Novel: Plexus

Overview

Plexus, the middle volume of Henry Miller’s Rosy Crucifixion trilogy, returns to late-1920s New York to chart the ordeal through which an aspiring writer forges his vocation. Where Sexus detonates the old life and Nexus foreshadows departure, Plexus is the long crucible: a tangle of love, poverty, bravado, and artistic hunger. Its title names the dense network of nerves and connections that bind body to mind, lovers to city, and daily survival to grand metaphysical ambition.

Plot and setting

Narrated by Henry, Miller’s undisguised alter ego, the book unfolds in cold-water flats, rooming houses, pawnshops, cafeterias, and cheap dance halls across Brooklyn and Manhattan. Henry has abandoned security to become a writer, but the pages do not come easily. He takes odd jobs, hustles acquaintances, and invents schemes that flare and fizzle. Money is a constant emergency. The city becomes both antagonist and tutor, spurring him with humiliations and revelations.

At the center stands his turbulent marriage to Mona, a dazzling and often unknowable figure whose charisma pulls admirers and patrons into their orbit. Their days alternate between exaltation and squalor: exaltation when they imagine a destiny beyond commerce, squalor when hunger and debt reduce them to quarrels, betrayals, and truce-making. Episodes rather than a straight line, the narrative moves through quarrelsome evenings, ecstatic walks, abortive theatrical ventures, and marathon conversations in which Henry declares his war on mediocrity and conformity.

A shadow element enters as Mona draws close to a mysterious female friend, a presence that both fascinates and terrifies Henry and begins to reshape the marriage. The triangle that will come to dominate the final volume gathers here as foreboding: love becomes a maze of mirrors in which each person seeks recognition and finds distortion.

Characters and relationships

Henry is mercurial, bombastic and tender, ruthless in self-scrutiny yet capable of colossal self-justification. Mona is a muse and saboteur by turns, a generator of myth who insists on beauty even when the rent is unpaid. Around them circulate fellow strivers, bohemians, and opportunists, artists with unfinished canvases, would-be impresarios, anonymous benefactors, each offering Henry a fleeting role or temptation. The relationships are transactional and sacramental at once, binding the characters in a compact of mutual exploitation and shared longing.

Themes

Plexus dramatizes the tension between art and ordinary life, between the demand to live truthfully and the costs of that demand for everyone nearby. It treats poverty as both scourge and discipline, a hammer shaping the temperament that will produce the later books. Eros is central, not only as sexuality but as a current running through speech, food, friendship, and rage. The novel interrogates American success myths, lampooning respectability while ferociously asserting an alternative ethic of waste, risk, and ecstatic attention.

At its core lies the problem of self-creation. Henry believes in a genius he has not yet proven; the novel renders the violence and comedy of building that self from scraps. Mona complicates this project by insisting on her own mythic space; love becomes a theater in which competing fictions wrestle for staging.

Style and structure

Instead of a conventional plot arc, Plexus proceeds by improvisation: scenes erupt out of argument and memory; meditations on art, history, and America splice into street-level reportage. The prose swings from hymn to harangue, piling catalogs and metaphors until a sensation or insight detonates. It is candid about sex and scatology, often comic, sometimes cruel, and persistently self-implicating. The effect is of a living mind thinking on the page, contradictory, excessive, unafraid.

Place in the trilogy and legacy

As the trilogy’s keystone, Plexus binds the initial break of Sexus to the severances of Nexus, tracing the painful apprenticeship that precedes the Paris years. It shows the voice that will write Tropic of Cancer gathering force amid failure, clarifying its quarrel with America, and testing the endurance of love. The book’s sprawling nerve-work, its very plexus, becomes both subject and method, a portrait of artistic becoming conducted at full voltage.