Women and Men

Literary fiction

First published: 1987
Print length: 1191 pagesKnopf, 1987

Description

James Mayn, a business and technology journalist in New York City, occupies the same Murray Hill building as Grace Kimball, a woman linked to many people in his life. The two repeatedly approach an encounter without quite meeting, even as Grace’s dreams echo a mythic version of Jim’s grandmother’s history. Around them, other lives and eras accumulate, including rehearsals for Hamletin, a never-performed opera reputed to possess magical powers and resist fascism. Rather than following a single linear plot, the novel spirals among historical periods, imagined futures, intimate connections, and vast social forces. Its long, detail-rich sentences explore technology, inherited memory, desire, power, and the hidden systems that keep separate lives in consequential proximity.

Reading profile

About this profile

Collected’s assessment, not reader ratings. Complexity runs from 1 (least demanding) to 5 (most demanding).

Writing: How much attention the sentences and language require.
Ideas: How much interpretation or abstract reasoning the book asks of you.
Structure: How much you need to keep track of speakers, timelines and connections.
Background knowledge: Prior knowledge needed to follow the book, beyond what it explains.
Emotional intensity: Emotional pressure, from gentle (1) to intense (5). Separate from difficulty.

Writing style

Dense · Descriptive · Experimental · Lyrical

Pace

Slow

Tone

Atmospheric · Cerebral · Philosophical · Wistful

Structure

Braided · Fragmented · Multiple timelines

Focus

Character · Ideas · Relationships

Emotional intensity

3 / 5

Reading complexity

1–5 · higher means more demanding

Writing: 5 / 5
Ideas: 5 / 5
Structure: 5 / 5
Background knowledge: 3 / 5

Themes

Art and creativityIsolationLoveMemoryPowerTechnology and society

About Joseph McElroy

Joseph McElroy is an American novelist, short story writer, and essayist whose fiction combines encyclopedic reach with close attention to consciousness. He builds narratives from documents, disputed evidence, interrupted memories, and embedded stories, allowing information to accumulate before its connections become clear. His sentences are often long and densely descriptive, while his structures move among time frames and points of view rather than following a single line of action. Science and technology recur both as subjects and as forces shaping perception, power, and social life. In Women and Men, intimate histories, imagined futures, and large systems converge around two New Yorkers who repeatedly approach an encounter without meeting. Lookout Cartridge turns the search for a destroyed documentary into a shifting investigation of surveillance, recollection, and control over images. A Smuggler’s Bible uses eight autobiographical manuscripts nested within a sea voyage, with each narrative altering the frame that contains it. McElroy’s characters often understand experience by arranging its fragments, even as that arrangement unsettles identity and ownership.

Book details

For the print edition listed above.

Publisher: Knopf
Language: English
ISBN: 9780394503448

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