Cannonball is an oddly structured, dense novel, but when committed to provides a rewarding and totally unique reading experience.  We are not treated to typical sentence structure or chapter flow, instead we occupy the mind of our main character Zach, but maybe even something deeper than his mind, his subconscious or perhaps his unconscious. Wherever it is we’ve descended to, thoughts bounce around wildly, partially formed, fragmented and scattered, and we have to be willing to continue to collect these pieces and trust that finally grasping the whole will be worth it. 

In a sense it is almost like experiencing the birth of a thought, we follow these fractured snippets, thoughts and remembrances, and are rewarded with the moment the idea or full memory crystalizes within Zach, McElroy takes us along on this process in a truly unique way, here he is doing something more chaotic than just stream of consciousness. He accomplishes this not just with the content of his sentences but the sentences themselves, words are presented in odd, almost alien orders, simple concepts and ideas are made obscure and difficult to grasp because they are presented in a linguistically abnormal, almost backward way. This too serves the larger goal of getting us to think in a fractured manner, to not immediately grasp a thought but have to study it, weigh the words we read, feel it as it shapes itself in our own minds. 

The story is one of conspiracy, taking us back to the Iraq War, where the US creates and claims to have discovered ancient scrolls, revealing Jesus to be less a peacemaker and more a war happy, free enterprise loving capitalist.  This satirizing of the era's Christian support of the wartime effort runs throughout the novel, and importantly as well while we spend time in a combat zone with our main character and even experience a bombing, there are never any enemy combatants to be found.  McElroy posits the notion that The War in Iraq was a war fought exclusively by the United States, a confusing war with no enemy propagandized to death.  

Zach is caught in the midst of it all as an army photographer, and we spend a good deal of time with him and his mysterious Chinese immigrant friend, Umo, as the two of them spend time in California and then strangely reunite in the Middle East.  It's a book packed with twists and turns, all unfurling expertly through the fractured memories and feelings of our protagonist.  McElroy's understanding and ability to convey the experience of a memory as it forms is fantastic to witness, and the entire book is an experience unlike any other.