Joseph McElroy Interview

Picture me, perennial college dropout, working in a used bookstore in central Maryland circa 2009. One of my bibliophilic regulars makes a habit of passing along obscure titles for me to investigate. Hands me a certain worn hardcover with assurances of its rarity, attests to the writer’s genius, instructs me to read without delay. The book is Lookout Cartridge by Joseph McElroy. An unfamiliar name, but my regular has never steered me astray. I take the book home and find my impressionable mind melted at the virtuoso wordplay. Here is something special.

I seek out more. I scour the shelves. M …Mc …McCarthy …McGuane …McInerney …McMurtry. No McElroy to be found. I pester the regular. Solemn, he shakes his head and speaks the wretched words, Out of print. Years pass. I keep hunting. A first edition of Women and Men turns up, then a scarce paperback of Plus. To this day I haven’t given up on finding a reasonably priced copy of Smuggler’s Bible. Joseph McElroy is one of the greatest living American novelists. Why the hell are so many of his books impossible to find?

Enter Dzanc Books. This fine press has been steadily publishing new work from McElroy and reissuing his earlier classics. Their latest is Hind’s Kidnap, originally released in 1969. Described as a “city pastoral,” the labyrinthine plot follows the titular Jack Hind on an obsessive odyssey to solve a years old kidnapping. The details of young Hershey Laurel’s disappearance are vague at best—“neither had ransom been asked nor a kidnap note received”—though McElroy’s second novel is anything but.

Following a mysterious tip, Hind progresses from one interlocking location to the next—a city pier, an office complex, a New England golf course, a health club, a university—with little to go off other than a series of enigmatic notes. The characters that Hind chases down are treated less like human beings and more like clues to be decoded, then discarded. The world of HK is one in which any word or action might contain hidden messages, potentially revealing answers to the seemingly endless stream of riddles we face. Hind becomes so wholly absorbed that he disregards his estranged wife and child in lieu of pursuing the Laurel case, even though Hind has no real relation to the missing child. His motivations are ambiguous. In fact, no one seems to care that the boy has gone missing except for Hind. About halfway through, the novel pivots when Hind has a change of heart, and he determines to reverse engineer a “dekidnapping,” literally working his way backwards to absolve his selfish tactics, to see his friends and family as people instead of clues he can use as means to an end.

Filled with rich, multilayered sentences and keen philosophical observations, Hind’s Kidnap is a challenging but rewarding read. Equally complex and comic, McElroy’s mastery of language is on full display here. Like Jack Hind, you will search for answers, scour the pages for clues, pine for resolution. Best to acquiesce and let the narrative guide you where it will. “No need to prove or claim—merely to possess in oneself and to be possessed by, the few knowledges one’s small originality desires. To settle for such a possession is not to be a coward, but a shepherd.”

At 91, Joseph McElroy shows no signs of slowing. With a new novel nearing completion, a collection of essays forthcoming and a long-anticipated work of nonfiction about humanity’s relationship with water due out at some point, there has never been a better time to be a McElroy fan. He graciously corresponded with me via email to discuss Hind’s Kidnap and more.

Read our conversation below and purchase Hind’s Kidnap from Dzanc Books here.

To start off, can you shed some light on the origins of Hind’s Kidnap? Where did the initial seed come from? (My wife is due to give birth soon, so conception has been on my mind)

The book is full of light – the streets, the people. Down almost to photons of the everyday. Is your question accidentally its own answer – even a theme of this novel? I mean your will to be distracted from the thing itself. I’m working on a novel right now that’s been in my mind for at least sixty years. What would you make of these origins you speak of if they existed, Matt? Beginnings of Hind’s Kidnap? a long-ago case still open but perhaps forgotten. The idea of appropriating or even stealing another person – into another life that is still possible. Sitting on a pier by the river … A city, though, where everything can be found and lost. The novel is the thing, Matt. In this novel as in your life, you pay attention to what each sentence says. It may bear on you. Henry James, someone on whom nothing is lost, set as a standard. I think I’m going to be answering some of your questions with questions.

On the surface HK is a mystery novel, though I might describe it as an anti-mystery or inverted detective story. You’ve also described it as a fable. Your work sometimes plays with or bends genre tropes (Plus contains elements of science fiction, for instance). What do you consider the uses and limits of genre?

Is your question just statements? What surface? What do you think you mean? But you’re right, Matt: my city may be an unformulable alternative to the incisive solutions a mere detective story arrives at. But mysteries displace our attention yet then in favor of other trails that nonetheless lead back. Yet D.H. Lawrence calls the Novel “the one bright book of life.” Yes there are genres in my head, old set forms. Easier to identify in poetry. I regularly write sestinas for friends, living and dead, about current events. The medieval but very modern sestina with its arbitrary-seeming clarities of repeated end-of-line words for six substantial stanzas is a container that shapes and opens thoughts unexpectedly. I wrote one for the Harry Mathews’ memorial in New York and it made it into Best American Poetry of that year. Harry taught me the sestina. He said it was impossible to write a bad sestina. My novel about a brain in earth orbit, Plus, is fuller and more disturbing or poignant than sci fi tradition, I believe; but the science is there – and the fiction strong, where fact is more deeply factual than what you might experience in documentary non-fiction, yes I believe that that often happens. An idyl (if you want an ancient form) though in Plus in its own way tragic and exalted. Hey, the genre of the Interview, it occurs to me! with its slippery self-advertisements and near-lies and sometimes ambivalent questions; though my voice here is quite frank. Asked once for an interview to go with a volume of essays about my work brought out by The Review of Contemporary Fiction, I reversed the angle or nerve or decorum and turned the genre outward and came up with three connected interviews conducted instead by me with people who’d been important in my life.

As a “city pastoral,” HK presents a vivid depiction of New York, especially Brooklyn Heights. I’d say the boroughs are as much a character as Jack Hind in the novel. The city embodies all these different paradoxes—artificial and natural, concrete and abstract, static and dynamic. I lived in Bed-Stuy from 2010-2011, and when I returned for a visit in 2018 I found the landscape completely transformed but also eerily familiar in many ways. I imagine you’ve witnessed tremendous change in NYC over the years. How has being a New Yorker informed your writing?

What is your question? Does pastoral inspire vivid depictions of the actual city? Maybe so. But only if pastoral by contrast with urban shows us what we never thought the city was. Here in HK a strange lightness, an unpredictable lift – a fable with roots that keep growing. Pastoral would seem to go against or simplify the industrial and populated and loud and uncomfortable and brainy complexities of the city – anyway, in the mid-1960s of Hind’s Kidnap a curious uncertain waiting here and across the nation – entwined with new technology and wild performing-arts energy here in New York seeming then to prevail, like a haunting even beautiful and threatening next thing about to upend us – does this answer belong above in the first question? If city pastoral is a contradiction how would that recreate my city in HK? By paradox, I suppose. A teacher of mine at Columbia, Mark Van Doren, said the country was too beautiful to live in year round. The HK New York is sometimes a necessary idyl yet manqué. You won’t get me to talk about Bed-Stuy when I was 5 years old and my father’s family had lived there since the 1920s. And “being a New Yorker”? My fiction tells you better than I could. Are cities unlike small towns half-designed to change?

I found HK rather comic at times, filled with puns and double entendres, though I’ve read you didn’t intend it to be satirical. Certainly it’s a strange book and many of the scenes are quite funny. Is the humor intentional or more of a happy accident?

“Rather comic” will do, I guess. Your alternatives aren’t mine. Everything is intentional but do I try to be funny? no, just to tell some imagined whole truth. The book belongs less to me now than to the reader, which is a happy accident when it happens.

Your work has often been labelled “difficult” or even “incomprehensible,” which to me is unfair. Reading HK might be a challenge for some, as there’s lack of context and frequent jumps in time and perspective. The style mirrors the narrative. In the same way Jack Hind can never be certain what (or who) is or isn’t a clue, the reader likewise must rely on conjecture to piece everything together. We’re carried along in Hind’s quest to break the kidnap and then reverse engineer a dekidnapping without understanding his motivations. Even if we don’t know how it’s all going to add up, it’s an immersive, propulsive experience. What’s your approach to balancing ambiguity and clarity?

Thanks for “immersive, propulsive.” Who said the work is “incomprehensible”? Don’t you triangulate yourself here, the good guy on my side vs those mysterious but explicit others?

About “difficult,” I like my readers for the interesting difficulties of our lives.

The dekidnapping is not quite a joke. In my gut, no joke at all. Balancing ambiguity and clarity? It’s built into our intelligence and our sentences, mine anyway, which are often narratives in themselves. Ambiguity is a fuller clarity, if you look at your own moment-to-moment life, Matt.

Feel free to disregard this question if you prefer not to elaborate, but I’m curious about book II in HK, which is an extensive, disjointed monologue written from the POV of Hind’s wife Sylvia. What is the significance of the letter “V” in this section?

Two questions here? I can’t tell. The “V” words beginning each paragraph are like related materials helping this pivotal central and centering, partly interior monologue hold together. I don’t think the character Sylvia in her mind exactly says them though maybe somewhere in the reader they are voiced. Some beautiful words here, what they mean, many kinds of motion. Viaticum. Vanish … Think of colors on a canvas in some rhythm of coherence. Nothing difficult, just intimately alive and full of veins and arteries and a will to live and understand. This woman’s monologue, the wife’s truth, holding the whole as-yet-unfinished novel together; hence future as well as past. What differences do you find between this middle section and the first and third parts of the book, which are Hind’s POV? Did you notice that the sequence of places in the first is reversed in the third?

In your essay “Neural Neighborhoods and Other Concrete Abstracts,” you write, “what I was after in what I was writing was the relation between Outside and Inside.” I think you achieve this in HK, which is full of both rich, hyper detailed descriptions and carefully constructed, nuanced personalities, both of which bleed into one another. What tricks can the writer employ to dissolve the boundaries between interiority and the external world?

Bleed, yes. Thanks for answering your own question. We are a little strange, more so than we thought. And this is material of which we all are made and with which we make something of each other, I do believe.

Linguistics features prominently in HK. The guardian tells Hind, “Language is the trap.” The idea of language ensnaring rather than liberating us intrigues me. A simple word like “of” is revealed to be deceptively complex, the meaning nebulous and shifty depending on its usage. Over half a century after HK’s initial publication, what has kept you engaged with language and storytelling?

Ensnaring is also committed. Quite apart from “Women’s Lib,” an antiquated phrase surfacing in the language in mid-1960s, what you describe must mean that I find Freedom only in its apparent opposites.

I’ve been thinking about what it means to be a writer in America today, specifically about what constitutes “the great American novel.” I could ask a dozen people and get a different answer from each. The United States is such a mercurial, contradictory, fragmented place, which is reflected in the writing we produce. You get grouped with the likes of Gaddis, Gass, and Barth, these literary giants of the 20th century’s latter half. Do you feel there’s a unique quality that signifies American fiction? Is there a book you’d list as the definitive American novel?

You’ve been thinking? So have I. If you got a dozen different answers to the above, with reasons for each choice, that would be something, wouldn’t it? I knew those three writers, though I don’t know about the “groupings.”

You taught creative writing for many years. What advice might you offer young writers who are fresh to the craft?

Keep your autobiography at arm’s length and find the real story. What did Oscar say? Best thing to do with good advice is pass it on. Borges suggests that you read your work as if someone else had written it.

I’m delighted to see you’ve got several titles slated for release. Can you tease anything for us regarding your upcoming projects? (I’m dying to read your book about water).

A play at last. Meanwhile, at socratesonthebeach.com – the link for a new online journal – you can find an excerpt from my new novel, almost finished, set in 5th-century-BC Greece. The name of the journal is not the title of the novel.

The non-fiction Water Book has rewritten itself. It locates in often technical detail the constantly changing global crises of water also in us, almost as if the 70% water of which we’re composed might be involved in the thinking. Or not. Thus, Outside and Inside again?

Joseph McElroy is the author of nine novels, including A Smuggler’s Bible (Harcourt), Hind’s Kidnap (Harper & Row), Ancient History: A Paraphase (Knopf), Lookout Cartridge (Knopf), Plus (Knopf), Women and Men (Knopf), The Letter Left to Me (Knopf), Actress in the House (Overlook), and Cannonball (Dzanc, 2013). His short novella about India, Taken From Him, is available as an Amazon Kindle Single. Another novella, Preparations for Search, appeared in 2010. Night Soul and Other Stories, a volume of short fiction, was published by Dalkey Archive Press in 2011. A volume of his essays, Exponential, has been published in Italy and in expanded form will be forthcoming from Dzanc. His non-fiction book about water is close to completion. Two plays are forthcoming, and a children’s book, The Island, illustrated by G. Davis Cathcart. McElroy received the Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and fellowships from the Guggenheim, Rockefeller, and D.H. Lawrence Foundations, twice from Ingram Merrill and twice from the National Endowment for the Arts. Among other universities he has taught at Columbia, Johns Hopkins, Northwestern, University of New Hampshire, Temple, NYU, the University of Paris, and the City University of New York. McElroy was born in Brooklyn, New York in 1930. He was educated at Williams College and Columbia University and served in the U.S. Coast Guard.