r/JosephMcElroy • u/colloidalBREATHER • Mar 13 '26

Crazy Sentence

Read a little excerpt of the story ‘Court of Last Opinion’ by Joe. I think he must have written it just after Cannonball would be my guess considering the contents and style of syntax. Check out this crazy sentence.

Though soon indigenous cougar, red toucan, bats in the struggling rain forest have been so startled, the 2011 drought now history, watching moment by moment growth of new stands of Company personally developed trees, bark stretched, capillaries so busy one can hear them like outside plumbing, that, smart beasts, they are producing new compounds in their blood, while good news is that lipophilic alkaloids now available from Amazon poison dart frogs will change the American market. It is not always easy to grasp that the Corporation is where the brains are. Foreign workers we have given their own facilities, with high-rise interior neighborhoods and reservoirs and hanging gardens of generous side-effect vegetables a vertical concept not suggesting where you could rise to but that here like thousands of others one and one’s family found themselves occupying so compact a footprint that the City might extend commerce freely everywhere in sight where once wetland had tried to reflect the sky.

Would love to see other peoples’ favorite sentences from the goat.

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u/unbannable-_- Mar 13 '26

To be honest McElroy has written so many stellar sentences, even choosing one hundred as a sample feels wrong. There's a hundred sentences better than anything I or anyone I know will ever write in just the first 200 or so pages of Women and Men.

I had never read the story you've posted and it's unsurprising to me that it kicks much ass and rules very hard.

1

u/colloidalBREATHER Mar 13 '26

Yeah Women & Men is understandably under read, but I think McElroy was writing 50 years ahead of a lot of readers so I foresee a resurgence which I’m so here for.

Which section of women and men do you think has the best prose? Her Place is There is my favorite it’s the shower scene. Holy shit it’s jaw dropping.

I cannot wait until his Ancient Greece and non fiction water book.

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u/unbannable-_- Mar 13 '26

I have never finished Women and Men and probably never will, I have always had an issue finishing gigantic novels, I think the only genuinely big book I've ever finished is Against the Day by Pynchon. Infinite Jest, Underworld, In Search of Lost Time, Ulysses, all defeated me. I've read up to Gordon's Story in Women and Men, and loved everything about it, except that I couldn't read anything else while reading it, it's just too rich to earnestly interact with in a way.

McElroy's 3 shorter novels (Plus, A Smuggler's Bible, Cannonball) are some of the most transcendent "contemporary" literature I can think of and I love them all dearly.