The Iraq War at 80

While some octogenarian fiction writers, such as Philip Roth and Alice Munro, have retired, and others—William Gass in Middle C and Cynthia Ozick in Foreign Bodies—set their recent novels back 50 or so years in the past, Joseph McElroy, born in 1930, streams full speed ahead into the present with an inventive novel about the war in Iraq. Yes “streams,” not “steams,” because stream of consciousness is the closest term we have for the unique cognitive style that has made—and still makes—McElroy one of America’s most audacious and intelligent novelists. Intelligent because into the sweep and swirl of personal, emotionally layered stories McElroy floats information about the physical world and its study that only he seems to know—or invent. The closest comparison is the septuagenarian Thomas Pynchon, but McElroy has a subtler sensibility and is, I think, more learned in the sciences that often gird his novels.