Hind's Kidnap

by Joseph McElroy

A very tall man resumes his search for a kidnaped child long after the unsolved case has been officially closed. Hind dropped his search when he married. Now, some years later, at the instant the novel opens, he is leaving his apartment to visit his estranged wife Sylvia and his five-year-old daughter May; he wants to live with them. But at his door is a strange old woman, and in his mailbox a note beckoning him toward the old trail. Hind’s renewed quest leads him among people in their spring and early-summer landscape – a city pier; the well-fenced office complex of a famous firm; a New England golf course and the owner’s house overlooking it; a city health club; and a city university. Yet at the end of this pentad the kidnaping of the child, Hershey Laurel, has receded to a dim corner of the book. And Hind’s late, beloved guardian, and the threatening past he summons up, grow more and more powerful, uncontrollably, as does Hind’s awareness that his search has taken possession of him.Hind realizes, too, that despite his craving to be needed, he has used people as means, abbreviated them as clues, and disposed them in his heart as exhibits. He becomes unsure whether he wants to go back to Sylvia because the fifth clue points to her or because she is a woman he loves. He revisits his friends, his clues, in the hope of "taking" them not as clues but as ends in themselves. Indeed, he endeavors to de-kidnap them.But what has been started – and only partly by Hind – can’t be stopped. The lock pursues the keys, the kidnaping pursues the memory that is trying to erase it, and a mass of old life emerges – passionate adolescence, the cruel charm of the clever, sickly girl Hind adored, the intricate commitments to childhood friends, and, in back of it all, the guardian himself, a failure, a remotely tragic hero, an interesting man. The maze of the book’s opening part has come into focus out of its dense nightmare anonymity – New York, Brooklyn Heights, terrible genealogy, the self in relation to others.

Genres: Fiction, 20th Century, Novels, Literature

534 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1969

About the author

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

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

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

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

Reviews

[Mark William · Rating 5 out of 5]

“An accidental whole organic end chaos of human being”

Great stuff here...
http://www.electronicbookreview.com/t...

[Cody · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh, what a gift it all is every so very rarely. I wound up reading this as my last McElroy with no design or intention, rather, a crumbled cookie's fortune of happenstance. It is such a gloriously human work from the most, ahem, at times knotted scribbler, I figured I could bank on more of that Newyorkcity, hifalutin word-a-learning. Nonesuch here. This is an angora sweater and laying on a plush velvet sofa; it is the text equivalent to the warmth of a Boss HM-2 with the High's rolled to nothing and the Level and Distortion at ten (just a wooshing smush, a vacuum cleaner in the clouds raining, of fuzz glow; see "I Am the Cancer"). This is, of all Joe's novels, trying the least and, because of that, maybe accomplishing the most. It is vying for top spot in my hierarchy (no, that other one isn't in my five), a testimony to how wonderful the wooly Hind's Kidnap is.

For reference: not dissimilar to Pynchon's private eye Inherent Vice's horsing around, but without the benefit of hindsight providing the clarifying of actors being holistically malfeasant; all that which would become trope is busily afoot and in the field of this very 1969 release. But the true joy is reading McElroy's framing device come to life, its famous 'V' design of narrative. Too little is said of the joining point of those two planes.

Giving over something like 70-pages to a first-person monologue by the protagonist's wife (otherwise largely not present) delivered in a physical and emotional landscape that anyone ever in a longform relationship can understand, it is such a liberative, a female airing of the pressure valves we accumulatively and protectively amass to throw off the 'scopes of psychic rifles. We forget that our donning of armor, though necessary, also keeps everything in as well as out. Or that we all have our shit and, yeah, chaps, so too do women and every gender between those two sawhorses the right to the same (and their own internal relationship to said shit, or your access or agency to same said shit as theirs's theirs and ours's ours).

It is all so blessing to have the big ole' Shaggy Joe remind us here that life is all means until it all just ends. All of it, the whole Cosmological Enchilada and Episto-Ontological Nachos, inter/intra and dependent-independent simultaneously. Mean well when you may.

[Nick · Rating 5 out of 5]

I <3 McElroy's prose. The detail he paints of NYC always takes me back to my younger self, traversing these same subways and streets and settings he so beautifully depicts. I truly feel at home when transported into McElroy's world.

[Christopher]

One of the more effortful reads I’ve yet done. More later.

[Ian Scuffling · Rating 4 out of 5]

I’m not usually precious about my approach to reading an established author’s books in some specific order, never too caring about “the right place to start” with one’s writing, etc. For example, Gravity’s Rainbow was my first Pynchon, J R my first Gaddis, A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never Do Again my first Wallace, and Cannonball my first by Joseph McElroy. In fact, going against the grain, I often find it gives berth to more surprises as you dig further into the catalog, backwards, forwards and in between.

In fact, I find it really interesting to hold off on reading a writer’s earliest works until the end because it grants you this kind of higher level look down at the evolution of their style and ideas, their characters and narratives. And in no way is it different reading Hind’s Kidnap after having read the lion’s share of McElroy’s other novels. In HK, McElroy’s winding syntax is muted at the start as we learn about Jack Hind, a 6’7” New Yorker who has spent six years with an on-again off-again obsession with an unsolved child kidnapping. In this way, HK is a kind of private eye novel where Hind is set off on a journey to finally solve the kidnap by pursuing clues and leads of varying level of specificity, acting more of an investigation by free association rather than a traditional methodology.

The search for Hershey Laurel’s kidnappers leads us across a number of Hind’s associated and old friends, uncovering deep unsettled history between them that Hind ignores in pursuit of “clues.” These clues come in the form of vague, loose associations uncovered through his conversations with his friends, for example, while at a gym pursing his friend Dewey Wood for the next clue, someone mentions chlorophyll which Hind links to a pharmacist named Phil who chews clorets gum and he goes to see him as the next part of the investigation.

Ultimately, we learn the toll the kidnap has taken on Hind’s interpersonal affairs, including, and most damagingly, his family: wife Sylvia and young daughter May.

McElroy writes the city like an old friend itself. Living and breathing. An ecosystem of small individuals making something more whole and human than any individual could be on its own. It’s the navigation of this world that gives so much life to HK and Hind’s traipses through it.

Meanwhile, as if almost imperceptible to the reader, McElroy has begun layering stacks of syntactical tricks, doubling meanings and names, doubling time and history in each sentence. In fact, McElroy is training you how to read the rest of the book (and perhaps the rest of his books) by making HK’s early chapters deceptively “simple” at a sentence-by-sentence level. When you come to the second section, a 100-page monologue from Sylvia to Hind (who is in and out of sleep throughout), you’re only barely ready to understand it, but you’re equipped enough to carry through.

Finally, after Sylvia’s chapter, we come back and are almost fully in McElroy’s characteristic stream-of-pre-consciousness style, where a single sentence can seem meaningless until you’ve received its whole context in preceding sentences, pages, chapters. And while Hind abandons “the kidnap” of the early chapters, he takes up a kidnap of his own, and a mystery deeper and more personal to him. The revelation of which challenges Hind’s identity and self and confronts him with the reality of why he is who he is.

Masterfully crafted with unexpected characters, narrative arcs, stylistic games and more, this is perhaps the “best place to start” with McElroy. But who really cares where you start.

[Jonathan · Rating 3 out of 5]

There were sections of brilliance, and flashes of the wonderful prose only McElroy can produce, but it felt baggy, formless, meandering. I could not bring myself to care about either the characters or the plot, and there was not enough going on in the writing itself to render that issue moot.

Others may have a different opinion, and I would definitely consider it worth attempting.

It is interesting to see this work placed between S.B and A.H (both of which I loved, and Ancient History is right there in my list of favorites) as it very much straddles the fence between the two styles. Sadly, for me, this "middle ground" seems to lose much of what made its prede/suc=cessors work.

[Kevin Adams · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 ⭐️

[sean · Rating 3 out of 5]

Having first approached McElroy through his post-W&M output (and W&M being one of the most memorable reading experiences of my life), I found HK to be puzzling, shapeless and undercooked. It seems like this is McElroy's least read novel, maybe because it's so difficult to find (I somehow managed to get a 1st UK at a second hand store in Melbourne, which is the only time I've ever seen a McElroy book on shelves in this country), or maybe because it's just not as good as the others. At a sentence level, HK is very different to any other McElroy I've read: sentences don't seem to accomodate multiple voices, and they rarely double back on themselves or splinter into several temporalities – but they do gather different resonances as the novel moves forward and the characters shift and change.

The book's takes as its premise Jack Hind's obsession with solving a cold case kidnaping. His fixation on the case has led to him alienate his friends and family, and ultimately to a separation from his wife. HK then follows Hind as he (mis)interprets what he thinks are "clues" to solving the crime. In this sense the book closely mirrors postmodern wild goose chases like Pynchon's Lot 49 – McElroy wants to position the reader as an active interpreter of slippery, elusive meaning. To my mind, this kind of intellectual performance is not what makes McElroy a genius author – W&M is a cerebral book, but it's deeply human, and its more impenetrable sections are always in service of something greater. As someone who has never thought of McElroy as being a postmodernist, it was strange reading something of his that could have been written by DeLillo.

[David Kuhnlein · Rating 5 out of 5]

The first section of Hind’s Kidnap follows Jack Hind, a six foot seven inch man who forgoes his most intimate relationships in order to rekindle the long cooled kidnap of a boy named Hershey Laurel who went missing six or seven years prior. Hind moves nimbly through New York City in a deceptively straightforward narrative. Deceptive because the deeper into the novel we travel, the more beautiful and strange McElroy’s sentences become. Dig deep enough and phrases become fossils — their beauty evoking impressions left behind from previous sentences, phrases, words.

Full recommendation here: https://xraylitmag.com/david-kuhnlein...

[Wei Lin · Rating 1 out of 5]

It pains me to write this review because I was really looking forward to getting my first taste of McElroy’s fiction. I don’t wish to convey that the book was a complete waste of time for me, because it did in fact leave me with a lot to think about. In fact, it is precisely one of those thoughts which suggested that the right thing to do is to honestly say that despite the staggering amount of insight I managed to conjure in my reading of the novel, I hardly enjoyed much of it in terms of actually reading it. If I take a 1-star rating to indicate 20% enjoyment, that’s already generous enough, I think.

From the get-go, I understood that this novel is very different from other fiction I’ve read, especially in how it seems to demand so much attention from the reader. It made me realise how my attention seems to hang between three things: background noise, my own thoughts and the novel itself. Oddly enough, those three categories are also present within the novel: diegetic background noise, Hind’s thoughts and the person Hind is listening to at any given moment. Without paying attention, I think it’s easy to lose track of which category the novel is presenting because little signposting exists. A flashback can overtake a scene for a few paragraphs before I even realise it.

Like Hind, who tries to fish for clues to the kidnap of Hershey Laurel inside all this noise, I tried grounding my reading of the novel by filtering information so as to arrive at a ‘point’ (or, a kind of conjecture as to what this novel is demonstrating). I did this in the way a literature student looks for evidence in order to write an essay with a coherent argument: annotating, making notes, having my thoughts sometimes overtake the prose. In other words, just as Hind “uses” the people around him as means to an end, I used the text in hopes of writing something about it (like a vanishing point in the future), probably in an attempt to reassure myself that my time wasn’t wasted in reading the novel.

This all seemed to go rather well for me until I got to Sylvia’s interior monologue. No longer was there a point-de-capiton in the form of Hind (or the kidnap case) to hold all the noise together. Everything just collapsed into total noise. At this point, I entertained the idea that there was something unethical in both Hind’s selective processing of the people he talks to as well as the way I truncated the novel in order to frame it according to a particular thesis. The novel affirmed my idea with the notion of people as ends in themselves, which is repeated quite a few times in the second half. The novel seemed to ask me: you seem to giving a lot of time to this text, but do you give the same kind of time to a person? If you can’t even pay attention to this text – having to reorganize it in a way that is more comfortable for your understanding – then how can you pay attention to a real human being?

Faced with this ethical challenge, I decided to put down my pen and stop annotating. I decided to just listen to the text as it is without letting my own thoughts interfere with what it is trying to say. In a way, I tried to see eye-to-eye with the other. However, I realized then that most of the earlier enjoyment I was getting out of the text was by working through it in that supposedly violent way – cutting it up, rearranging its parts, reanimating it in my own design. Reading it as it is was a slog (for the most part, that is – there were two or three bits I genuinely enjoyed).

Joe Milazzo (electronic book review) calls Hind’s Kidnap a “system”. I think reading it as a system was somewhat enjoyable, though in a way that I personally feel is somewhat masochistic. However, since I think the novel was asking me to read it as a novel – to “rekidnap” it, in the novel’s terms, and treat it not as a means to an end but an end in itself – I can only say that this novel is probably the total opposite of what a novel is. I won’t dispute McElroy’s genius, but Hind’s Kidnap, as a kind of anti-novel, was not fun to read.

I remember hearing somewhere that people have said that through their reading of The Recognitions, the author Gaddis seems to loathe his readers. Although McElroy’s prose in Hind’s Kidnap seems to suggest something similar to me, I would like to emphasize the sympathy this novel appears to have for the tedium that the reader suffers. Maybe I’m just trying to justify the time I spent on Hind’s Kidnap by scraping for every bit of value I can find in this experience. I could ‘kidnap’ the text for my own purposes and praise it for how it made me think about everything I just said (and the text is unquestionably a masterpiece for being able to do so). I will however have to be honest and ‘rekidnap’ it: the pleasure I felt in simply reading this text without having to coldly dissect it was minimal. That might be the response that Hind’s Kidnap wants from me, and I can only do it justice in this way.

[Will · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hind's Kidnap is a densely layered, fascinating book that is ultimately undermined by a lack of control over it's contents, both structurally and tonally. Hind's Kidnap is not built in a typical narrative structure, but instead in a V, doubling back upon itself at the midpoint and arriving at the end exactly where it started. McElroy writes in an instructive prose, his book layers complexity as it goes, and teaches you how to read along. Part one of the book is a neurotic clue seeking journey, sniffing out leads where there are none, and as a result we also end up searching the text for clues and meaning that may or may not be there, a state of mind McElroy toys with and subverts throughout the text.

We do this with titular character Hind, who alienates his friends and family in an obsessive hunt over a cold case kidnap. Part two is a stream of consciousness from his estranged wife's perspective that fills in a lot of character backstory and inverts the purpose of the novel, Hind realizes with his wife's help that he has been deeply selfish and manipulative, and must undo all he has done up to this point.

What Hind doesn't realize is how to do this, and he attempts to "dekidnap" his friends from the case by receiving them as "ends themselves and not merely means." This third and final part he doubles back, and we the reader and eventually Hind himself realizes that what he really needs to do is come to terms with suppressed issues within himself from childhood, his own kidnap of sorts, and who he really is as a person both internally and in relation to all the people in his life.

McElroy delights throughout with a myriad of fascinating deep dives into human relationships, the ways in which we move and do not move through time, and many thought provoking linguistic discussions about the words we use and what they really say. (The title itself transforms in meaning several times throughout the book)

Unfortunately the book is a bit bloated and can be repetitive, every section runs longer than it has interesting things to say. The other major issue is that for a book about human engagement a lot of the dialogue can be inhuman, I found for a work ostensibly about relationships many of them were made rather plastic in service of focusing in other directions, it's clearly an early work from a very talented author who had some kinks to work out in how he juggled his many ideas and themes, still very much an enjoyable read.

[Noah · Rating 3 out of 5]

A great novel whose ambitions flog the premise. 3 stars in relation to the 'league' I'd place the book in (partly why I dislike the rating system! (stars, or a lack thereof, represent different things for different novels)). There is so much happening here, the density can become overwhelming and flat-out unnecessary. Again, prose-wise, there is a hypnotic simplicity once you 'hit the groove' a.k.a. tempo of what's happening, but it's so inaccessible that the only way to properly do this is by getting jacked on a cup of Joe before bed in a suppression zone. One distraction pulls you from the text. Flaw. First McElroy read; underrated, yes! under read, yes! But for a good reason. You won't come across pre-cognitive prose because it's impractical, it tells a story where the reader must work 3x as hard, compared to MA-lit.

Note also: prophetic in that the kidnap and Hind are so orbitally unrelated to urban reality that there is no foundation for the fiction; cobbled ideas, arboreal names. It's meaningless in that our identity is a search or chase or kidnap vis-a-vis the soul; in that maybe obsessions are often personified by the quests we create for ourselves, although malefic, also bounteously relevant for the progression of a self -> community -> humanity.

Much flew above you, read again in 5 years when life makes 5 more years of sense.

[nethescurial]

DNF for the time being (stopped at p. 289). I like McElroy but I find myself constantly fighting with the brazen intellectual wankery here, and it just became increasingly transparent that McElroy doesn't even remotely consider any potential readers when he writes - these exercises are largely for himself and whatever literati who are in his circle. I love the main thrust of the story, which is about the search for one's true self and how we necessarily get sidetracked from what (and who) really matters in our search for fulfillment, and McElroy is imaginative and at his best moments the writing sings with an intoxicating rhythm and an engaging forward driving momentum. There's a lot of tenderness and compassion buried underneath the layers of obfuscation, and I can tell he is a writer who does love the people he creates and humanity in general, albeit through an unorthodox point of view. But I think as of right now I'm in the process of moving on from this kind of "erudite white guy running circles around the reader" American mid-20th century pomo stuff. Maybe I'm just getting old, and I'll probably revisit this at some point, but I'm much more in the mood lately to be challenged in a way that doesn't feel like I'm just being fucked with. If I'm ever in the mood for that again, then this is here to sate me, I suppose. Til next time Joe.

[Evan DeFraine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Embarrassed at how long it took me to finish. More a testament to my own (lack of) time management and the crunch of law school than any shortcomings with the book. That said, tough read, starts off strange but consistent and slowly gets more and more… whatever it is. I really enjoyed it, even if I didn’t understand most of it. Hopefully McElroy has some shorter novels!

[Stephen · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although in each part of the novel my interest waned the closer it got to the end this is still an intelligent, well put together novel that achieves deep thematic exploration along with a compelling story as a nice flavouring.

[Tom Flint · Rating 2 out of 5]

Judging by other reviews I thought I'd enjoy it a lot more than I did. I quite liked the beginning, Hind's obsession with a dead case, chasing pointless leads...But for me it didn't justify the length and I was constantly checking how many pages I had left—not a good sign!

[James · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not quite equipped to review a book like this but I wanted to make a note of its V-shaped structure since that might be of some interest to others. The plot follows Jack Hind picking back up a cold kidnaping case that had interested him years prior. In the first section Hind pursues a series of oblique clues that each lead him to a different old friend. This culminates in the second section narrated by his estranged wife, SylVia, in which all but two (if I remember correctly) paragraphs begin with the letter V.

In the third section, Hind, having realized he was taking advantage of all these friends for his own ends, revists them all in reverse order in an attempt to "dekidnap" (his word) them. All this leading to the grand realization that the orphan Hind's foster father (whose name is literally Foster) is actually his real father, thus completing some kind of identity quest and I guess releasing Hind from his obsession with the kidnap.

Anyway, this is a very bare-bones way to describe a complicated and dense novel that went over my head in a lot of ways but I thought it might be useful especially since other readers seem to consider this book meandering and structureless.

[Omar Abu samra · Rating 3 out of 5]

Let’s say this is insane, let’s say, I didn’t got that, let’s say this is a great complex prose but. Let’s say was too long reading more than 600 pages. Overall. This is my first McElroy experience