Plus

One of McElroy's most endearing works: it is at once strange and familiar, as much of his other stuff, but its brevity makes it one of his most powerful and haunting novels. The prose is phenomenal--like Imp Plus, the narrator, it expands and grows as his bizarre mind-building experiences accumulate, turning into something more real (his voice carries him like a parent, and not the other way around) than poor Plus himself, who can only circle around the earth and never join it. His identity becomes his voice, assimilating each of his experiences and serving to sustain or remember them somehow by reporting on them. Communication here is a metaphor for being--our voice is our consciousness--and it is beautifully done.

Joseph McElroy, who claims with this book an attempt to write shorter books for a reading public with less time on their hands, has written in "Plus" an incredibly ambitious and experimental novel. He does no less than discuss the emergence of consciousness; he attempts to explain, or at least propose, the first instances of conscious intelligence. If he has, as suggested, reduced the size of the novel, he has in turn increased its complexity and density."Plus" is by no means an easy novel to read. In fact, it challenges the reader at every turn. However, to read it through, to contemplate its implications, and to finally understand it, is to take part in its achievement.