t literary comprehension difficult without sparknotes? Like, McElroy mentions this screwdriver DB stole several times, then, later, his father (or David writing from his father’s perspective) reflects on the Manhattan Project’s Louis Slotin, the slip of a screw driver and subsequent prompt-critical that resulted in Slotin’s death. And, okay, what about the church in Norway vs the church on Oake’s land? Aaaand the smuggler’s Bible from the cruise ship smuggler vs the one from St. John? Ellen repeats, mantra-like, this beach could be anywhere, Corfu, Cornwall, Casco Bay. Yes, I think McElroy has intentions with this, but it’s beyond me.
A lot of it is beyond me and probably beyond the scope of reasonable understanding. This being because this is McElroy’s first book! And it has that special quality we find in many masters’ first artistic endeavors where they seem to be fighting for their fucking lives to get something out that has GOT to get out, like, absolutely swinging for the fences, come along or don’t, there is real heart and soul, real meaning, whether it can be made sense of or not. And that is my main basis for the 5 star rating. I feel desperation in this book, despite the domesticity of subject matter and the awfully steady (beautiful at times, but basically emotionless) prose, there is real desperation somewhere and I just adore being able to feel that in a work.
Edit: I forgot I wanted to talk about Sartre a bit. Recurring fragment of a Sartre quote comes up several times, “devoid of secret fragments,” coming from “I have never before had such a strong feeling that I was devoid of secret dimensions, confined within the limits of my body, from which airy thoughts float up like bubbles. I build memories with my present self. I am cast out, forsaken in the present: I vainly try to rejoin the past: I cannot escape.” Really works into McElroy’s ideas on the psyche as something static. Alienation from the past, desire to carry it with. And, working Sartre into the perspective angle: Sartre says hell is other people, well, right near the end of the novel we get “GOD is other people.” Salvation in this idea of the self only existing as a kaleidoscope of viewpoints!
August 1, 2024
Really amazing and unique book, you REALLY had to concentrate and I'm not sure I even grasped all of it. But thought it was very cool. Would love to discuss this book in an academic setting. It was VERY american which was both a good and a bad thing in different ways.
July 14, 2014
What is it with debut novels written by young male authors about withdrawn, over-intellectual, under-socialized young men? I'm starting to see how Charles Bukowski got a foothold: read enough of these, and a book about a womanizing drunk becomes a welcome breath of fresh air.
Still, McElroy does a good job with this one. David Brooke, his protagonist, has set himself the task of creating a self-portrait, or perhaps a memoir, by "projecting himself" into other people, and using their point of view to convey impressions of himself (most of which are, tragically, reflections of his own self-concept).
The characters are ultimately uninteresting, as is the protagonist, making one wonder why it is worth reading either their stories or his. To be sure, they are well-conceived : the famous and possibly-fraudulent interdisciplinary professor, the pseudopaedophile ex-pat, the grasping denizens of the boarding-house, the various fish-out-of-water Englishmen. It is hard to say whether these characters are just uninteresting *people*, or whether it is Brooke's interest in them that is so shallow and limited (and the novel does imply the latter).
Towards the end, I was starting to wonder if McElroy was having trouble trying to pull everything together (suddenly everyone is using red hardbound journals, the same joke about the wise men is being told by every character, and the quotation marks and parentheses don't quite match up). Brooke's project seems to spiral out of control when it turns out that many of his acquaintances already know each other; the novel itself suffers a similar fate, though that may be art instead of accident.
Unexpectedly, I read the last half of this at the same time as I watched the first season of True Detective. The poorly-received observations and witticisms of David Brooke are jarringly similar to Rust Cohle's nihilistic monologues. In my head, I started to read them in Rust Cohle's voice, to rather comic effect.
Still, McElroy does a good job with this one. David Brooke, his protagonist, has set himself the task of creating a self-portrait, or perhaps a memoir, by "projecting himself" into other people, and using their point of view to convey impressions of himself (most of which are, tragically, reflections of his own self-concept).
The characters are ultimately uninteresting, as is the protagonist, making one wonder why it is worth reading either their stories or his. To be sure, they are well-conceived : the famous and possibly-fraudulent interdisciplinary professor, the pseudopaedophile ex-pat, the grasping denizens of the boarding-house, the various fish-out-of-water Englishmen. It is hard to say whether these characters are just uninteresting *people*, or whether it is Brooke's interest in them that is so shallow and limited (and the novel does imply the latter).
Towards the end, I was starting to wonder if McElroy was having trouble trying to pull everything together (suddenly everyone is using red hardbound journals, the same joke about the wise men is being told by every character, and the quotation marks and parentheses don't quite match up). Brooke's project seems to spiral out of control when it turns out that many of his acquaintances already know each other; the novel itself suffers a similar fate, though that may be art instead of accident.
Unexpectedly, I read the last half of this at the same time as I watched the first season of True Detective. The poorly-received observations and witticisms of David Brooke are jarringly similar to Rust Cohle's nihilistic monologues. In my head, I started to read them in Rust Cohle's voice, to rather comic effect.
March 11, 2024
To my surprise, I found that on a sentence by sentence level A Smuggler’s Bible is unique among McElroy’s body of work by actually being very easy and simple to read and comprehend. As his debut novel, I suppose it shouldn’t come as a shock. McElroy employs no wild syntactical trickery here seen in his later work, but the structure of his novel is certainly bizarre and challenging to follow. Our main character David projects his consciousness into a series of people he knows from throughout his life, some closely and some distantly, and writes 8 “autobiographies” from their perspectives, in which he occasionally features, in an attempt to define his own life and self. Interspersed between each of the 8 stories he grapples with ordering and structuring them while a voice in his head attempts to force him in different creative directions.
McElroy openly plays with the theory of solipsism, the idea that we can only be sure of our own existence. David struggles throughout the book with really knowing people, and by framing outward into their lives McElroy draws a sometimes infuriating, sometimes touching portrait of a man who, in spite of himself, is surrounded by people who care for him as he feverishly investigates the epistemological ramifications of every encounter and thought, missing the forest for the trees routinely as a result. It’s an extremely weird plot, and honestly I’ll say it doesn’t really work as one.
In his later works, McElroy's calling card and biggest strength as an author is his unearthly syntax and prose, the feeling of downloading another consciousness into your own, as the sentences twist and contort in impossibly unique ways, delivering their message in disparate threads that only form a whole in retrospect, pieces of thoughts accreting in the readers brain until he closes the book and realizes new thoughts have been shaped in his head he didn’t even realize were forming. This doesn’t really happen in Smugglers.
Maybe that’s not entirely true, as the conceit of reading as accretion is still present, it’s just more simple and straightforward. We hear snatches of sentences, jokes, ideas, theories, that return fully formed the deeper into the book we go. Structurally McElroy is still attempting his magic trick, but as a first novel it does come across as one practicing, not yet really grasping how best to make it happen, due to this lack of prosaic pyrotechnics. I will say that his structure is still fun and engaging to attempt to “solve” in a sense, but it features one of his most languid plots, and lacks the sentence by sentence excitement of his later novels.
One thing McElroy does succeed at right away is his trademark interest in conveying simultaneity, and for his lack of prosaic flair it’s an impressive feat. A constant stream of fact and history and memory and emotion batter the reader, McElroy turns a single moment into a deluge, a brilliant rendering of every thought possible all at once, the classic impossibility of “learn to use 100% of your brain, not just 15%” actualized in novel form. It is too much at once, and a sensation both overwhelming and intoxicating in equal measure. At his best McElroy simulates another life crashing over you in relentless waves, beautiful and incomprehensible, dangerous and exhilarating.
We are attuned when reading and living to separate signal from noise, to delineate the important and unimportant into two very uneven piles. McElroy, in all his novels, dares us to reject the idea of noise by refusing to differentiate at all. Every idea, plot thread, memory, feeling, and statement is given equal weight in his books, from start to finish. There is no rising action, no climax, because everything that happens is equally important. This methodology frankly tends to make for weaker novels in a conventional sense, but always serve as fascinating prose experiences, and it works in concert wonderfully with his simultaneity. For McElroy life explodes in every second all around us, and to just allow ourselves to be swept along, making sure to stay above water and absorb what we can of life as he depicts it is a wholly unique, rewarding reading experience.
Ultimately, Smuggler’s Bible, his first book, serves as a Rosetta Stone for his entire corpus. Nowhere else is he this clear, this straightforward with his themes and ideals while still delivering, to a degree, his trademark style. By the same token that also makes it one of his weaker novels, as the lack of complexity and bombast in his prose lowers the heights he is capable of reaching, and this straightforwardness, coupled with his usual plotlessness, can render the book a slog at various points, giving the reader little impetus forward. On the whole I would say it’s a valuable book for a McElroy fan to experience and a book that I personally relished throughout, but would not be a good choice to convince someone to dig deeper into his works.
McElroy openly plays with the theory of solipsism, the idea that we can only be sure of our own existence. David struggles throughout the book with really knowing people, and by framing outward into their lives McElroy draws a sometimes infuriating, sometimes touching portrait of a man who, in spite of himself, is surrounded by people who care for him as he feverishly investigates the epistemological ramifications of every encounter and thought, missing the forest for the trees routinely as a result. It’s an extremely weird plot, and honestly I’ll say it doesn’t really work as one.
In his later works, McElroy's calling card and biggest strength as an author is his unearthly syntax and prose, the feeling of downloading another consciousness into your own, as the sentences twist and contort in impossibly unique ways, delivering their message in disparate threads that only form a whole in retrospect, pieces of thoughts accreting in the readers brain until he closes the book and realizes new thoughts have been shaped in his head he didn’t even realize were forming. This doesn’t really happen in Smugglers.
Maybe that’s not entirely true, as the conceit of reading as accretion is still present, it’s just more simple and straightforward. We hear snatches of sentences, jokes, ideas, theories, that return fully formed the deeper into the book we go. Structurally McElroy is still attempting his magic trick, but as a first novel it does come across as one practicing, not yet really grasping how best to make it happen, due to this lack of prosaic pyrotechnics. I will say that his structure is still fun and engaging to attempt to “solve” in a sense, but it features one of his most languid plots, and lacks the sentence by sentence excitement of his later novels.
One thing McElroy does succeed at right away is his trademark interest in conveying simultaneity, and for his lack of prosaic flair it’s an impressive feat. A constant stream of fact and history and memory and emotion batter the reader, McElroy turns a single moment into a deluge, a brilliant rendering of every thought possible all at once, the classic impossibility of “learn to use 100% of your brain, not just 15%” actualized in novel form. It is too much at once, and a sensation both overwhelming and intoxicating in equal measure. At his best McElroy simulates another life crashing over you in relentless waves, beautiful and incomprehensible, dangerous and exhilarating.
We are attuned when reading and living to separate signal from noise, to delineate the important and unimportant into two very uneven piles. McElroy, in all his novels, dares us to reject the idea of noise by refusing to differentiate at all. Every idea, plot thread, memory, feeling, and statement is given equal weight in his books, from start to finish. There is no rising action, no climax, because everything that happens is equally important. This methodology frankly tends to make for weaker novels in a conventional sense, but always serve as fascinating prose experiences, and it works in concert wonderfully with his simultaneity. For McElroy life explodes in every second all around us, and to just allow ourselves to be swept along, making sure to stay above water and absorb what we can of life as he depicts it is a wholly unique, rewarding reading experience.
Ultimately, Smuggler’s Bible, his first book, serves as a Rosetta Stone for his entire corpus. Nowhere else is he this clear, this straightforward with his themes and ideals while still delivering, to a degree, his trademark style. By the same token that also makes it one of his weaker novels, as the lack of complexity and bombast in his prose lowers the heights he is capable of reaching, and this straightforwardness, coupled with his usual plotlessness, can render the book a slog at various points, giving the reader little impetus forward. On the whole I would say it’s a valuable book for a McElroy fan to experience and a book that I personally relished throughout, but would not be a good choice to convince someone to dig deeper into his works.
November 4, 2023
So I finally made it through all of McElroy's debut novel (I had a copy I bought years ago but abandoned halfway through on my previous attempt).
At his best, McElroy is capable of some unbelievably electric writing - see, for example the Breather sections of Women & Men . Writing like late Henry James dropped acid and jammed with Miles Davis in the seventies.
He's able to push the fussy linear quality of prose right up to the point where it breaks apart in to something more like music (think Miles but also Coltrane composing a sentence in both directions at once).
On the other hand, alas, he's also capable of being extremely tedious. A Smuggler's Bible has its moments but overall I found it an unpleasant chore to read.
At his best, McElroy is capable of some unbelievably electric writing - see, for example the Breather sections of Women & Men . Writing like late Henry James dropped acid and jammed with Miles Davis in the seventies.
He's able to push the fussy linear quality of prose right up to the point where it breaks apart in to something more like music (think Miles but also Coltrane composing a sentence in both directions at once).
On the other hand, alas, he's also capable of being extremely tedious. A Smuggler's Bible has its moments but overall I found it an unpleasant chore to read.
March 26, 2018
A Smuggler's Bible lives and breathes with its characters, a rich tapestry expertly drawn by McElroy. McElroy, like Pynchon and Gaddis, abides by the central conceit that the greatest fiction of all is the ongoing march of History, forever intertwined by the fallibility of memory, and the circumstances and lives of those cataloging. It is a shame that McElroy is not more widely read and discussed.
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