As part of our monthlong, fractured discussion of postmodern fiction, Garth Risk Hallberg weighs in on Joseph McElroy's weighty "Women and Men."



Given the decidedly premodern overtones of the word "canon," the idea of a postmodern one may seem like a contradiction in terms. Indeed, one approach to constructing a postmodern canon is to set the parameters so wide — Kathy Acker, Philip K. Dick, Grandmaster Mele Mel — that the term becomes practically meaningless. In the narrower purview of literary critics, however, references to canonical postmodernism tend to cluster around a group of white male fiction writers of a certain age: Barth and Barthelme, Gaddis and Gass, DeLillo and Coover and Pynchon.

Obviously, this canon is as hobbled by omissions as the prepostmodern canon it subtends. Still, in light of its demographics, it seems doubly baffling that Joseph McElroy, who turns 79 this year, is so often left off the list of po-mo masters. Like his rough contemporary Thomas Pynchon, he is the author of eight works of fiction acclaimed for their encyclopedic embrace of contemporary life. The New York Times wrote:

To ignore ["A Smuggler's Bible," 1966] would be as shameful an act of self-deprivation as that which so many of us performed when "The Recognitions" and "Under the Volcano" were first published.

["Hind's Kidnap," 1969] is full of marvels.

"Lookout Cartridge" [1973] is the rarest kind of achievement.

Yet Google Joseph McElroy, author, and you'll come up with about 5,000 hits, compared with roughly a quarter million for Pynchon. What gives? The short answer, it seems to me, is a single book, a behemoth called "Women and Men."

"Women and Men" belongs to the maximalist subspecies of postmodern novel that includes "Gravity's Rainbow," "The Recognitions" and "Underworld," somewhat the way the Chevy Suburban belongs to the "light truck" vehicular class, or Andre the Giant belonged to the World Wrestling Federation.

If those other books swing for the fences, "Women and Men" swings for the parking lot. If they represent, in their rigor, a form of literary calculus, "Women and Men" is chaos theory. And — no getting around this — if these books are big, "Women and Men" is bigger. At roughly 700,000 words (that's 1,192 closely printed pages), it is one and a half times the length of "War & Peace."

The book reached advance readers in 1987 in the form of two 600-page galleys. The reviewer for the New York Times made no secret of having sped through the book in a matter of days. And his tone, which mixed acknowledgment of the novel's ambition with barely disguised resentment at having to read the damn thing, typified critical response. Apparently the audience for literary fiction needed little encouragement to avoid a book that weighed 4 pounds in hardcover. "Women and Men," reportedly 10 years in the making, was not so much a publishing event as an anticlimax.

I happen to have a soft spot for underdogs, and another one for the postmodern mega-novel, and having some free time last summer, I picked up a "like new" first edition of "Women and Men" for something in the neighborhood of 10 bucks. I carried the book with me everywhere for six weeks, moving through it at a rate of about 30 pages a day. It quickly became obvious why the book is so rarely read. In persevering, however, I discovered some reasons why I think it should be.

Why it should be read ... after the jump.