Reviews for Liberty and Law: Being an Attempt at the Refutation of the Individualism of Mr. Herbert Spen...

The average rating for Liberty and Law: Being an Attempt at the Refutation of the Individualism of Mr. Herbert Spen... based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2012-08-31 00:00:00 James Mayer Required reading for one of my ancient art classes in college. Review: Useful resource for study. I enjoyed this.

Review # 2 was written on 2019-04-11 00:00:00 Lisamarie Stout "In the Spirit of My Divisions" Joseph McElroy has imagined himself, "in the spirit of [his] divisions, somewhere between Vladimir Nabokov and Norman Mailer." Initially, this statement comes across as egotistical, given the relative status of the three authors. How many readers have even heard of McElroy, let alone read him? Of those who have read him, how many have read him critically enough to question his self-assessment? On the other hand, what of his choice of author? It's understandable that authors might aspire to the standards of Nabokov, especially ones who, like McElroy and Pynchon, are science-literate or numerate. They inject science and mathematics into both the subject matter and the form of their fiction. However, why Mailer? What is the connection? How proximate are the two authors? Why does McElroy appear to rate Mailer so highly? True Confessions One of the reasons for McElroy's interest is the significance of confession in Mailer's works (not necessarily in a religious sense). Indeed, this mode of writing is equally present in "Lolita". A lot of critics of "Lolita" tend to overlook the fact that it is effectively structured as a confession, even if it was never actually read during Humbert Humbert's life and therefore had no impact on any criminal proceedings (which would have been discontinued after he died while awaiting trial in prison). In "The Armies of the Night", Mailer mentions that during the day preceding the night of Robert Kennedy's assassination, he [Mailer] was enjoying a dalliance or secret assignation with a woman. Having revealed this (almost, if not probably, unnecessarily), he adds, "Let us leave it at that." You have to ask why, if he was going to leave it at that, he didn't leave it out altogether? The only answer consistent with Mailer's character is his overwhelming sense of sexual and political braggadocio. Something about this quality simultaneously attracted and repelled or disgusted McElroy. Whatever we might think of Mailer now, he was a very public intellectual, a celebrity, a media personality, at a time when it was rare for authors in particular to enjoy such a profile outside their chosen art form. McElroy refers to Mailer's self-disclosure as "an embarrassment of greed, but also an open assault on his own privacy." Mailer craved the limelight, the attention, the enhancement it might offer his sex appeal and life. It didn't matter that he might embarrass or disgrace himself. What mattered was the perception of machismo. If it was a public perception, all the better. Fulfilling Relationships For all his creative virtuosity, McElroy doesn't strike me as the same sort of egotist as Mailer. He seems to have a genuine interest in the mechanisms and success of relationships. He writes about relationships as something you do with somebody, rather than something you do to somebody. Mailer seemed to write about sexual relationships as if they were 15 round boxing matches that the male had to win, even if it meant that the conquest of the female might result in her death. Occasionally, I wondered whether McElroy resembled Saul Bellow or William Gaddis in any material way. While Bellow is not as macho as Mailer, I think that there is still a sense in which the solo man is dominant and a woman might be a convenient accessory for social events or status. Compared with Gaddis, the concerns of metafiction are more omnipresent or at least waiting just around the corner, even if the manner of their execution sometimes threatens to unrail McElroy's fluid and elegant sentences. McElroy arguably has more in common with the John Updike of "Couples" (absent the metafictional practices). He seems to define a person, regardless of gender, as someone who is capable of, and ought to be having, a relationship of some kind, whatever the trauma or difficulty or inconvenience. For McElroy, the quality of the relationship is very much the measure of the person. A Letter to a Dominant Male "Ancient History" is structured as a letter to a dead man, Dom, who could be modelled on Mailer. Dom has just suicided by defenestration. In "An American Dream", the protagonist kills his wife in the same way, and ends up outside on the ledge of an apartment building, wondering whether to jump. McElroy's protagonist, Cy, walks into Dom's open apartment shortly after the police have left, sits down at his desk and starts to write a letter, which is the novel, using Dom's pen and paper. There is a sense of urgency about the composition of the letter. The authorities or family members could walk in and discover Cy at any stage. In fact, at the exact half-way point, Dom's son-in-law removes the first half of the letter. This epistolary form is the only stylistic issue I felt was unconvincing in conceit. During the first few pages, the style is as crisp as a detective novel. However, it soon degenerates into a soliloquy, more like a recording of Cy's thoughts (though never a stream of consciousness: the sentences are too precisely crafted). It just doesn't sound like a story somebody would tell, either to an acquaintance or a stranger, certainly not in letter form. At times, I wondered whether Cy was mentally unbalanced, at the very least a stalker. This angle isn't pursued, although this might simply be a product of the fact that it is a first person narrative. Buildingsroman Just like "Women and Men", "Ancient History" is set in an apartment building. It's a microcosm of society and the semi-public space in which both characters and readers are educated. In a way, the Building is the Bildung, and the Novel is a Buildingsroman. Similarly, just as McElroy is interested in the relationships between people, he's interested in how they can be measured. He describes them mathematically, and maps their coordinates on graph paper in accordance with Field Theory. Tripartite friendships are described in terms of the friends being equidistant. The proximity of C and D varies when A and B move closer. This aspect of the novel warrants greater scrutiny. There are probably sophisticated mechanisms at work in the novel's structure that aren't immediately obvious. If so, they're still there for someone else to track. To be honest, I didn't find this aspect of the novel particularly fascinating. I don't want to condemn McElroy to realism, but I think if he devoted less effort to metafiction, he would emerge with better fiction. Spiral Bound Fiction Still, the aspects that most appealed to me appear to be structured around mathematical parabolas and spirals. The relationships occupy spaces that spiral from the magnitude of society at large, to the microcosm of the apartment building, to the 12th floor, to Dom's apartment, to his study, to his desk, to his pen and paper, to the mind of Cy, to his letter, to, finally, the novel itself. McElroy is interested in not just time, but space. The two novels that I have read explore the poetics of space, both inside and outside, both inner and outer space (including spacecraft). Sometimes, it seems as if McElroy is trying to pack too much sophistication and subtlety into his novel. He seems to be trying too hard, when he could sit back and trust his novel to do its job. As you get towards the end, though, after many times wondering what the hell is going on and why, it all comes together. You feel that you have finally lifted the bonnet on the engine of his vehicle and you can appreciate the engineering in all of its precision and beauty. However, many readers would not last the distance. Man of Letters McElroy shares another flaw with Norman Mailer, though not to the same degree. The latter tried too hard to tie himself to the Zeitgeist, by endeavouring, self-consciously, to define and embody it. Now, decades later, it's very easy for his writing and preoccupations to seem dated. Time has moved on. So have ways of seeing. The very fact that Mailer symbolised so much to McElroy begs the question why (as much as he is one of my literary keystones). Surely it is more than a fascination with the dual perspective of a public intellectual? As it turns out, Cy's letter is much more about his own Ancient History, and his own confession. Still, you have to question whether it would have been a better novel without the implied need to incorporate traces of Mailer's macho Weltanschauung. I don't know enough about McElroy personally. However, on the basis of his writing, I suspect that he is at heart a shy person, a relative introvert, who is more comfortable in the guise of a man of letters in contrast to Mailer's ostensible man of action. Ultimately, we only need one Norman Mailer. It would be illuminating to see even more of the real Joseph McElroy, a unique man of letters, in his own work.