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NEW: book review by JMcE: http://www.thenation.com/issue/000306/0306mcelroy.shtml
He is completing a new one, Actress in the House.
NEW: http://www.temple.edu/temple_times/97/4/3/speaker_mcelroy.html
His latest novel, Voir Dire, is forthcoming, and McElroy is currently completing a screenplay.
And what's this? http://www.phillynews.com/inquirer/99/Apr/11/books/BLIT11.htm
...author of Actress in the House
1930: born Joseph Prince Mcelroy Aug. 21
Grew up in Brooklyn Heights, NY
1951: BA from Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts
1952: MA from Columbia University, New York City
1952-54: US Coast Guard
1961: PhD from Columbia
Taught at the University of New Hampshire and at Queens College, City University of New York.
Friends with Joyce Maynard and her father
c1990: a son
Source: Encyclopedia Britannica article
At his best, McElroy achieves a level of poetic prose that's unequalled. But the stories that he chooses to tell are not interesting in the conventional way, so his popularity suffers.
Recommended starting point: Lookout Cartridge
A well-received experiment sketching various lives living in one rooming house (if I recall)
"McElroy's first novel, now recognized as a modern masterpiece, is structured around eight "memories" being edited by one David Brooke in an attempt to connect and dissect the lives of his friends, family, and acquaintances. "
Trivia: One character in this is based on Joyce Maynard's father, whom she writes about on her website
More experimental, less well-received. Most of the characters have tree-names.
"In Hind's Kidnap, a man grows as a character by searching for a kidnapped child who is missing from view."
Note: not 'paraphRase'
One of my favorites, about the obsessive fan of a Norman Mailer/ Marshall McLuhan-like sixties celebrity, who's just committed suicide as the book opens.
His most successful by a mile, and the best place to start, this is a gritty detective story on one level.
Not for everyone, this is a beautiful, difficult sci-fi tale told from the point of view of a tragically bionic consciousness.
"Did he wish a return of the jolting to set wheeling these bone-lines that intersected but at no center for he had none? Such spin would show again how free from it all his new-found equilibrium was. Yet if by being in the equilibrium he could then have left the spin to kick itself down stairwell after stairwell of burst orbits, still the spin unquestionably had stopped; and Ground's queries like shadow went round this unknown while they went round also what Imp Plus saw for himself: that contrary to what the Good Voice had said attitude stabilizer had not been under dual control."
One section was published separately as "Ship Rock: A Place"
So long I still haven't finished it. The first chapter is his best writing, imho.
"The plot focuses on the lives of James Mayn, a journalist come to New York from a town in New Jersey, and Grace Kimball, a feminist/therapist who conducts what she calls a Body-Self workshop for women who have been through the mill. (She is Mayn's neighbor, though the two never meet.) Gradually, fragment by fragment, aspects of their lives are examined, along with the lives of their families, friends, associates, in an effort to encompass a wide range of American experience and some sources of contemporary anxiety and anguish: marriage and divorce, parents and children, sexual deviation, U.S. intervention in Latin American politics, environmental pollution and destruction, nuclear devastation."
A shorter piece on a boy who's lost his father. (I never finished this, either, for some reason.)
"Sometime in the late 1940s, a teenage boy receives a letter from his recently deceased father. Written several years before the man knew that he was ill, and found among his papers after his death, the letter is full of stern, fatherly platitudes. Friends of the family praise the letter extravagantly; copies are printed up and mailed to their friends. A few years later, one of the boy's college professors analyzes the letter in class. Most of the students find it stilted and phony, and the boy must come to his own conclusions."
"Holding With Apollo 17" New York Times Book Review. January 28, 1973
"The Skylab Cluster" Poly Prep Alumni Review (Spring 1974)
Atypical 1997 essay on Mount St Helens' ecological recovery
Wordy online essay by William S Wilson includes lots of quotes.
Special issue of the Review of Contemporary Fiction [Table of contents?]
Conspiracy and Paranoia in Contemporary American Fiction:
the works of Don DeLillo and Joseph McElroy
by Steffen Hantke
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