Ancient History: A Paraphrase

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1. At the center of Henry James’ writings, forming a sort of hinge in James’ shelf, perhaps, stand a handful of tales in which someone contemplates and abides with the mysterious and supervalent absence of a dead or dying writer: “The Lesson of the Master,” “The Figure In The Carpet,” “The Aspern Papers,” “The Middle Years.” Joseph McElroy’s shelf is double-hinged (at least), with two narratives that resonate with this archetypal plot, in The Letter Left To Me and Ancient History: A Paraphase. In Letter, as in the examples from James, the narrator/ protagonist is a vulnerable recipient, a would-be interpreter or medium, left to contend with an opaque address from the dark side. Ancient History reverses these charges. It takes the form of an eloquent, garrulous, obsessionally digressive, tender and yet rebuking address to a dead genius.

2. I’ve just heaved out my effort at categorical description—“a reverse-engineered Jamesian address to the dead”—at great cost. For, like most — all? — of McElroy’s fiction, Ancient History stymies the categorical impulse to an extreme degree. McElroy’s prose, coming on less like a street-gang than like a storm-cloud of evocations, intimations, and signifiers, robs the reader of his guidebook and compass. McElroy doesn’t shirk clarity, or particularity; he’s a great bestower of intensely clear descriptive and conceptual moments. His writing consists of almost nothing else. But there are few writers less interested in standing to one side, in the role of ringmaster or stage manager, to interject with comparisons, framing remarks, or encompassing descriptions.

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