The latest addition to my website is Joseph McElroy‘s Actress in the House. This is another somewhat odd novel from McElroy, his first in fifteen years (and the next one won’t be till June 2013, ten years after this one). It starts with an actor slapping an actress, playing his sister, very hard in the face and carries on with McElroy’s trademark themes of people trying to make sense out of random information and link things together, a lawyer wondering whether he should sue the state of Connecticut for causing an earthquake, a couple sleeping together in the nude but not having sex, an atrocity during the Vietnam War and various odd events seemingly somehow connected. It makes for interesting if somewhat puzzling reading.