Joseph McElroy Knihy

A very tall man resumes his search for a kidnaped child long after the unsolved case has been officially closed. Hind dropped his search when he married. Now, some years later, at the instant the novel opens, he is leaving his apartment to visit his estranged wife Sylvia and his five-year-old daughter May; he wants to live with them. But at his door is a strange old woman, and in his mailbox a note beckoning him toward the old trail. Hind's renewed quest leads him among people in their spring and early-summer landscape - a city pier; the well-fenced office complex of a famous firm; a New England golf course and the owner's house overlooking it; a city health club; and a city university. Yet at the end of this pentad the kidnaping of the child, Hershey Laurel, has receded to a dim corner of the book. And Hind's late, beloved guardian, and the threatening past he summons up, grow more and more powerful, uncontrollably, as does Hind's awareness that his search has taken possession of him.

Beginning in childbirth and entered like a multiple dwelling in motion, Women and Men embraces and anatomizes the 1970s in New York - from experiments in the chaotic relations between the sexes to the flux of the city itself. Yet through an intricate overlay of scenes, voices, fact, and myth, this expanding fiction finds its way also across continents and into earlier and future times and indeed the Earth, to reveal connections between the most disparate lives and systems of feeling and power. At its breathing heart, it plots the fuguelike and fieldlike densities of late-twentieth-century life. McElroy rests a global vision on two people, apartment-house neighbors who never quite meet. Except, that is, in the population of others whose histories cross theirs believers and skeptics; lovers, friends, and hermits; children, parents, grandparents, avatars, and, apparently, angels. For Women and Men shows how the families through which we pass let one person's experience belong to that of many, so that we throw light on each other as if these kinships were refracted lives so real as to be reincarnate. A mirror of manners, the book is also a meditation on the languages, rich, ludicrous, exact, and also American, in which we try to grasp the world we're in. Along the kindred axes of separation and intimacy Women and Men extends the great line of twentieth-century innovative fiction.

An unexpected visitor in a man's apartment pens a peculiar confession intended for the host who is not present. This intriguing scenario unfolds into a deeper exploration of secrets and personal revelations, as the guest's thoughts reveal insights into both his own character and the absent host's life. The narrative invites readers to ponder themes of identity, connection, and the impact of uninvited intrusions on one's private world.

Set against the backdrop of the Iraq war, the narrative intertwines the lives of two divers and a Californian family. Their intimate relationships serve as a lens to explore broader themes of conflict, resilience, and human connection, revealing how personal stories are intricately woven into the fabric of larger historical events. This poignant exploration delves into the impact of war on individual lives and the bonds that unite them in times of crisis.