pedantic nuthatch

Joseph McElroy's fascinating, infuriating steamer trunk of a novel from 1974 is told by Cartwright, an American small businessman (hustler, almost) living in London who teams with his friend Dagger to make a documentary movie out of scavenged materials, both media and content. The two men shoot such mundanities as a softball game in Hyde Park and a busking Hawaiian in the Underground on a variety of film stocks, sometimes with sound and sometimes silent. But shortly after the project begins, portions of the film go missing, apparently leaving Cartwright's obsessively kept diary as the only record of events. Sinister figures are interested in the remaining footage, as well as the journal, but why? McElroy's protagonist shuttles between New York and London trying to find out. His life, as well as his family, could be in danger, he tells us. But Cartwright is not the most reliable of narrators.

If you are not sure where you are, you have me. (p. 8)

Events are told in flashback from the last day of October, 1971. At first, Cartwright tells his story more or less linearly, interrupted only by accounts of the scenes of the film. Soon a kind of lyric paranoia becomes evident. As Cartwright fixates on one set of details and ignores or misinterprets another, we enter a world like that of Antonioni's Blow-Up or Coppolla's The Conversation, a world of obsessive digression, rumination, and doubt, with a hint of the nouveau roman. Here, Cartwright surveys the studio of Dagger and his wife Alba, which he has just broken into:

There was too much here: too much between Dagger's pica standard and Alba's elite portable; too much between on my left the poster blow-up of Trotsky in his tortoise-shell glasses with a very young man with an open face beside him (as if photographed together when in fact there was a panel dividing them) and on my right across above the glass cabinet Mercator's northern and southern hemisphere framed by Alba; too much between (as the balcony end on the far side of the French doors from me) a folded playpen (sandwiches between two suitcases) and (toward the hall door) several thigh-high piles of books and a stack of magazines staggering up from the floor; too much between (at that end of the room) the upright little oblong steel stove (about as high as the book piles) in which Alba (who would not have in her house one of the antique French stoves I'd been peddling) burned smokeless fuel—and (surprisingly yet somehow not awkwardly near the door to the hall) a huge paper lantern ballooning down from the ceiling. (p. 374)

The last numbered chapter cuts between two scenes, and is followed by the novella-length final interchapter "Cartridge," which slips back and forth through multiple timeframes, just avoiding narrative chaos. It provides a satisfactory resolution, if not a comprehensive explanation of all events.

Following James Joyce, McElroy omits quotation marks to set off direct discourse. He takes the willful ambiguity one better by omitting discourse punctuation altogether. In a two-person scene, we're often momentarily at a loss to know who is speaking, or even whether what we're reading is unspoken thoughts.

The book sports a bewilderingly long cast of characters, enough of them with similar names (two Johns, a Marie, a Mary, a Myra, a Norma, a Lorna) or with names that shift (putative Jan Graf becomes Jan Aut once Cartwright understands the role she plays) to make a nineteenth-century Russian novelist proud.

The overall effect of the prose is an oceanic alloverness of tiny details, like the best of abstract expressionist painting. A passing simile notes

... Franz Kline's great black forms against white canvas which seem some secret cross between ancient wood growths and the magic lintels [of Stonehenge] in Wiltshire. (p. 127)

A passage (p. 152) in which Cartwright makes a visit with his son Will to the Giant of Cerne, an earth formation that resembles a reclining man when viewed from far away, heightens the thematic tension between the large and the small, the world and the incident. Cartwright visits another stone circle, at Callanish in Scotland (p. 318), and his reading of the meaning of the megaliths is no clearer than his reading of the motivations of the conspirators seeking his diary.

In addition to the 1960s/70s resurgence of druidic practices, other preoccupations of the era are revealed. There is a discussion of the Kennedy assassination and its filming by Abraham Zapruder, and towards the very end there is a mysterious sniper shooting. Elements of technology are romanticized: a twin-lens reflex camera (p. 205), Dagger's Beaulieu camera and Cartwright's Nagra tape recorder. Cartwright sees himself as wetware:

...in my brain (that is suspended in fluid and has, they say, no sensitivity to pain) the amateur thought circles like a series of instructions performed repeatedly till some specified condition is satisfied whereupon a branch instruction is obeyed to exit from the loop... (p. 233)

or as "some crystal semiconductor whose designed impurity draws the two together." (p. 414)

Cartwright, ever on the run between the two sides of the ocean, is the mediator of the novel's reality (p. 388). He provides us with translations between Britishisms and their American equivalents. But like any projection (like Mercator's), he introduces distortions. And as the Hindus believed, the reality is ultimately an illusion.

The book's greatest strength is its finely worked digressive passages on just about anything, like a section in the middle of a paragraph in which Cartwright riffs on antique glass bottles (p. 363).