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    Preparations for Search
    Preparations for Search
    Preparations for Search
    Ebook49 pages48 minutes

    Preparations for Search

    By Joseph McElroy

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    About this ebook

    Preparations for Search was a section removed from the classic Women and Men that stands alone as a great short work of fiction.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDzanc Books
    Release dateMar 1, 2012
    ISBN9781937854744
    Preparations for Search

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      Book preview

      Preparations for Search - Joseph McElroy

      On Preparations for Search: Joseph McElroy’s Late Model Noir

      Mike Heppner

      In conversation with Joseph McElroy, I once described his short novel Preparations for Search in genre terms as noir-core, in which the conventions of noir are flattened and compressed into dense, jet-black space, a gravitational singularity. As unprecedented as McElroy’s work appears at first glance, he’s also not afraid to use the familiar forms of genre to put forth his vision. Hind’s Kidnap is, at heart, a detective story. Plus? File under science fiction. Lookout Cartridge offers more than a little something to fans of John le Carré. Even later stories like Night Soul engage in coy flirtations with genre; in this case, the fairy tale. McElroy’s 2003 novel Actress in the House has a set-up straight out of Raymond Chandler: complex and alluring young woman entices older man (not actually a detective, but functionally so) to help her out of a jam.

      There’s a sense of noir in Preparations for Search as well, noir as defined by George Tuttle as a subcategory of hardboiled detective fiction in which the protagonist is usually not a detective, but instead either a victim, a suspect, or a perpetrator.¹ Amateur sleuths abound in McElroy, from the titular Hind in Hind’s Kidnap to Jim Mayn in Women and Men (again, not an actual detective but a kind of investigative journalist whose freelance sleuthing propels a good portion of the book). One could say that McElroy, in both his novels and short fiction, invites us to become sleuths as we plunder, decode, hypothesize about and interrogate his information-rich narratives.

      But what makes Preparations for Search noir-core is McElroy’s approach to tempo and tone. Here the prose is so tightly wound—the pace accelerated to two-hundred beats-per-minute—that what we’re left with is the structural essence of noir without the flabby clichés. Begun in the early-Eighties when the author was chest-deep at work on his 1987 masterpiece Women and Men, an early version of Preparations for Search was intended as part of Women and Men but pulled at the last minute, and except for a hush-hush appearance in Formations in 1984 (again, in nascent form), the narrative remained out of the public eye until Small Anchor Press published a limited run in 2010. This is the same text you have before you now.

      As McElroy himself is quick to point out, the part of Manhattan described in Preparations for Search bears only a certain resemblance to the same neighborhood today. Tribeca in the late-Seventies early-Eighties stood on the brink of a real estate boom that ultimately gentrified much of the area south of Canal and between Broadway and West. Originally home to warehouses and textile factories, by the 1970s most of those industries had fled Tribeca, leaving behind empty commercial lofts to be converted into relatively cheap residential space. This change attracted a new influx of population, among them artists, filmmakers, and the otherwise creatively-inclined. For a few years, Tribeca was a well-kept secret; not-yet-fashionable, but getting there. And this is the Now of Preparations for Search: a time when the neighborhood wasn’t quite so crowded with upscale eateries, when you had to wait in line to use a phone booth, and missing persons couldn’t be located on the Internet.

      Different—but also basically the same. That’s the thing about McElroy’s contemporary-minded fiction: it doesn’t date especially. We can still understand Enos’s longing to track down his estranged father. We sense the awkwardness between Bet, Enos, and Susan—never really a love triangle, except in some flattened perspective. We can relate to how money complicates relationships, or how inflections and intentions sometimes get lost over the phone. Most of all, we can still appreciate the timeless, truth-defining accuracy of a passage such as this:

      The pitcher completed his warm-up tosses, according to the commentator’s voice on transistor behind us. The pitcher turned his back on home plate. The game was underway again but it had gone on too long for Enos and Susan and me, and the odds were

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