There’s no beating around the bush: Cannonball is the most syntactically difficult book I’ve  read.  To call the writing wildly inexplicable is to somehow understate the amount of madness and purposeful incoherence and turbulence to be found in the prose.  This makes Faulkner’s and Virginia Woolf’s modernist stream-of-consciousness prose look positively quaint, linear and pedestrian in comparison.  The experience of reading this is like having a story shouted at you in a language you don’t understand while you’re underwater and something is spinning you head over heels, trying desperately to grasp any sort of meaning from the words swimming off the page in seemingly arbitrary sequences before it is untimely ripped away and you are disoriented again, summersaulting and drowning endlessly in white water.

That doesn't sound fun, and in some ways it isn't, but the nonchalant madness of the prose did not stop me from continuing all the way to the end, and that must be something to the book's credit.  The author spins a fascinating, mysterious premise: a combat photographer is at the poolside of one of the deposed Saddam Hussein's palaces under which, lies something, and under that: one part of a larger ancient Mesopotamian system of horizontal wells where a message, a hidden interview from Jesus Christ himself has been travelling across time and under land, promising a new gospel of profit, self-interest and entrepreneurship.  And there appears, absolutely inexplicably, a fat 300 pound age-ambiguous Chinese man, a childhood friend of the combat photographer, jumping off a diving board into that palatial pool.

This book is unapologetically difficult and slant, yet if careful attention is paid, I think a patient reader can suss out the majority of events that occur and even some of the rich layers of subtext.  The questions of who this fat Chinese man is, how he got there, why he's diving, who the combat photographer is and how they are connected, what the deal is with these Scrolls, and larger still: what the hell is this war all about... these mysteries gird a novel that almost has contempt for every convention of the medium (grammar and most standards of punctuation being the first casualties).  On a sentence by sentence level (whenever McElroy chooses to actually write it sentences...) , the novel is completely unpredictable; words are used and mis-used, characters have dialogues that are so broken and scattered they might as well be in insane.  It pushes the reader into an unrelenting and baffling state of paranoia; it might well exhaust you in its impenetrability.  But...and I can't even believe I'm saying this, there is something special and extraordinary at the core of the book: extracting endless parallels between its form and the act of diving, of backstroke, competition, doing-the-job, water, instantaneous rates of change, motion dissected and held in place by a befuddled cameraman, a surprisingly touching friendship and sincere but alarming intimacy.

I don't know who this book is for or if I even understand the better part of it.  And it's a shock to myself to say it but...I kinda liked it all the same.