The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Actress in the House, by Joseph McElroy
reviewed by Trey Strecker

Joseph McElroy. Actress in the House. Overlook, 2003. 432 pp. $26.95.

Joseph McElroy’s dazzling, multidimensional novel brilliantly unfolds a seismic map that charts the tumultuous, uncertain relationship between Becca Lang and Bill Daley. The novel opens as Daley witnesses an actress at a warehouse theater violently struck in the face during a performance; as she is hit, Becca, the actress, catches Daley’s attention. From this initial connection McElroy explores the “joint venture” between actress and audience, storyteller and listener, that spirals backward and forward from several events in Daley’s past, including his wife’s death, his mugging, and a botched helicopter mission in Vietnam. Through the intersection of these two lives, this “plunge into another person,” McElroy navigates Becca and Daley’s emerging romance and negotiates their individual (perhaps linked) pasts, crafting a prismatic narrative that mimics the complex evolution of memory, as the diverse cast of characters recycles experience into multiple narratives. Actress in the House engages themes of love and abuse, memory and action in Daley’s passionately imagined New York, with “people and enterprises all linked like street noises or evidence.” Amid “the subtly dislodging, dissolving layers and vibrations” of McElroy’s deep vision, Daley operates as a hinge between people. “People take from what you give them something or other and you don’t know what it might be,” he observes. Throughout the novel Daley encounters many forms of physical and psychological abuse—the “misuse of actual people”—which spread in concentric waves across the narrative as Daley tries to maintain control of his past and discover the truth of Becca’s previous life. Actress serves as a masterful evocation of McElroy’s earlier work, displaying the same subtle perception and uncompromising intelligence as A Smuggler’s Bible, Lookout Cartridge, Plus, and Women and Men. Yet Actress is a remarkable, insightful novel in its own right, and readers should seek out McElroy’s distinctive voice, immense range of knowledge (geology, jazz, law, engineering), and unparalleled genius.