I knew very little about McElroy before I started this book; I picked it up because it was short and his name occasionally comes up in discussions of, e.g., Gaddis or Pynchon. A little amuse-bouche before I try the main course, kind of thing.

Well, not sure I'll try to main course. Reading it was frustrating for very straightforward reasons: the plot is simple and fun, the emotional energy behind it clear, the larger issues (about military adventure and the perversion of religion) obvious and important.

Sounds good. Then I realized that I knew exactly what was going on in any given paragraph without thinking about it at all, but if I slowed down and tried to read individual sentences, I had no idea what they were saying.

Now, if McElroy was telling me something difficult or new, I'd be fine with the convoluted sentences: sometimes it's hard to express difficult, new things. But each sentence in Cannonball tells us very little (if you want an example, just open the book; they're too long for me to type out right now). So why the syntactical trickery?

Well, the TLS review explains that "McElroy forces the reader to work in order to highlight his belief that knowledge is not a given." The Daily Beast tells us that "McElroy uses contemporary surfaces to entice us into an epistemology."

Okay. So McElroy is concerned to tell us how 'knowledge' is not a given. If so, either it doesn't exist (= relativism, which is only a worry if you think knowledge just is mathematical), or it's constructed.
If it's constructed, it's either imposed on people by an external agency ('there are WMDs in Iraq'), composed by an individual (relativism again) or composed by people together. Imposition isn't very nice. The construction of knowledge by people together could be, provided that the people doing the constructing recognize what they're doing, and work together as best they can.

And art can be one of the better examples of working together. The writer gives the reader what she thinks is important; the reader sees what she can make of what the writer has given her. But McElroy, and many other quasi-epistemologists, don't appear to recognize that making people 'work for it' is often just as oppressive as force.

I suspect that McElroy's earlier novels are better than this one. I'll give him another shot, for sure. But Cannonball feels too much like a period piece from the '70s for me to feel like I'll ever want to re-read it. But then, I actually studied epistemology, instead of conflating it with politics. ( )