Women and Men by Joseph McElroy

First published: 1987

Type of plot: Science fiction

Time of work: The 1970’s and the future

Locale: New York City, New Mexico, and outer space

Principal Characters:

• James Mayn, a science journalist
• Grace Kimball, a New Age feminist
• The Hermit-Inventor of New York
• Foley, a prison inmate
• Ray Spence, a suspected murderer
• Luisa, a Chilean diva
• Larry Shearson, a mathematics student
• Margaret, Mayn’s grandmother

The Novel

Women and Men is divided into eight major chapters, five of which are called “Breathers,” with twenty-three sub-chapters. Set in New York and New Mexico, the novel also traverses a universe populated by angelic and earthy creatures, through whom the author discusses the flux and flow of relationships between the sexes against the backdrop of supertechnology. In addition, Joseph McElroy plays with the elasticity of time in an ongoing “dialogue” about the difficulty of human memory to retrieve the past.

The novel opens with a woman giving birth to a child with the aid of her husband. Neither parent is identified, and it is only later that the possibility arises this anonymous child may be the central character or his mother. It may even be the unidentified reader. The book is narrated in turn by James Mayn, a middle-aged science journalist, an “Interrogator” reminiscent of a South American torturer, and New Age feminist Grace Kimball, among others. While Kimball and Mayn are tenants in the same New York apartment building, they never actually meet. Instead, they share what seem to be only tangential common concerns and friendships. Kimball runs a “Body Self” workshop in which a miscellany of women participate in elaborate acts of mutual masturbation. In one scene, the sex guru projects separate slides of male and female genitalia to point out the real lack of visual difference between the two. Grace plays the role of sex goddess for women, urging them to liberate themselves from stifling marriages. With an ability to abandon herself to her own sexuality, Grace has accurate insights into the unhappiness of other women. For example, she can discern the ambiguous feelings Clara, a Chilean woman, has concerning her husband. Occasionally, the narrative follows the interior conversation of a member of the Body Self Workshop as she gives herself over to the experience of being naked and vulnerable with other women.

Mayn’s search is primarily twofold: He yearns for an answer to the riddle of why his headstrong mother, Sarah, committed suicide, and he is equally compelled to come to terms with the impossibility of true intimacy. As he attempts to glue the fragments of his past together, Mayn envisions a future where a couple—a man and a woman—are jettisoned into space and intertwine to become one man/woman. In his mind, this melding of genders represents the perfect union.

There are substantial passages in which Mayn’s grandmother, Margaret, recalls an Indian myth about a princess of Choor and her relationship with a Navajo prince. References to Choor and the Anasazi people bring the story back to the Southwest, as McElroy tells of black mesas, sweeping vistas, and of a people more securely rooted in American history and the soil than, presumably, white Americans are capable of being. It is through this densely layered spiritual epic that Mayn comes closer to suturing the wound caused by his mother’s untimely death.

The effects of his divorce are painfully palpable and continue to resonate for Mayn as he courts a young female journalist. During sex, Mayn cannot stop thinking of his former wife. He contemplates transformation into a sea lion, a monster, and a worm “digesting Earth” as he attempts sexual intimacy. Instead of a postcoital conversation of a sensual nature, the girl and Mayn discuss Chilean politics and space travel. For a brief moment, the girl becomes Mayn’s former wife, although it is left open as to whether Mayn has confused the two women or one actually becomes the other.

The shorter chapters, which stand alone as separate narratives from the much more involved “Breather” sections, concern the lives of such characters as intuitive twelve-year-old Davey (in a chapter entitled “the future”), whose parents are going through a divorce. During an evening he spends with his mother at a restaurant, an armed man terrorizes and robs the customers. In another chapter, a retarded African American messenger makes his way through the streets of Manhattan like a strangely compelling angel. His journey offers a highly detailed vision of storefronts, people walking, and the fits and starts of city traffic. There is also a Chilean opera singer who, in an effort to lose weight, ingests a tapeworm that proceeds to eat away at her insides.

The novel ends in New York, as the Navajo prince simply vanishes into the crates containing the as-yet unassembled Statue of Liberty. Thus, McElroy joins New York at one of its earlier stages of becoming a powerful city with New Mexico as it represents the last great open frontier of America.

The Characters

While the majority of the characters are more like disembodied voices, the two who stand out most recognizably are James Mayn and Grace Kimball. Mayn’s character is closest to what one might imagine as that of the author’s: thoughtful, able to be in the moment and then quite removed, and relentlessly observant of his fellow creatures, as though such attention to nuance might make a lasting connection between himself and another human being. His heart aches for a remembered time when his family lived happily together, and Mayn also grapples with the wrenching loss of his mother, Sarah. These losses appear to tear Mayn from his moorings, as his psyche travels through space. Beyond the obsessive involvement with his own personal anguish, Mayn’s sphere of compassion extends to those who suffered under the Salvador Allende regime in Chile. Given the frequently elliptical style in which McElroy writes, the novel suggests a dipping into and out of Mayn’s consciousness as he repeatedly confronts the limitations of his own humanness.

With her Body Self workshop, which completely excludes men and focuses on supporting only women in their quest for sexual fulfillment and independence, Grace Kimball might appear to hate men, but this is not true. She anguishes over breaking up her lover’s marriage and in particular over how Marv, her lover’s husband, will cope with the split. Kimball exuberantly embraces her body’s ability to produce pleasure. A 1970’s feminist, Kimball does not necessarily advocate a world devoid of men; rather, she is on a mission to help women awaken the power within themselves to be sensual beings. If this awakening contributes to the deterioration of a marriage, perhaps the marriage was built on an unsteady foundation.

Although the character of Davey, the prepubescent boy whose parents are soon to part, is relatively minor, he is clearly drawn and handled with a special tenderness. He loves his mother, Ann, perhaps with greater devotion as he senses her sadness. Other characters such as the Hermit-Inventor of New York and the Interrogator represent aspects of the human experience rather than individuated people. The reason that Kimball and Mayn never meet may be because they, too, are halves of a whole, the yin and yang of humanity.

Critical Context

A decade in the making, Women and Men is McElroy’s sixth novel, and one that some critics believe brought the themes of his earlier novels together. The book was criticized as an indulgent piece of work, in part due to its massive length of more than a thousand pages and its intentional subversion of traditional story structure. McElroy was elsewhere praised for his Proustian passion for detail, his devotion to the authenticity of human thought, and his ability to interweave a complex of both universal and profoundly personal matters into a single book. The novel has been compared to James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922) and Thomas Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow (1973) because it shares a similar deconstructionist, postmodern approach and a tendency toward extended reveries. McElroy’s fascination with science and technology does not fall into sarcastic elitism or blind awe. Women and Men reflects a keen eye and a tenacious determination to push the reader’s intellectual prowess and commitment to the process of reading. McElroy’s earlier novels, Smuggler’s Bible (1966) and Hind’s Kidnapping: A Pastoral on Familiar Airs (1969) rely more openly on a recognizable realism, while Ancient History: A Paraphrase (1971), his third novel, marks a commencement of the fragmentation and reconstitution of the narrative. Nevertheless, despite the obvious theme of a father-son relationship, Smuggler’s Bible uses an unusual geometric structure. It is a system of connectedness between people, places, events, and methods of communication that identifies McElroy’s work as both unique and in the tradition of such writers as Pynchon and Joyce.

Ancient History: A Paraphrase is narrated by Cy, Dom’s best friend, who in the course of trying to make sense of Dom’s suicide becomes a kind of social scientist as he goes back into Dom’s past to find answers. McElroy’s next two novels, Lookout Cartridge (1974) and Plus (1977), both share concerns about power—psychic, physical, and verbal. Plus plays with such images as a brain orbiting Earth; Women and Men occasionally has a mobile home, split in half so the interior is in full view, orbiting the Earth close enough to see every detail. What is especially strange in the latter image is that the humans who observe this “wide load” seem barely ruffled by the sight. Such displacement of familiar sights is a hallmark of McElroy’s writing.

In addition to his novels, McElroy has written numerous short stories, essays, and book reviews. He is regarded as a master of the postindustrial age, one who challenges the reader’s intellect in unexpected ways.

Bibliography

Karl, Frederick R. American Fictions: 1940-1980. New York: Harper and Row, 1983. Well-crafted criticism on McElroy’s first five novels.

Kuehl, John. Alternative Worlds: A Study of Postmodern Antirealistic American Fiction. New York: New York University Press, 1989. An excellent overview of postmodern fiction, including an introduction that suggests that this movement is an outgrowth of such early Transcendentalists as Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne.

LeClair, Thomas. “Reformulation: Joseph McElroy’s Women and Men.” In The Art of Excess: Mastery in Contemporary American Fiction. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989. A critical comparison of Joseph McElroy, Thomas Pinchon, Roland Barth and other postmodernist writers that brings together issues of ecology, cybernetics, and anthropology in recent American literature.

Porush, David. “The Imp in the Machine: Joseph McElroy’s Plus.” In The Soft Machine: Cybernetic Fiction. New York: Methuen, 1985. An interesting discussion of McElroy’s fifth novel.

The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Spring, 1990. Special Issue. A comprehensive collection of essays, an interview, and bibliography of McElroy’s body of work.