Can you ever really know someone else? The cliche is you can’t know someone until you’ve walked in their shoes. Perhaps that’s true. But does that mean you don’t know your partner? Will you ever? And if one wanted to, what would it take to get there?
In Isle McElroy’s new novel, People Collide, we follow a writer named Eli who wakes up to find his wife has vanished and he is alone in Bulgaria. And what’s more when he goes to her work, he finds he has become her. As in, he is inside her body. Which begs the question: what happened to his body?
He goes on a chase that takes him across Europe, into a terrorist attack in Paris, and eventually back into the United States. He’s chasing his wife, yes, but also chasing himself. And, in doing so, he learns more about the two of them than he could’ve imagined – their hopes, their desires, and the aspects of their personalities they keep hidden.
… McElroy narrows in on a specific intersection on a Venn diagram: masculinity, mass culture, the self.
Both of McElroy’s books are interested in exploring ideas around gender roles and masculinity. On one level, their debut novel, The Atmospherians,is about cults and the people who get involved in them, but on another, it is an exploration of masculinity in today’s world. One of the characters, Dyson, is a guy who struggles to be a guy. His friends are women; his body is never quite enough. He binges, he purges, he pushes himself into extremes. From the men who got involved in the DeLillo-like “Man Hordes,” going around in a stupor, to the way Dyson struggled with his self-image, McElroy narrows in on a specific intersection on a Venn diagram: masculinity, mass culture, the self. The idea of the “man horde” was a riff on fragile masculinity run amok: men are so forced into a gender role they literally lose themselves in it, as if in a trance. There, McElroy takes us deep into Dyson’s world of struggling to be a man in society today, and through the eyes of their protagonist, Sasha Marcus, we see Dyson slowly unravel and eventually self-destruct.
McElroy has inverted their interest in gender roles in People Collide. Instead of exploring masculinity from a feminine perspective, they investigate femininity from a masculine point of view. We see Eli learning how to navigate the world as a woman, how people see him in his wife’s body, and how to maneuver these tricky passages without prior experience. Perhaps I’m describing any number of trans fictions: Casey Plett’s A Dream of a Woman, Imogen Binnie’s Nevada, or Jeanne Thornton’s Summer Fun.
I didn’t want to emulate him so much as I wanted to be closer to him, to impress him, simply for him to like me and for him to want those same things from me: a desire to be closer, a desire to impress me…
But McElroy’s book diverges from these, gathering on the collector lane of the freeway instead of the express. Eli, a character who has never wanted to be a woman and has never even considered exploring this territory, is forced to learn through missteps and accidents. Things pile up and build as Eli figures out what works and why. Take this scene from Eli meeting a man for drinks in a Paris bar: “I didn’t want to emulate him so much as I wanted to be closer to him, to impress him, simply for him to like me and for him to want those same things from me: a desire to be closer, a desire to impress me…”
McElroy’s a writer with a knack for description and getting into their characters’ heads. They alternate perspectives, sometimes from Eli’s point of view, sometimes from afar. It creates a level of detachment where we know what’s happening in Eli’s mind but are never quite sure about Elizabeth. This shifting of perspective keeps readers slightly off-balance and from getting too comfortable. But by the end, we also see the stark changes in both Eli and Elizabeth and how they’ve grown and shifted as people: “For the first time, I could see how the qualities in Elizabeth that so impressed me – her relentlessness, her intelligence, the precision of the stories she told – could make me uneasy,” says Eli.
A briskly paced novel that’s both a thrilling chase through Europe and an examination of how two people don’t know each other like they thought, People Collide is an enjoyable read and shows McElroy building on the successes of their first novel.
