Cannonball

Cannonball is a wonderful book, one which I will eagerly return to time and time again. In general, the confusion associated with growing up is often masked by one's sense of duty and responsibility on many fronts: duty and responsibility to one's self, to one's family, to political sentiments, and in relation to one's peers, just to name a few.The magic that McElroy weaves in his challenging (and rewarding all throughout!) narratives is unrivaled.McElroy continues to write about the connections that human beings only seem to be able catch a glimpse of, the purpose just outside our peripheries; the ways in which we all succeed and fail to connect with others. For our troubled times (cliché, I know) I know of no other writer, of both fiction and nonfiction, who can describe and bring forth a more sincere, genuinely beautiful form of clarity of what it is like to be a human in this conflicted world.

On the twentieth day of March 2003, the United States invaded Iraq. WMDs, regime change, terrorism: numerous justifications were given. As time passed and more information came to light, the rationale became more and more obfuscated, and as such the conversation changed. Political parties were divided—the nation was divided. Yet still our presence persisted in spite of the mounting suspicions, confusions, and disapproval. It is to this time of conflict—both foreign and domestic—that Joseph McElroy turns his inimitable gaze in Cannonball, his ninth and newest novel.Competitive diving, photography, undocumented immigrants—Cannonball’s scope is wide, and necessarily so. Central to the narrative is Zach, a war photographer whose diving career was cut short due to an injury sustained as a child, and his unlikely friend, Umo, the corpulent high diving savant of Chinese origin who lacks both valid documentation and anything resembling a stable home life. Writing with a cubist’s command of time, McElroy effortlessly slips between the novel’s present—war-torn Iraq—and Zach’s tense, conflict-ridden high school past, where he struggles with identity and purpose, living under the overbearing gaze of his diving instructor father, and alongside his sister, with whom he shares an uncomfortable intimacy.It is impossible to talk about a McElroy novel without talking about sentences. For, like Gertrude Stein and Samuel Beckett, no one writes sentences like Joseph McElroy; and just like Stein and Beckett, the sentences are what matter most. But unlike those two modernist masters, who tested the sentence’s ability to withstand tightness and constraint, McElroy pushes the limits of just how much a sentence can hold. At times transitioning among five distinct time periods, while elsewhere containing multiple paragraphs, McElroy’s sentences are neural networks unto themselves. Notwithstanding the prose difficulty, Cannonball contains enough velocity that it often reads more like a page-turning thriller than a close assessment of a society in conflict.Cannonball gives us McElroy at his most paranoid: A mysterious set of scrolls sought by the U.S. military for their power, and the sometimes preternatural tendencies of Umo’s movements and actions, evoke a mysticism that feels both appropriate and necessary when tackling a topic as multifaceted as the Iraq War. Although the paranoia and the undeniable difficulty of his prose lead many critics to compare this octogenarian to the likes of Pynchon and DeLillo, McElroy’s perspective lacks the bleakness associated with their postmodernism. McElroy’s writing never retreats to black humor, nor does he adopt a detached tone when wrestling with some of the most difficult issues; rather, he writes with the care and closeness of James or Proust, where the nuances of humanity matter more than systemic psychological or societal exhaustion.Not just a war novel, McElroy here is at home with what he does best: intricately measuring human interactions and, perhaps more importantly, non-interactions to illuminate the complexities created out of a world in flux. We watch as Zach wrestles with loss and discovery, gradually managing to parse out a semblance of belonging, though exactly what he belongs to remains always out of focus.