What do you think?
Rate this book
Ancient History: A Paraphase
Intense psychological detective story.
307 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1971
7 people are currently reading
446 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.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 24 of 24 reviews
July 7, 2021
Ancient History: A Paraphase is a missive to a dead man… The man who took his own life and left no suicide note was a writer and a public figure… The narrator addresses him directly…
The narrator enters the dead man’s empty apartment and starts writing his long confession… But his vast epistle turns out to be nothing but crazy ravings consisting of meaningless trivia of life and his vacuous thoughts on all subjects…
And it seems the dead man’s life didn’t have much meaning as well…
I understand Joseph McElroy’s neologism ‘paraphase’ as ‘a false stage’…
Hence the modern history is just a farcical repeating of the ancient history.
I don’t care how much you were looking forward to your son Richard’s next letter (as it began by saying you’d said), believe me most of it was punitive decoration. The core was that you ought to lay off: take Dorothy back, who he said looked better than ever having lost weight living apart from you; get back to your “long-term” writing and your “hobbies,” which I assume include that light, fat styrofoam pastoral crowded in front of the bookcase between window and screen tripod; stop trying (he said with a shade of mere intimacy) to throw yourself against odds into the maelstrom of this country’s kitsch doom (or was it “century’s”?); and get to the barber at once. “For it isn’t necessary to try every life you imagine in order to be one on whom nothing is lost.”
The narrator enters the dead man’s empty apartment and starts writing his long confession… But his vast epistle turns out to be nothing but crazy ravings consisting of meaningless trivia of life and his vacuous thoughts on all subjects…
And it seems the dead man’s life didn’t have much meaning as well…
Ten big days in jail right on top of your ejection from that Jackson hotel interrupted your private investigation of the Mississippi Mystery and left you visibly weakened but visually more vivid. In jail, time is very different, you told reporters. Who smirked, no doubt recalling that the hotel management hadn’t had to lean toothpicks up against your door to know that you and your secretary used only one of the two rooms you booked.
I understand Joseph McElroy’s neologism ‘paraphase’ as ‘a false stage’…
Hence the modern history is just a farcical repeating of the ancient history.
July 13, 2017
I will let Joe explain himself first
"Also, there is in the book a very immediate but also abstract field theory that is associated with the ultimate destination of the book labeled in its subtly but correctly spelled subtitle, Paraphase: a new time, or state like time, or state of being outside or beside time (phase meaning “a section of time,” para meaning “beside,” “parallel to,” “substituted for”).
The word "coördinates" (with its diaeresis in place, like the good New Yorker he is) is distributed liberally throughout the text, characters are named (A)l, (B)ob, (C)yrus, (D)om, (E)v, (F)red, (G)ail (when we are told at one point that a character named John's name comes from (Z)oan, we are not surprised), and geometric mapping is key to McElroy's project.
Much of this (and other "intelligent" comments I could make) have been already made by others (this review is particularly good, I think http://www.electronicbookreview.com/t...)
(this also is excellent reading http://www.electronicbookreview.com/t...)
Why I consider McElroy to be writing somewhere above and beyond his contemporaries can be extrapolated from the above – his approach to human relationships and the movements of the human mind is unique. He writes on graph paper. He observes us from a higher dimension – time and space laid out flat before him, while he slowly traces it out onto the page. This is why his books are, objectively, hard - they require us to think in a different way to that which our brains are hard-wired to do.
On a more human level, I found Cy, the narrator, to be a wonderfully complex and contradicted character – his responsibility for Dom's suicide driving his writing, a desperate attempt to keep this truth at bay (hiding, reading and destroying Dom's family's letters to him, isolating him further surely must have driven him to his death) is subtly developed. The scenes with Gail and the quarry and all the rest are heart-stoppingly good. He has written sentences that can only be described as "beautiful" and he has written sentences that can only be describes as "baffling" (though, if we trust him, and we should, things will become clearer as we connect more of the dots).
And what happens when our information is faulty? If our vectors lie? If our imagined parabola curves far from the actual? Our data is patchy, though we convince ourselves it is complete. We are mapping an unstable, shifting, betraying terrain. Would we not be driven mad, as Cy perhaps has been, by the conflict between a desire for precision and the impossibility of ever being precise?
"Also, there is in the book a very immediate but also abstract field theory that is associated with the ultimate destination of the book labeled in its subtly but correctly spelled subtitle, Paraphase: a new time, or state like time, or state of being outside or beside time (phase meaning “a section of time,” para meaning “beside,” “parallel to,” “substituted for”).
The word "coördinates" (with its diaeresis in place, like the good New Yorker he is) is distributed liberally throughout the text, characters are named (A)l, (B)ob, (C)yrus, (D)om, (E)v, (F)red, (G)ail (when we are told at one point that a character named John's name comes from (Z)oan, we are not surprised), and geometric mapping is key to McElroy's project.
Much of this (and other "intelligent" comments I could make) have been already made by others (this review is particularly good, I think http://www.electronicbookreview.com/t...)
(this also is excellent reading http://www.electronicbookreview.com/t...)
Why I consider McElroy to be writing somewhere above and beyond his contemporaries can be extrapolated from the above – his approach to human relationships and the movements of the human mind is unique. He writes on graph paper. He observes us from a higher dimension – time and space laid out flat before him, while he slowly traces it out onto the page. This is why his books are, objectively, hard - they require us to think in a different way to that which our brains are hard-wired to do.
On a more human level, I found Cy, the narrator, to be a wonderfully complex and contradicted character – his responsibility for Dom's suicide driving his writing, a desperate attempt to keep this truth at bay (hiding, reading and destroying Dom's family's letters to him, isolating him further surely must have driven him to his death) is subtly developed. The scenes with Gail and the quarry and all the rest are heart-stoppingly good. He has written sentences that can only be described as "beautiful" and he has written sentences that can only be describes as "baffling" (though, if we trust him, and we should, things will become clearer as we connect more of the dots).
And what happens when our information is faulty? If our vectors lie? If our imagined parabola curves far from the actual? Our data is patchy, though we convince ourselves it is complete. We are mapping an unstable, shifting, betraying terrain. Would we not be driven mad, as Cy perhaps has been, by the conflict between a desire for precision and the impossibility of ever being precise?
August 31, 2016
"In the Spirit of My Divisions"
Joseph McElroy has imagined himself, "in the spirit of [his] divisions, somewhere between Vladimir Nabokov and Norman Mailer."
Initially, this statement comes across as egotistical, given the relative status of the three authors. How many readers have even heard of McElroy, let alone read him? Of those who have read him, how many have read him critically enough to question his self-assessment?
On the other hand, what of his choice of author?
It's understandable that authors might aspire to the standards of Nabokov, especially ones who, like McElroy and Pynchon, are science-literate or numerate. They inject science and mathematics into both the subject matter and the form of their fiction.
However, why Mailer? What is the connection? How proximate are the two authors? Why does McElroy appear to rate Mailer so highly?
True Confessions
One of the reasons for McElroy's interest is the significance of confession in Mailer's works (not necessarily in a religious sense). Indeed, this mode of writing is equally present in "Lolita".
A lot of critics of "Lolita" tend to overlook the fact that it is effectively structured as a confession, even if it was never actually read during Humbert Humbert's life and therefore had no impact on any criminal proceedings (which would have been discontinued after he died while awaiting trial in prison).
In "The Armies of the Night", Mailer mentions that during the day preceding the night of Robert Kennedy's assassination, he [Mailer] was enjoying a dalliance or secret assignation with a woman. Having revealed this (almost, if not probably, unnecessarily), he adds, "Let us leave it at that."
You have to ask why, if he was going to leave it at that, he didn't leave it out altogether?
The only answer consistent with Mailer's character is his overwhelming sense of sexual and political braggadocio.
Something about this quality simultaneously attracted and repelled or disgusted McElroy.
Whatever we might think of Mailer now, he was a very public intellectual, a celebrity, a media personality, at a time when it was rare for authors in particular to enjoy such a profile outside their chosen art form.
McElroy refers to Mailer's self-disclosure as "an embarrassment of greed, but also an open assault on his own privacy."
Mailer craved the limelight, the attention, the enhancement it might offer his sex appeal and life.
It didn't matter that he might embarrass or disgrace himself. What mattered was the perception of machismo. If it was a public perception, all the better.
Fulfilling Relationships
For all his creative virtuosity, McElroy doesn't strike me as the same sort of egotist as Mailer. He seems to have a genuine interest in the mechanisms and success of relationships. He writes about relationships as something you do with somebody, rather than something you do to somebody.
Mailer seemed to write about sexual relationships as if they were 15 round boxing matches that the male had to win, even if it meant that the conquest of the female might result in her death.
Occasionally, I wondered whether McElroy resembled Saul Bellow or William Gaddis in any material way.
While Bellow is not as macho as Mailer, I think that there is still a sense in which the solo man is dominant and a woman might be a convenient accessory for social events or status.
Compared with Gaddis, the concerns of metafiction are more omnipresent or at least waiting just around the corner, even if the manner of their execution sometimes threatens to unrail McElroy's fluid and elegant sentences.
McElroy arguably has more in common with the John Updike of "Couples" (absent the metafictional practices).
He seems to define a person, regardless of gender, as someone who is capable of, and ought to be having, a relationship of some kind, whatever the trauma or difficulty or inconvenience. For McElroy, the quality of the relationship is very much the measure of the person.
A Letter to a Dominant Male
"Ancient History" is structured as a letter to a dead man, Dom, who could be modelled on Mailer.
Dom has just suicided by defenestration. In "An American Dream", the protagonist kills his wife in the same way, and ends up outside on the ledge of an apartment building, wondering whether to jump.
McElroy's protagonist, Cy, walks into Dom's open apartment shortly after the police have left, sits down at his desk and starts to write a letter, which is the novel, using Dom's pen and paper.
There is a sense of urgency about the composition of the letter. The authorities or family members could walk in and discover Cy at any stage. In fact, at the exact half-way point, Dom's son-in-law removes the first half of the letter.
This epistolary form is the only stylistic issue I felt was unconvincing in conceit.
During the first few pages, the style is as crisp as a detective novel. However, it soon degenerates into a soliloquy, more like a recording of Cy's thoughts (though never a stream of consciousness: the sentences are too precisely crafted). It just doesn't sound like a story somebody would tell, either to an acquaintance or a stranger, certainly not in letter form.
At times, I wondered whether Cy was mentally unbalanced, at the very least a stalker. This angle isn't pursued, although this might simply be a product of the fact that it is a first person narrative.
Buildingsroman
Just like "Women and Men", "Ancient History" is set in an apartment building. It's a microcosm of society and the semi-public space in which both characters and readers are educated. In a way, the Building is the Bildung, and the Novel is a Buildingsroman.
Similarly, just as McElroy is interested in the relationships between people, he's interested in how they can be measured.
He describes them mathematically, and maps their coordinates on graph paper in accordance with Field Theory. Tripartite friendships are described in terms of the friends being equidistant. The proximity of C and D varies when A and B move closer.
This aspect of the novel warrants greater scrutiny. There are probably sophisticated mechanisms at work in the novel's structure that aren't immediately obvious. If so, they're still there for someone else to track.
To be honest, I didn't find this aspect of the novel particularly fascinating. I don't want to condemn McElroy to realism, but I think if he devoted less effort to metafiction, he would emerge with better fiction.
Spiral Bound Fiction
Still, the aspects that most appealed to me appear to be structured around mathematical parabolas and spirals.
The relationships occupy spaces that spiral from the magnitude of society at large, to the microcosm of the apartment building, to the 12th floor, to Dom's apartment, to his study, to his desk, to his pen and paper, to the mind of Cy, to his letter, to, finally, the novel itself.
McElroy is interested in not just time, but space. The two novels that I have read explore the poetics of space, both inside and outside, both inner and outer space (including spacecraft).
Sometimes, it seems as if McElroy is trying to pack too much sophistication and subtlety into his novel. He seems to be trying too hard, when he could sit back and trust his novel to do its job.
As you get towards the end, though, after many times wondering what the hell is going on and why, it all comes together. You feel that you have finally lifted the bonnet on the engine of his vehicle and you can appreciate the engineering in all of its precision and beauty. However, many readers would not last the distance.
Man of Letters
McElroy shares another flaw with Norman Mailer, though not to the same degree.
The latter tried too hard to tie himself to the Zeitgeist, by endeavouring, self-consciously, to define and embody it. Now, decades later, it's very easy for his writing and preoccupations to seem dated. Time has moved on. So have ways of seeing.
The very fact that Mailer symbolised so much to McElroy begs the question why (as much as he is one of my literary keystones). Surely it is more than a fascination with the dual perspective of a public intellectual?
As it turns out, Cy's letter is much more about his own Ancient History, and his own confession. Still, you have to question whether it would have been a better novel without the implied need to incorporate traces of Mailer's macho Weltanschauung.
I don't know enough about McElroy personally. However, on the basis of his writing, I suspect that he is at heart a shy person, a relative introvert, who is more comfortable in the guise of a man of letters in contrast to Mailer's ostensible man of action. Ultimately, we only need one Norman Mailer. It would be illuminating to see even more of the real Joseph McElroy, a unique man of letters, in his own work.
Joseph McElroy has imagined himself, "in the spirit of [his] divisions, somewhere between Vladimir Nabokov and Norman Mailer."
Initially, this statement comes across as egotistical, given the relative status of the three authors. How many readers have even heard of McElroy, let alone read him? Of those who have read him, how many have read him critically enough to question his self-assessment?
On the other hand, what of his choice of author?
It's understandable that authors might aspire to the standards of Nabokov, especially ones who, like McElroy and Pynchon, are science-literate or numerate. They inject science and mathematics into both the subject matter and the form of their fiction.
However, why Mailer? What is the connection? How proximate are the two authors? Why does McElroy appear to rate Mailer so highly?
True Confessions
One of the reasons for McElroy's interest is the significance of confession in Mailer's works (not necessarily in a religious sense). Indeed, this mode of writing is equally present in "Lolita".
A lot of critics of "Lolita" tend to overlook the fact that it is effectively structured as a confession, even if it was never actually read during Humbert Humbert's life and therefore had no impact on any criminal proceedings (which would have been discontinued after he died while awaiting trial in prison).
In "The Armies of the Night", Mailer mentions that during the day preceding the night of Robert Kennedy's assassination, he [Mailer] was enjoying a dalliance or secret assignation with a woman. Having revealed this (almost, if not probably, unnecessarily), he adds, "Let us leave it at that."
You have to ask why, if he was going to leave it at that, he didn't leave it out altogether?
The only answer consistent with Mailer's character is his overwhelming sense of sexual and political braggadocio.
Something about this quality simultaneously attracted and repelled or disgusted McElroy.
Whatever we might think of Mailer now, he was a very public intellectual, a celebrity, a media personality, at a time when it was rare for authors in particular to enjoy such a profile outside their chosen art form.
McElroy refers to Mailer's self-disclosure as "an embarrassment of greed, but also an open assault on his own privacy."
Mailer craved the limelight, the attention, the enhancement it might offer his sex appeal and life.
It didn't matter that he might embarrass or disgrace himself. What mattered was the perception of machismo. If it was a public perception, all the better.
Fulfilling Relationships
For all his creative virtuosity, McElroy doesn't strike me as the same sort of egotist as Mailer. He seems to have a genuine interest in the mechanisms and success of relationships. He writes about relationships as something you do with somebody, rather than something you do to somebody.
Mailer seemed to write about sexual relationships as if they were 15 round boxing matches that the male had to win, even if it meant that the conquest of the female might result in her death.
Occasionally, I wondered whether McElroy resembled Saul Bellow or William Gaddis in any material way.
While Bellow is not as macho as Mailer, I think that there is still a sense in which the solo man is dominant and a woman might be a convenient accessory for social events or status.
Compared with Gaddis, the concerns of metafiction are more omnipresent or at least waiting just around the corner, even if the manner of their execution sometimes threatens to unrail McElroy's fluid and elegant sentences.
McElroy arguably has more in common with the John Updike of "Couples" (absent the metafictional practices).
He seems to define a person, regardless of gender, as someone who is capable of, and ought to be having, a relationship of some kind, whatever the trauma or difficulty or inconvenience. For McElroy, the quality of the relationship is very much the measure of the person.
A Letter to a Dominant Male
"Ancient History" is structured as a letter to a dead man, Dom, who could be modelled on Mailer.
Dom has just suicided by defenestration. In "An American Dream", the protagonist kills his wife in the same way, and ends up outside on the ledge of an apartment building, wondering whether to jump.
McElroy's protagonist, Cy, walks into Dom's open apartment shortly after the police have left, sits down at his desk and starts to write a letter, which is the novel, using Dom's pen and paper.
There is a sense of urgency about the composition of the letter. The authorities or family members could walk in and discover Cy at any stage. In fact, at the exact half-way point, Dom's son-in-law removes the first half of the letter.
This epistolary form is the only stylistic issue I felt was unconvincing in conceit.
During the first few pages, the style is as crisp as a detective novel. However, it soon degenerates into a soliloquy, more like a recording of Cy's thoughts (though never a stream of consciousness: the sentences are too precisely crafted). It just doesn't sound like a story somebody would tell, either to an acquaintance or a stranger, certainly not in letter form.
At times, I wondered whether Cy was mentally unbalanced, at the very least a stalker. This angle isn't pursued, although this might simply be a product of the fact that it is a first person narrative.
Buildingsroman
Just like "Women and Men", "Ancient History" is set in an apartment building. It's a microcosm of society and the semi-public space in which both characters and readers are educated. In a way, the Building is the Bildung, and the Novel is a Buildingsroman.
Similarly, just as McElroy is interested in the relationships between people, he's interested in how they can be measured.
He describes them mathematically, and maps their coordinates on graph paper in accordance with Field Theory. Tripartite friendships are described in terms of the friends being equidistant. The proximity of C and D varies when A and B move closer.
This aspect of the novel warrants greater scrutiny. There are probably sophisticated mechanisms at work in the novel's structure that aren't immediately obvious. If so, they're still there for someone else to track.
To be honest, I didn't find this aspect of the novel particularly fascinating. I don't want to condemn McElroy to realism, but I think if he devoted less effort to metafiction, he would emerge with better fiction.
Spiral Bound Fiction
Still, the aspects that most appealed to me appear to be structured around mathematical parabolas and spirals.
The relationships occupy spaces that spiral from the magnitude of society at large, to the microcosm of the apartment building, to the 12th floor, to Dom's apartment, to his study, to his desk, to his pen and paper, to the mind of Cy, to his letter, to, finally, the novel itself.
McElroy is interested in not just time, but space. The two novels that I have read explore the poetics of space, both inside and outside, both inner and outer space (including spacecraft).
Sometimes, it seems as if McElroy is trying to pack too much sophistication and subtlety into his novel. He seems to be trying too hard, when he could sit back and trust his novel to do its job.
As you get towards the end, though, after many times wondering what the hell is going on and why, it all comes together. You feel that you have finally lifted the bonnet on the engine of his vehicle and you can appreciate the engineering in all of its precision and beauty. However, many readers would not last the distance.
Man of Letters
McElroy shares another flaw with Norman Mailer, though not to the same degree.
The latter tried too hard to tie himself to the Zeitgeist, by endeavouring, self-consciously, to define and embody it. Now, decades later, it's very easy for his writing and preoccupations to seem dated. Time has moved on. So have ways of seeing.
The very fact that Mailer symbolised so much to McElroy begs the question why (as much as he is one of my literary keystones). Surely it is more than a fascination with the dual perspective of a public intellectual?
As it turns out, Cy's letter is much more about his own Ancient History, and his own confession. Still, you have to question whether it would have been a better novel without the implied need to incorporate traces of Mailer's macho Weltanschauung.
I don't know enough about McElroy personally. However, on the basis of his writing, I suspect that he is at heart a shy person, a relative introvert, who is more comfortable in the guise of a man of letters in contrast to Mailer's ostensible man of action. Ultimately, we only need one Norman Mailer. It would be illuminating to see even more of the real Joseph McElroy, a unique man of letters, in his own work.
June 27, 2017
What follows is a "paraphrase" rather than (or also) a paraphase of a few things that McElroy did to my brain over the course of reading this book:
//now long ago there was an undergraduate night in a state of heightened consciousness where I felt apodeictically that the only way to describe the world was as a massive waiting room. McElroy made me remember this viscerally, in several places, but also with a single equation "...EARTH=SPACECRAFT." (256)
//one way of thinking about space is as a Cartesian plane, with three extended dimensions, XYZ. Time, then could be represented as a stream of photographs. The limitation is that this makes for a linear abstraction while we are at rock bottom, preontological beings always already involved in the world, absorbed, skillfully coping. Perhaps it is for that very reason why the linear time metaphor seems logical if not inevitable. But we also naturally open up reflective spaces or paraphases. We push on the front edge of time, but are constantly projecting into the future and re-creating the past. Yet, experience is always of the present. How does one represent this? McElroy's narrative advances as the literary embodiment of life phenomenologically felt. The character/narrator/author's confession is constituted by myriad narratives advancing by small degrees, shifting and emerging from associations that make the reading disorienting and difficult at first. However, once you give yourself over to the immersive flow the prose is so easy to follow it reveals itself as superfluid crafted so well as to make endorphins fire and commas mostly superfluous.
//looping the XYZ back to another cycle, we have psuspiciously named characters, Al, Bob, Cy, Dom, Ev, Fred Eagle, Gail (etc.) which forces you into looking for patterns, solving puzzles, parsing parallels: why does Cy try so compulsively to keep Al and Bob from meeting? why does he introduce them as finally arriving at the same hotel but leave it there? how disturbed should a reader let himself become when piecing together the main character's culpability in multifarious engagements? is Cy actually responsible for two suicides, one commissive, the other ommissive? or is this yet another faulty parallel, ancient history like Cyrus the Great?
//screw you Bohack Joey, now I need to read everything you've written. Cf.: "The freaked-in cloud-hanger, his plane long gone, looks up for silver and feels the earth there, and but half-willing to think of himself as just one more paratrooper, himself vectoring the drag and lift and their aerodynamic resultant vector which brother had better be equal to your downward weight, puts off deciding whether to yank his ripcord: but suicide? like, spend the rest of your life dead? Space is something to get through, to come from. It's how you use your earth." (248)
//the most enjoyable discomfiting reading experience in recent memory: the proximity anxiety, suspicion of nefarious activity, stalkerish perseveration, trampolining on a penthouse rooftop is not to be missed.
//my first experience with McElroy, and the gateway. Are people doing doctoral theses on his stuff yet?
//now long ago there was an undergraduate night in a state of heightened consciousness where I felt apodeictically that the only way to describe the world was as a massive waiting room. McElroy made me remember this viscerally, in several places, but also with a single equation "...EARTH=SPACECRAFT." (256)
//one way of thinking about space is as a Cartesian plane, with three extended dimensions, XYZ. Time, then could be represented as a stream of photographs. The limitation is that this makes for a linear abstraction while we are at rock bottom, preontological beings always already involved in the world, absorbed, skillfully coping. Perhaps it is for that very reason why the linear time metaphor seems logical if not inevitable. But we also naturally open up reflective spaces or paraphases. We push on the front edge of time, but are constantly projecting into the future and re-creating the past. Yet, experience is always of the present. How does one represent this? McElroy's narrative advances as the literary embodiment of life phenomenologically felt. The character/narrator/author's confession is constituted by myriad narratives advancing by small degrees, shifting and emerging from associations that make the reading disorienting and difficult at first. However, once you give yourself over to the immersive flow the prose is so easy to follow it reveals itself as superfluid crafted so well as to make endorphins fire and commas mostly superfluous.
//looping the XYZ back to another cycle, we have psuspiciously named characters, Al, Bob, Cy, Dom, Ev, Fred Eagle, Gail (etc.) which forces you into looking for patterns, solving puzzles, parsing parallels: why does Cy try so compulsively to keep Al and Bob from meeting? why does he introduce them as finally arriving at the same hotel but leave it there? how disturbed should a reader let himself become when piecing together the main character's culpability in multifarious engagements? is Cy actually responsible for two suicides, one commissive, the other ommissive? or is this yet another faulty parallel, ancient history like Cyrus the Great?
//screw you Bohack Joey, now I need to read everything you've written. Cf.: "The freaked-in cloud-hanger, his plane long gone, looks up for silver and feels the earth there, and but half-willing to think of himself as just one more paratrooper, himself vectoring the drag and lift and their aerodynamic resultant vector which brother had better be equal to your downward weight, puts off deciding whether to yank his ripcord: but suicide? like, spend the rest of your life dead? Space is something to get through, to come from. It's how you use your earth." (248)
//the most enjoyable discomfiting reading experience in recent memory: the proximity anxiety, suspicion of nefarious activity, stalkerish perseveration, trampolining on a penthouse rooftop is not to be missed.
//my first experience with McElroy, and the gateway. Are people doing doctoral theses on his stuff yet?
Read
August 31, 2016And so again. With this reading of McElroy. How easily one forgets and picks it up like just any other 300 page novel. Something to slip in between the back and front covers of a Fuentes and followed by Avalovara. Just to knock out that McElroy completionism we badge=earners are so determined about. And lo! wouldn't ya know? Mental space is all wrongly configured. Maybe should just give up this difficult book thing altogether. Read something clever. Something timely. Something about today. At any rate, three days in here, two pretty much just wrong, not caring too much who Al is and who Bob is and when all this is taking place but being a little curious Why not more Dom? who is supposed to be Mailer. Maybe. Just that this field is so dense. This network, so many connections. Vectors slicing through. Am I a Vector Attractor? Sure as hell didn't feel like it. I won't use that metaphor about a text locking out some generic reader, some author with some attitude toward some unknown (wouldn't that just be yet another vector?). Because the evidence is pretty solid. This is fiction in a scientific age. I ran into that same thing mor'less with Lookout where the network just kept spinning itself out, some spider with her web and no teleology. Maybe. And Plus with its never three dimensionally sketched referents and its unnamed pronomial antecedents. So, It's not your fault it's mine. And why not? Do we really know what it's like to confront the world we face every day because every day don't we simplify? (Simplify, man, simplify.) Yet no. If we pay attention, can we? Can you tell when you are a Vector Attractor and when you are not? Don't you daily say You can't fool me!(?) Daily don't you believe you can see through it? Yet can you? Because I do begin to suspect that if we got all down and dirty with reality (man!), and like get all objective about stuff and things, it'd feel a little more like a McElroy novel than less. And but I find in this scientific age the thing that's missing, the thing that we want, the thing McElroy so wonderously (re)inserted into Women and Men making it a masterpiece, something that shall we say transcends this merely scientific and information=laden world, is myth. For what is this special reincarnation, this Choor Monster, this Anasazi Healer, this Hermit-Inventor of New York? These are what make the world beautiful, and not merely endlessly meaning......
May 3, 2016
McElroy=Spacecraft
Ye Gods! What starts out as a tremor slowly builds in intensity to plate-shifting. I have no idea how Joe do that voodoo that he do, but we will never see another writer like him. I can’t even begin to explain the current that Ancient History sweeps you away in—it is an almost superhuman piece of writing.
As the magnetic polarity of the metaphorical “Paraphase” vacillates between poles—sane/mad, past/present, A(l)/B(ob), rejection/concession—the tension McElroy stages is singularly his own. I know of no other writer that operates on so many levels while never losing touch with a genuinely humane subtext (despite the multiple foci present in a given novel) that can only be the result of his own remarkable constitution. Ancient History’s scree of tossed off revelations eventually form an edificial monument to the idea of multiplicity we all possess in our many para-I’s. It is equal parts confession, splenetic manifesto, and cry for help and every page will have something virtuosic enough to compel you to burn your own attempts at fiction in self-loathing. (My fireplace burns bright tonight, Dom.) The most fascinating aspect is that I really have no better idea who Cy/CC is now versus 307-pages ago, yet I feel like I know him. Does that make sense? It shouldn’t.
The more I try to write about McElroy the more elusive he becomes. All I can say is read it and be thankful that we were all lucky enough in our own paraphases to cross chem trails with this extraordinary alchemist and his body of work. The man is quicksilver.
Ye Gods! What starts out as a tremor slowly builds in intensity to plate-shifting. I have no idea how Joe do that voodoo that he do, but we will never see another writer like him. I can’t even begin to explain the current that Ancient History sweeps you away in—it is an almost superhuman piece of writing.
As the magnetic polarity of the metaphorical “Paraphase” vacillates between poles—sane/mad, past/present, A(l)/B(ob), rejection/concession—the tension McElroy stages is singularly his own. I know of no other writer that operates on so many levels while never losing touch with a genuinely humane subtext (despite the multiple foci present in a given novel) that can only be the result of his own remarkable constitution. Ancient History’s scree of tossed off revelations eventually form an edificial monument to the idea of multiplicity we all possess in our many para-I’s. It is equal parts confession, splenetic manifesto, and cry for help and every page will have something virtuosic enough to compel you to burn your own attempts at fiction in self-loathing. (My fireplace burns bright tonight, Dom.) The most fascinating aspect is that I really have no better idea who Cy/CC is now versus 307-pages ago, yet I feel like I know him. Does that make sense? It shouldn’t.
The more I try to write about McElroy the more elusive he becomes. All I can say is read it and be thankful that we were all lucky enough in our own paraphases to cross chem trails with this extraordinary alchemist and his body of work. The man is quicksilver.
Read
December 14, 2020It's purely coincidental and the author certainly didn't intend it if, somehow, the characters in this book are similar to real persons, living or dead. It's printed right there on the copyright page. And so, because authors' intentions can never really be trusted, let's instead focus on the coincidental. Because it seems that everything happening in this novel was coincidental. Every incident had a co-incident.
The characters in Ancient History: A Paraphase do, in fact, seem similar to real persons both living and dead. And that's because the characters populating Joseph McElroy's third novel are similar to every real person. Maybe not in physical attributes or personalities or personal circumstances. What's left? What's left are the ways in which people relate to one another, the ways in which they interact, link, converge and diverge.
Instead of a succession of events linearly unfolding, it's as if McElroy folded events both backwards and forwards, so that an incident in the far past sat atop an incident in the near past. He does the same thing with scale. The micro is stretched to the same scale as the macro. Sometimes even beyond. Time itself is modified, massaged, shifted.
“Into the regular arc of my legible but distinctive hand so many rates of time collapse: a month in a phrase, a Fred-Eagled hour in three long pages, four summers in the one word 'quarry,' and now a nearly instant thirty-word response to thirty seconds. Collapse into paraphase.”
I didn't feel that I was to be looking for patterns. Rather, I felt like I was experiencing the development of a matrix. Or actually, several matrices. These matrices proved to be representation of human relationships as moving vectors. Because you can deduce the properties of the linear transformations, I think that this whole process, as if this novel was a computer model, was to take three dimensions, use two dimensional methodology, and render it all back into three dimensions.
I have this untested and unproven conviction that most people, when reading this novel's subtitle, will read Paraphase as Paraphrase. I did. I read it as Paraphrase a few times, actually. The idea of a paraphase or paraphases proves to be very important, maybe even paramount to this work. But, I don't think the misreading is a mistake. I have this suspicion that McElroy intends the misreading. In fact, I think he intends misreading throughout the novel. And re-reading.
So much of Ancient History seems to be happening on many levels. One of those levels, I think, is the phenomenology of reading, itself. McElroy clearly knows much about the mind and how it experiences the environment. One of those environments happen to be the page. He knows that the mind adds letters to words, that it recognizes patterns that aren't there, that it creates false memories, that it connects two things which are not actually connected. He knows when we will stop reading because we are disoriented by time. He knows when we will have to re-read a sentence. And so, while we read, it sort of feels like McElroy reads us.
“You were easy to misunderstand but hard to disregard. You can misunderstand anyone if you're careful enough.”
The novel you read is one long letter. Ancient History begins with Cy watching his upstairs neighbor Dom, completely covered by a blanket, rolled out on a stretcher and into the elevator. He has killed himself. Cy notices that his deceased neighbor's door is left unlocked. And so, with a loose plan, Cy lets himself into Dom's now empty apartment. He sits at Dom's desk, takes up Dom's pen, and commences writing a letter to Dom, which seems to be a confession, a remembrance, a personal history, and also something of fan letter. It was in fact because of Dom that Cy moved his family into this apartment building. Dom was a public figure, an writer, an intellectual, a genius (?), and Cy felt a particular connection to him. However, the deceased writer did not know Cy. The letter is many things, but it is also an introduction, an explanation.
"Why write? to remember? or to give? or at last to forget.”
Under the precarious privacy of the empty apartment, Cy writes this letter to Dom throughout the night. Except for a brief interruption wherein Cy has to hide behind a curtain, he is left to write this letter until he runs out of empty sheets of paper. This letter quickly moves into Cy's history – his ancient history. We learn of his relationships with friends, lovers, parents, wife, daughter, and stepson. These relationships are mapped out, each person is a coordinate. There's Al, Bob, Ev, and Fred, there's Annette, Bill, Emma, and Fasinelli. These people might not know one another. In fact, Cy's two closest and oldest friends, Al and Bob, have never met. It's almost inexplicable but their paths have yet to cross. However, it's this night, the night of Dom's death, that Al and Bob could have a crossing of the paths, a crossing of the vectors.
"The key trick was to make a name contain a mass of data."
It's not possible to ignore: Field Theory is at play in this novel. These layers of connected coordinates placed on top of one another create a field that is saturated, dense with inter- and intra-connections. Cy creates proximity between vectors that wouldn't appear, at first, to be connected in any way.
Field Theory as used in physics and mathematics is clearly the correlation here. But also, Field Theory, used in a different way in psychology, seems to be placed on top, so that we have these various fields (of study) causing interactions and creating connections that we couldn't have seen otherwise.
Everything is so precise, so fully constructed, engineered, that it does feel odd to think of McElroy as a novelist. I know there are novelists that are also precise, that can engineer, that can apply scientific understanding within a creative work that doesn't itself supervene on that scientific understanding. But it's something more, something that I can't articulate. He seems, both in his preoccupations and in his capabilities, to be more than a novelist and closer to...I don't know.
One wintry night years ago, my uncle took me to the woods. We slogged through the snow and walked to the top of a hill. He was carrying a telescope. Neither of us were dressed warm enough. At the top of the hill there was this nice, open clearing. And so he had me set up the tripod and he then attached the telescope and adjusted it, pointing it somewhere near Orion. He looked through it in silence for a few minutes. Then he had me to take a look. What am I supposed to be seeing? He just told me to look. All I see is like a fuzzy...thing. Like a smudge. Is that what I am supposed to be looking at? A smudge?
I am grateful to have someone who will guide me up a hill on a freezing night in order to teach me that the unimpressive smudge I am looking at is, in fact, a complex, beautiful, powerful, luminous supernova.
The characters in Ancient History: A Paraphase do, in fact, seem similar to real persons both living and dead. And that's because the characters populating Joseph McElroy's third novel are similar to every real person. Maybe not in physical attributes or personalities or personal circumstances. What's left? What's left are the ways in which people relate to one another, the ways in which they interact, link, converge and diverge.
Instead of a succession of events linearly unfolding, it's as if McElroy folded events both backwards and forwards, so that an incident in the far past sat atop an incident in the near past. He does the same thing with scale. The micro is stretched to the same scale as the macro. Sometimes even beyond. Time itself is modified, massaged, shifted.
“Into the regular arc of my legible but distinctive hand so many rates of time collapse: a month in a phrase, a Fred-Eagled hour in three long pages, four summers in the one word 'quarry,' and now a nearly instant thirty-word response to thirty seconds. Collapse into paraphase.”
I didn't feel that I was to be looking for patterns. Rather, I felt like I was experiencing the development of a matrix. Or actually, several matrices. These matrices proved to be representation of human relationships as moving vectors. Because you can deduce the properties of the linear transformations, I think that this whole process, as if this novel was a computer model, was to take three dimensions, use two dimensional methodology, and render it all back into three dimensions.
I have this untested and unproven conviction that most people, when reading this novel's subtitle, will read Paraphase as Paraphrase. I did. I read it as Paraphrase a few times, actually. The idea of a paraphase or paraphases proves to be very important, maybe even paramount to this work. But, I don't think the misreading is a mistake. I have this suspicion that McElroy intends the misreading. In fact, I think he intends misreading throughout the novel. And re-reading.
So much of Ancient History seems to be happening on many levels. One of those levels, I think, is the phenomenology of reading, itself. McElroy clearly knows much about the mind and how it experiences the environment. One of those environments happen to be the page. He knows that the mind adds letters to words, that it recognizes patterns that aren't there, that it creates false memories, that it connects two things which are not actually connected. He knows when we will stop reading because we are disoriented by time. He knows when we will have to re-read a sentence. And so, while we read, it sort of feels like McElroy reads us.
“You were easy to misunderstand but hard to disregard. You can misunderstand anyone if you're careful enough.”
The novel you read is one long letter. Ancient History begins with Cy watching his upstairs neighbor Dom, completely covered by a blanket, rolled out on a stretcher and into the elevator. He has killed himself. Cy notices that his deceased neighbor's door is left unlocked. And so, with a loose plan, Cy lets himself into Dom's now empty apartment. He sits at Dom's desk, takes up Dom's pen, and commences writing a letter to Dom, which seems to be a confession, a remembrance, a personal history, and also something of fan letter. It was in fact because of Dom that Cy moved his family into this apartment building. Dom was a public figure, an writer, an intellectual, a genius (?), and Cy felt a particular connection to him. However, the deceased writer did not know Cy. The letter is many things, but it is also an introduction, an explanation.
"Why write? to remember? or to give? or at last to forget.”
Under the precarious privacy of the empty apartment, Cy writes this letter to Dom throughout the night. Except for a brief interruption wherein Cy has to hide behind a curtain, he is left to write this letter until he runs out of empty sheets of paper. This letter quickly moves into Cy's history – his ancient history. We learn of his relationships with friends, lovers, parents, wife, daughter, and stepson. These relationships are mapped out, each person is a coordinate. There's Al, Bob, Ev, and Fred, there's Annette, Bill, Emma, and Fasinelli. These people might not know one another. In fact, Cy's two closest and oldest friends, Al and Bob, have never met. It's almost inexplicable but their paths have yet to cross. However, it's this night, the night of Dom's death, that Al and Bob could have a crossing of the paths, a crossing of the vectors.
"The key trick was to make a name contain a mass of data."
It's not possible to ignore: Field Theory is at play in this novel. These layers of connected coordinates placed on top of one another create a field that is saturated, dense with inter- and intra-connections. Cy creates proximity between vectors that wouldn't appear, at first, to be connected in any way.
Field Theory as used in physics and mathematics is clearly the correlation here. But also, Field Theory, used in a different way in psychology, seems to be placed on top, so that we have these various fields (of study) causing interactions and creating connections that we couldn't have seen otherwise.
Everything is so precise, so fully constructed, engineered, that it does feel odd to think of McElroy as a novelist. I know there are novelists that are also precise, that can engineer, that can apply scientific understanding within a creative work that doesn't itself supervene on that scientific understanding. But it's something more, something that I can't articulate. He seems, both in his preoccupations and in his capabilities, to be more than a novelist and closer to...I don't know.
One wintry night years ago, my uncle took me to the woods. We slogged through the snow and walked to the top of a hill. He was carrying a telescope. Neither of us were dressed warm enough. At the top of the hill there was this nice, open clearing. And so he had me set up the tripod and he then attached the telescope and adjusted it, pointing it somewhere near Orion. He looked through it in silence for a few minutes. Then he had me to take a look. What am I supposed to be seeing? He just told me to look. All I see is like a fuzzy...thing. Like a smudge. Is that what I am supposed to be looking at? A smudge?
I am grateful to have someone who will guide me up a hill on a freezing night in order to teach me that the unimpressive smudge I am looking at is, in fact, a complex, beautiful, powerful, luminous supernova.
March 20, 2016
I'll acknowledge up front that I was almost through the book before I realized that the subtitle of the book was paraphase and not paraphrase, and I'm not sure how many times Cy had used the term in the book before it clicked with me. The neologism was just so damn close, and, truthfully, the title made sense to me in my misreading of it. Oddly, the recognition of the correct word only slightly altered my perspective on the book; if anything, it just sort of reinforced many of the allusions to time and being outside of time in the text. I'm not going anywhere with this, I'm just talking.
So, this was really great, and I'm not sure if I wouldn't be more over the top about it had I not read Women and Men first (yes, I see my rating, but W&M only got the same rating because GR wouldn't let me rate it higher), and fairly recently at that. I felt they both had similar narrative obsessions with location and proximity, with an intense, mathematical plotting of details and vectors and an overarching awareness of where every object and person existed in space in a given moment: they both manage to capture reality in an obsessively precise way that is dense, difficult, and yet accurate to the point of unrecognizability (like a picture zoomed in so close that the picture is lost). This book also shares (precedes; whatever) W&Ms kind of cyclical narrative structure where McElroy is progressing multiple narratives all at the same time, with each narrative being progressed incrementally, but all sort of crushed together. Actually, this book is more compact - not in any way a reference to page count - than W&M, as it consists of only two long sections, with a mild meta-textual break about precisely halfway through the book. (I was about 70 pages into the book, had to go to the bathroom, and was holding out for a section break that just never came)
This is a sad little gut punch of a story as well, as the culpability of the narrator is only revealed in pieces, and even then McElroy mostly leaves it to the reader to connect the dots (puzzle 2) as to where the genesis of Cy's guilt actually lies.
Much as I said in my review of W&M, no one else really writes like McElroy; he manages to capture life in all its intricate complexity, with a staggering precision: it's damn difficult reading at times, but it is frequently (always) rewarding.
So, this was really great, and I'm not sure if I wouldn't be more over the top about it had I not read Women and Men first (yes, I see my rating, but W&M only got the same rating because GR wouldn't let me rate it higher), and fairly recently at that. I felt they both had similar narrative obsessions with location and proximity, with an intense, mathematical plotting of details and vectors and an overarching awareness of where every object and person existed in space in a given moment: they both manage to capture reality in an obsessively precise way that is dense, difficult, and yet accurate to the point of unrecognizability (like a picture zoomed in so close that the picture is lost). This book also shares (precedes; whatever) W&Ms kind of cyclical narrative structure where McElroy is progressing multiple narratives all at the same time, with each narrative being progressed incrementally, but all sort of crushed together. Actually, this book is more compact - not in any way a reference to page count - than W&M, as it consists of only two long sections, with a mild meta-textual break about precisely halfway through the book. (I was about 70 pages into the book, had to go to the bathroom, and was holding out for a section break that just never came)
This is a sad little gut punch of a story as well, as the culpability of the narrator is only revealed in pieces, and even then McElroy mostly leaves it to the reader to connect the dots (puzzle 2) as to where the genesis of Cy's guilt actually lies.
Much as I said in my review of W&M, no one else really writes like McElroy; he manages to capture life in all its intricate complexity, with a staggering precision: it's damn difficult reading at times, but it is frequently (always) rewarding.
December 24, 2017
My McElroy vector muscles are fatiguing! However, very much happily so. This has been my first chronological read through of a single author. Three down and two more to go until Women and Men is released in early 2018. Witnessing his progress so intensely has brought great reward.
I was less taken with Ancient History, enjoying Hind’s Kidnap much more, which I felt was not only incredibly sophisticated in style, but created a compulsive interest in the characters. With AH, although the boundaries of style were pushed even further, with prominent inspiration from science, as per below links, I felt less of a punch for what was going on character wise, despite them all encountering major issues.
This page has been a great source for orienting my approach and interpretation of what’s going on with these books. The articles I’ve read thus far definitely touch upon things in a more sophisticated manner.
https://www.reddit.com/r/JosephMcElro...
I was less taken with Ancient History, enjoying Hind’s Kidnap much more, which I felt was not only incredibly sophisticated in style, but created a compulsive interest in the characters. With AH, although the boundaries of style were pushed even further, with prominent inspiration from science, as per below links, I felt less of a punch for what was going on character wise, despite them all encountering major issues.
This page has been a great source for orienting my approach and interpretation of what’s going on with these books. The articles I’ve read thus far definitely touch upon things in a more sophisticated manner.
https://www.reddit.com/r/JosephMcElro...
November 6, 2015
For me the neologism makes the book (paraPHASE)
“I don't know how long it's been, I don't wear a watch. Dom, what is happening here is beside time.” - page 90
Time as the irrecusable structure of experience.
Right after my nephew was born I asked my brother if his baby dreams. He said he didn't think so; in order to have dreams you need experience, and babies really haven't experienced anything yet. I said, What about being born, isn't that an experience?
Maybe not. Birth is more like the limit to experience. Birth and death as the two poles which we ourselves can never experience, not in the first person.
The somewhat preposterous premise of Ancient History is this. The narrator has snuck into the apartment of a famous writer right after the writer kills himself, and proceeds to confess his own life, his “ancient history,”
Suicide could be seen as an attempt to gain mastery of death, bring it into the realm of experience, but as such it must be a failure. Surely the suicide can no more experience his death as it happens than anyone else.
You could say the narrator is cheating a little, trying to ride the coattails of another man's death, and in this way push against the limits of what it means to be alive.
*
Joseph McElroy is not really famous, but he is sometimes "noted"; as his Wikpedia page accurately says, “noted for writing difficult fiction.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_...) I have to say he did not come upon this reputation lightly. This is now the third of his novels I've read – in terms of personal enjoyment I'd rank it above Lookout Cartridge and below Actress in the House. I'm trying to discern whether it'd be worth it to plunge into his mammoth Women and Men. Signals have been mixed, and for the moment I remain undecided.
“I don't know how long it's been, I don't wear a watch. Dom, what is happening here is beside time.” - page 90
Time as the irrecusable structure of experience.
Right after my nephew was born I asked my brother if his baby dreams. He said he didn't think so; in order to have dreams you need experience, and babies really haven't experienced anything yet. I said, What about being born, isn't that an experience?
Maybe not. Birth is more like the limit to experience. Birth and death as the two poles which we ourselves can never experience, not in the first person.
The somewhat preposterous premise of Ancient History is this. The narrator has snuck into the apartment of a famous writer right after the writer kills himself, and proceeds to confess his own life, his “ancient history,”
Suicide could be seen as an attempt to gain mastery of death, bring it into the realm of experience, but as such it must be a failure. Surely the suicide can no more experience his death as it happens than anyone else.
You could say the narrator is cheating a little, trying to ride the coattails of another man's death, and in this way push against the limits of what it means to be alive.
*
Joseph McElroy is not really famous, but he is sometimes "noted"; as his Wikpedia page accurately says, “noted for writing difficult fiction.” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joseph_...) I have to say he did not come upon this reputation lightly. This is now the third of his novels I've read – in terms of personal enjoyment I'd rank it above Lookout Cartridge and below Actress in the House. I'm trying to discern whether it'd be worth it to plunge into his mammoth Women and Men. Signals have been mixed, and for the moment I remain undecided.
June 17, 2018
Well, the beautifully-conceived term "paraphase" could be said to denote the half-life of this fascinating novel itself (and sciencey lingo is always germane when we are dealing w/ McElroy). A paraphase. A space (and time), removed from the world of quotidian goings-ons, in which a cascading and all-consuming stream-of-consciousness is provided ground to expend itself. The idea that the novel is written by a fictional personage on available paper, over the course of a single night, as a direct address to a freshly-suicided cultural titan (in his own apartment, sub rosa), makes intelligible the force of its splurge. This is another McElroy that feels almost immaterial, using language in such a way as to absolutely collapse all convention and habituation. And because ANCIENT HISTORY is conceived the way it is, we are made to accept its accelerated juxtapositions and feverish machine-gun encompassings. It is another McElory engaged w/ and born of entropy. All the talk of vectors makes sense; things are bouncing off one another and careening in different directions. This paraphase is what Deleuze and Guattari would call a chaosmos. As I have marveled re: McElory in the past, I again marvel at the extraordinary thrust of this piece - its momentum. Since the book is diffuse and allergic to conventional build, the incredible, compulsively-readable momentum it possesses is entirely sui generis. You can expect to find nothing like its language and its reverence-inspiring form anywhere except in other McElroys. He is one of the great magicians of post-war fiction, w/ a brain that absolutely humbles.
March 23, 2021
A lovely, strange novel that demonstrates McElroy's emerging preoccupations with distance and simulteneity. Unlike Women and Men, Ancient History doesn't quite have the sweep or stylistic daring to match the its concepts; in comparison with his later work, the prose in this book is relatively straightforward (and singular?). But to my mind, Women and Men is so successful because it is so formally radical. While this book is much more recognisably grounded in human experience than, say, Hind's Kidnap, its metafictional and structural preoccupations seem to take precedence over everything else, to the point where it occasionally feels more like an exercise than a finished McElroy novel. There are many scenes in this book that are beautifully rendered, but the networks and connections built throughout were either too subtle for my mind or not given enough weight.
August 18, 2014
Jonathan Lethem in his preface to this novel says that it can be read through affect theory or something to that effect. The keyword here is "affect" defined, according to Spinoza and later Deleuze, as body's capacity to act and be acted upon - relations the body can form with another bodies. McElroy's novel is an exercise in how to describe the relationality itself, and in such a way that doesn't introduce either hegelian concept or (post)structuralist binaries into thinking - "I didn't see how to bring Al and Bob together, and so was drawn to you, Dom, not necessarily because you fused Dialectic, Dichotomy, and Field-State, but because you tried." The relationality itself McElroy calls "field-state" - "I think in interrupted scenes, Dom, but there is only one scene here. It is here. It is an arc quite out of time and real not at like all those good and bad times and those bewildered distances that determine this arc. It is in a field-state, one might gaily say, which is not a proud parable of anything but is he fact of multiruptive bodies acting on each other though rarely in contact."
One of the ways he manages to put the relationality of multiruptive bodies is by taking the synchronic aspect of the time (which also makes for some tough reading experience) - "Into the regular arc of my legible but distinctive hand so many rates of time collapse: a month in a phrase, interruptions to raid the icebox or listen, a Fred-Eagled hour in three long pages, four summers in the one word 'quarry,' and now a nearly instant thirty-word response to thirty seconds. Collapse into paraphase."
I'm surprised that none (at least to my knowledge) of theoreticians of affect has picked up McElroy yet. Perhaps that will change as his novels become more accessible. He certainly deserves a through re-reading.
One of the ways he manages to put the relationality of multiruptive bodies is by taking the synchronic aspect of the time (which also makes for some tough reading experience) - "Into the regular arc of my legible but distinctive hand so many rates of time collapse: a month in a phrase, interruptions to raid the icebox or listen, a Fred-Eagled hour in three long pages, four summers in the one word 'quarry,' and now a nearly instant thirty-word response to thirty seconds. Collapse into paraphase."
I'm surprised that none (at least to my knowledge) of theoreticians of affect has picked up McElroy yet. Perhaps that will change as his novels become more accessible. He certainly deserves a through re-reading.
April 3, 2021
is post-confessional a thing? who cares i guess. felt a lot like the non-Sinbad parts of John Barth’s Last Voyage etc, mean this in the best way possible
September 11, 2018
Thank goodness for use or lose vacation time. Finally got a chance to finish this book. Working on strengthening my vectoral muscle even though I'm not an only child.
July 9, 2024
Shortly after the suicide of author and controversial figure Dom (or was it Don?), circumlocutory Cy slips into the unsecure widowed apartment. There, he writes his life story in the form of random, tenuously connected vignettes that he circles back on again and again. Mostly, he expounds on his two closest childhood friends, Al and Bob, who he has kept separate into adulthood for reasons much deliberated upon but not wholly clear to any rational reader. Cy's writings to his deceased idol become a sort of prayer in which he finds someone to tell his story to, because what is God if not "someone you can tell your side of the story to?"
Ancient History is in typical McElroy stream-of-conscious style. I found it more enjoyable to read that Lookout Cartridge, but the plot is obscured by the prose in a similar way. It took me over two weeks to work through this novel. Granted, I'm not really reading much these days, but it seems excessive for such a short book. Really makes me worried to tackle Women and Men, McElroy's writing is not something that can be worked through easily.
The most evocative part of the story is the narrator's belief in a unique organ that he, among other only-children, possess in their brain called the vectoral muscle. Using this, he is able to detect the field-state of others and examine the parabolic locus of the past and present in the American terrain.
"'Only reason to believe in God is it’s someone you can tell your side of the story to.' An only child doesn’t only protect his parents. They lose their lives in his, so he must take care not to lose his life. Even including the action theater of your suicide, or my omenoid reflections on history and religion, or the physical witchcrafts of childhood and the kitsch biophysics of your (and my) Americanolysis, is my trick here tonight only the unchidden privateering of an only child?"
Overall, McElroy is one of the most interesting authors to read but also the most annoying.
Ancient History is in typical McElroy stream-of-conscious style. I found it more enjoyable to read that Lookout Cartridge, but the plot is obscured by the prose in a similar way. It took me over two weeks to work through this novel. Granted, I'm not really reading much these days, but it seems excessive for such a short book. Really makes me worried to tackle Women and Men, McElroy's writing is not something that can be worked through easily.
The most evocative part of the story is the narrator's belief in a unique organ that he, among other only-children, possess in their brain called the vectoral muscle. Using this, he is able to detect the field-state of others and examine the parabolic locus of the past and present in the American terrain.
"'Only reason to believe in God is it’s someone you can tell your side of the story to.' An only child doesn’t only protect his parents. They lose their lives in his, so he must take care not to lose his life. Even including the action theater of your suicide, or my omenoid reflections on history and religion, or the physical witchcrafts of childhood and the kitsch biophysics of your (and my) Americanolysis, is my trick here tonight only the unchidden privateering of an only child?"
Overall, McElroy is one of the most interesting authors to read but also the most annoying.
April 22, 2016
Anyone picking up work by the maestro knows it's about getting more micro. I hate alliterating, let me stop the review right there.
Read
March 10, 2020Another puzzler from Joe. Ye gods, don't make me claim I know what happened. Know only that ponderous friend McElroy delivers another thoroughly mysterious helping of his pitch-perfect ironically detached prose in service of a childhood reminiscence/the strangest case of B+E ever investigated by this cabal of literary=law enforcement known as GoodReads. I make no attempts to summarize plot, nor character, nor even the important leitmotif of vectors and field-states. All I can say is this novel bears relation most of all to Plus out of all of Joe's books (that I've read): it is an opaque and enthralling exploration of consciousness, the psyche-as-function mapped onto three-space: it is baffling and non-Euclidean and every bit as endearingly intelligent as his other work.
I cannot in good conscience however give this a rating until I've read it again, and perhaps gotten the full measure of its meaning.
I cannot in good conscience however give this a rating until I've read it again, and perhaps gotten the full measure of its meaning.
November 25, 2025
Crazy book. Glad to have accidentaly picked it up.
"All confessions are fantasies, though no less truthful."
"One day I’ll put a raft of these intersectional interruptions together as if they were one life and all the rest were interruption"
"All confessions are fantasies, though no less truthful."
"One day I’ll put a raft of these intersectional interruptions together as if they were one life and all the rest were interruption"
August 10, 2020
The first book to leave me physically breathless. While technically stunning, McElroy's narrative vectors and parabolae are more enjoyably constructed in Lookout Cartridge.
June 16, 2022
A beautiful read.
(Might update review further, might not. A earth shattering book nonetheless.)
(Might update review further, might not. A earth shattering book nonetheless.)
December 28, 2025
Stranger and slow and intense
February 24, 2016
Didn't finish, abandoned half-way through. High concept, but tedious to read
Displaying 1 - 24 of 24 reviews