Laura Warholic; or, The Sexual Intellectual

by Alexander Theroux

Eugene Eyestones, an erudite sex columnist for a Boston cultural magazine, becomes enmeshed in the messy life of a would-be artist named Laura Warholic. Repulsing and fascinating him at the same time, she becomes a mirror in which he not only sees himself but through which he is forced to face his own demons. Not only does she inadvertently supply him with material for his columns, she represents all Eugene considers to be wrong with contemporary America - a garish and dunce-filled Babylon that Theroux scorches with relentless satire.

Genres: Fiction, Literature, Novels, American, 21st Century, Literary Fiction, Contemporary

878 pages, Hardcover

First published December 17, 2007

About the author

Alexander Theroux is a novelist, poet, and essayist. The most apt description of the novels of Theroux was given by Anthony Burgess in praise of Theroux's Darconville's Cat: Theroux is 'word drunk', filling his novels with a torrent of words archaic and neologic, always striving for originality, while drawing from the traditions of Rolfe, Rabelais, Sterne, and Nabokov.

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

Laura Warholic or, the Sexual Intellectual is an authentic jungle of words.
Alexander Theroux doesn’t write to entertain, he writes to kill…

The future isn’t what it used to be.

Alexander Theroux satirizes absolutely everything, mocking every perversity in the nation and deriding every twist in society, leaving no stone unturned and maintaining the idea that truth just can’t be politically correct…
He cunningly cites The First Epistle to the Corinthians: “To the weak I became weak, to win over the weak.”
Exactly – amongst cripples pretend to be a cripple, amongst imbeciles pretend to enjoy imbecility so in this way the apostolic turncoat Saint Paul was the first politically correct politician.

Solitude is in a sense a deepening of the present, and he kept his counsel when time presented itself by realizing that art – music and books – for the longest time had been preponderating over his life more than the actual living of it.

In the end, life of an intellectual is a journey from the world without to the world within. A true intellectual is a stranger in any land.

[George · Rating 5 out of 5]

Alexander Theroux’s inscription to George Salis after a visit to Theroux’s home in Cape Cod. (10/4/22)


******An artillery of trigger warnings.******

Just as one doesn’t read Theroux for a Patterson-patterned plot in lieu of the wonder of words, you shouldn’t read him if you make the perennially stupid mistake of confusing a character’s actions and beliefs with that of the author’s, nor if you read books in the facile hope of becoming besties with the characters. And at the apex of a current cult of outrage in this cuntry, the censorious-saurus rears its empty head to gnash at anything offensive, which is everything, so if you haven’t already noticed, beware that this review adopts the bellicosity of the novel in question.

The term ‘shaggy monster’ is often used for any novel above, say, 500 pages, yet if only one novel deserves the label, it’s Laura Warholic, for it boasts digressive soliloquies on venomous hatred and idealized love and vice versa, lists of sex facts, historical curiosities, unsavory characteristics, freaks and phonies, as well as poems, song lyrics, and even sheet music. Like Ulysses, high and low culture and everything in between is used. Though it does have some nagging pleonasm and repetition, this did not significantly affect my reading experience. The novel is also similar to Infinite Jest not only in its shagginess but also in its merciless indictment of that great oxymoron (emphasis on moron) known as ‘American culture.’ All of it ending with the echo of a Greek tragedy, not unlike that far slimmer, more soft-spoken novel, The Great Gatsby.

While Darconville’s Cat is the epitome of titillating verbosity, a lingual animus of animosity and amore and more, Laura Warholic is less so, yet it still maintains a consistent flow of delightful words, such as ipsissimus, feuilleton, xeriscape, gletz, chemotaxis, actirastic, ostinato, cachinnation, geosynclinals, eutectic, aposematically, and azoic.

Speaking of the Cat, it’s often said that revenge is a dish served cold and, as cold as it is, it also hasn’t gotten cold, as it were, in the fired-up mind of Theroux because about 20 years later we get a hilarious cameo, Darconville’s lost cat Isabel Rawsthorne, who womanifests in a lesbian club called the Sewing Circle no less, a place infinitely more freakish than the medusan music venues in modern vampire movies. Amid this raucous scene of big and small racks screaming on the rack: ‘“I’m an acomovulvate,” shouted fat-assed Isabel Rawsthorne, a wallop-thigh-sized middle-aged greyball going up to another woman who looked like a tin-cup chimp.’ Rawsthorne is only one among alien throngs, for we get multiple humorous lists of the mostly grotesque-sounding club-goers, such as “amazons, cowboy girls, berdaches, women in lumber-jackets, dime bull-dykes, inertinites, female mastodons, kickboxing bansheettes, tribadists, succobovaients, gynoids, sex sufists, dandle queers, sexual variety artists, female infonauts, exchromonians, tinjinkers, bold she-males, old boy actresses, lumber-mothers, algogenesolagniasts, gregomulcts, mammathigmomaniacs, asylum-seekers, nerdoïdes, two-fisted falsettists, ambiguas, half-and-half figures, neurosthenic seek-arrows,” and much more.

The Sexual Intellectual of the novel’s subordinate title is Vietnam War veteran and poly-hobbyist Eugene Eyestones, who writes a column that explores the many faces and facets of sex and love. Eyestones, or E2 as some of his acquaintances call him, has a gyneghost in his past and a gyneghost in his future, Snow and Rapunzel Wisht respectively. Snow was a Vietnamese lover Eyestones had had, a Utopian relationship in which arguments were nonexistent and he reminisces how “there were so many sounds that made so little sense in the silences of night, except their souls.” Conversely, Rapunzel, as her name would suggest, is the unrealized fairytale, the beautiful mirage who works at a bakery. Rhapsodizing upon Rapunzel, Eyestones admires her from afar, taking it to hyperromantic if stalkerish levels, though “an undevout astronomer is mad” too. Yet this pure and pulchritudinous icon turns into something of a Necronomicon near the novel’s end. Caught between these two, Eyestones’s worship is curbed by the warship USS Warholic, the war alcoholic who is the titular Laura, conducting her scurvied skirmishes with Eyestones by using the hole in her head, likewise with others when she isn’t using the hole between her legs.

Laura is the embodiment of moronic America: debauched, plastic, ugly, incurious, delusional, pitiful, hypocritical, historically amnesic, pridefully ignorant, someone who has “the courage of her contradictions” and “always managed to see a tunnel at the end of the light.” Her unintelligence, if not anti-intelligence, is exemplified in a multitude of ways, including the fact that “her trains of thought had no cabooses” and “she needed a recipe to make ice cubes,” and anytime Eyestones utters an allusion or a generally lucid remark, she perceives it as an attack on the silly citadel of her dullard duck mind. Unlike many McDonald’s-sponsored Americans, however, she is disturbingly thin, fatuously skinny, a characteristic that the novel almost becomes unhealthily obsessed with, yet even Eyestones is in constant disbelief at her musculature or lack thereof. Thus she is something of an inverse ascetic, empty of everything those hungerkünstlers usually strive and starve for.

One of the thematic questions is the reason why Eugene is ‘with her’ at all, because it’s not even for the base excuse of bathetic coitus, for even when he had transient thoughts about such transactions, it came with the condition of an AIDS test, which she refused out of an irrational fear that echoes Schrödinger’s, not Darconville’s, cat, as though medically opening her box of “bushy scrubbing-brush pubes” would unsnatch one or more fatal diseases—Pandora’s pussy.

Read the full review in my Invisible Books column: https://thecollidescope.com/2020/07/0...

[Geoff · Rating 5 out of 5]

Laura Warholic is a tome of millennial sadness, desperation, and alienation; a jeremiad against American decadence and our rudderless expenditure of aimless energies and ever-quickening cacophonous descent into shallow materialistically-driven stupidity; a plea for lost grace, manners, intelligence, and beauty; a hard slap in the face that attempts a re-awakening of self-esteem and urges toward dignity; a record of the diabolical, noxious, tortured flaming-out of late-Capitalism and ruined democracy; a proof-in-text of the faltering, buzzing neon sign flickering outside the Hotel de Dream, “God less America” and a cri de coeur, not necessarily for a re-ascent of the ancient Gods of the Bible, the Torah or the Koran, but for some God, any God, any Ideal more beautiful and perfect and fulfilled than one’s self- some form or goal in the imagination that we positively work toward, and through that working-toward edge closer to perfecting ourselves within our limited lifetimes- an Absolute greater than the ego that proves our notions of “greater”, “perfect”, “beautiful”, “peaceful”, “sublime”. For this is that which is the gaping vacancy at the center of our times. This is that which is lost and what has almost utterly vanished from our era, which now only resides in the fluttering periphery- the conception of a sublime, idealized Self.

But let’s get through the unpleasant stuff first. This book, like any great, gigantic novel, has a number of glaring flaws. It is at times overwritten, even in the context of maximalist literature. There was a moment ¾ through the chapter set in the Sewing Circle nightclub where I found myself sighing “I get it already, I get it, freaks abound and we’re in Bruegel/Bosch/Bacchanalia-ville, I don’t really need twenty more pages of this, Mr. Theroux”, while at the same time it was hilariously exhaustive and at the level of wordage never boring or uninventive. Always alive and drunk with language, this book, always in love with its own rhythms and exhilaration, word-dazed and word-high it churns and rattles on like Suicide jamming at their most twisted and out (a comparison Theroux would gleefully despise). Yes, for awhile I employed my dictionary every few pages, and yes a great book has the duty of sending you to your dictionary, but at a certain point I stopped the constant checking of definitions and structures and began to formulate my own meanings and began breaking the neologisms and obscurants down into their components, and one realizes that Theroux’s verbosity is teaching you something about how words are made. Word-fever is never a negative, in my reading experience. Give me more, layer it on, bury me with words, if your words are as intoxicating as Theroux’s. A greater issue to me was the repetition of specific sentences and ideas, which seemed at times not so much a textual or textural choice on Theroux’s part, but an unintentional repeating due to problems of mass within this monstrous, Hydra-headed book, that belies bad editing. Speaking of which, this book has possibly the most typos I’ve ever seen in a published work. Countless obvious typos and a number of mis-settings of text. A book as great as Laura, which will inevitably be looked back on in future years as one of the defining novels of the aughts, deserves a cleaner, tighter treatment in final form.

But once one gets past the inevitable flaws that cannot but exist in a complex, mammoth book of prose such as this, what one has in her hands is a genuine modern American tragedy, clothed at times in an acerbic satire of the worst of our cultural traits, packed with references high and low, erudite and pop, suffused with manic energy, steeped in a paradoxically vicious gesture of empathy and understanding that at the core of modern alienation is something of the eternal, the first alienation- Loneliness. A want of simple human love. Confusion from a lack of connection in an antagonistic world. Drowning in an ocean of being, submerged daily in a whirl of faces and voices, oversaturated to the point of ambiguity and desolation, with no inherent internal compass provided to guide our way through, and often lacking the humility to admit our own desperate lostness. Loneliness and its two poles (Arctic and Antarctic, both dead frozen landscapes devoid of people) represented by Eugene and Laura. Eugene copes by immersing himself in books, history, natural and metaphysical philosophies, his storehouse of memories of years gone by, idealized visions, simplicity, a melancholic but vigorously curious understanding of the human condition achieved by embracing isolation and the freedom of thought it enables. (“...to be free is to be alone, to be alone is to be imprisoned, to be imprisoned is not to be free”) Laura, not equipped with the same coping mechanisms of intelligence and emotional stability, falls into the opposite whirlpool, the decadent recesses of culture (anti-culture)- anarchy of values; immediate, finite, temporal pleasures; empty sex (the giving away of the self); devaluing of language and thought; contempt, bitterness, grudges- a perfect recipe for the misunderstanding of the self and the world, the self within the world.

Where Laura Warholic finds its center is in examining the vague place where the value of these coping strategies approach each other, and in critiquing the culture that makes such alienating ambiguities a reality. Aren’t Eyestones’ isolated, romantic erudition and Laura’s debased eccentricities not two sides of the same Coin of Loneliness? And where does a locus of balance exist between the two? Or, in the duality Theroux sets up, are we looking at a “parallax object”, two opposing sides of a Mobius strip that cannot resolve each other because they share so little common ground? The dualities abound in the book- Man and Woman, Sophisticate and Lowlife, Public and Private, Memory and Reality, Ideal and Nadir, Courage and Fear, Forgiveness and Bitterness, even Gentile and Jew, Black and White, Historical Colonist and Historically Oppressed etc. etc., and the searching for the place where they synthesize I think is the impetus for the novel (for example, the synthesis of Male and Female occurs in the major thematic element of the book, the profound, odd labyrinth of human sexuality). In this fictive attempt at a resolution of these eternally unresolved dialectics, Theroux has given us nothing less than a brief history of humanity’s struggle to resolve the parallax gap, to survive the Loneliness of life, to come to terms with the tragedy of our inevitable “falling short of the truth”.

~

“...the home of the so-called freaks, marginal people of various sizes and shapes, oddities and ontologies, dreams and differences. Fates we are given, concluded Eyestones, but then were fates freedoms? He walked outside and questioned the skies as Laura finished bathing. A strange beautiful vagalume opened and closed overhead, a wandering light playing a game in a part of eternity.”

~

”How sad it is that we must suffer in the very place we love.”

~

”Loneliness has an echo.”

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 5 out of 5]

Having read the spellbinding Darconville’s Cat á coups de dictionnaire, I anticipated similar dizzying feats of sesquipedalianism from this outrageously funny follow-up. But unlike the stylishly ad unguem prose in that 1980s masterpiece, Laura Warholic is a frowstier monster: its prose is no less captivating or fine-tuned, but replaces the musicality and sumptuousness with a pricklier symphony of aeolistic attacks. “Character is plot,” says Theroux, and the titular anti-heroine dominates this vaudevillian doorstop. Laura is an allagrugous rock groupie in her mid-thirties, her speech and demeanour frozen in a Clueless-era slacker-speak, derided by everyone in the Quink offices—the magazine where our hero Eugene Eyestones works as The Sexual Intellectual—but especially her amurcous ex-husband who intends to sue her for every penny she doesn’t have. Eugene is the only kind-hearted character in the novel (Duxbak excepting): the moral and spiritual nucleus in a world of cartoon malfeasance and anhedonious loathing. His articles for the magazine are adoxographic musings in the Therouvian mould: quote-heavy mini-essays on love, romance, and female behaviour, all drawn from his observations of Laura. Laura is an autoschediastic bandersnatch who lies, betrays, steals and uses men to live a life of idle corruption and chaos, constantly dependent on Eugene’s Jesus-like charity and patience, and as the novel progresses, Eugene is trapped in a battle between his Christian conscience and his need to lance Laura like a boil—an agathokakological conflict that sits at the heart of the novel. Surrounding this relationship are brilliant Dickensian caricatures, rendered with fiendish devilry and typically waspish prose as Theroux preaches his lessons on the decay of American culture. Bursting with wondrous neologisms, relentless trivia and inhuman erudition, this is one of the finest and funniest novels it has been my pleasure to perch on my hydraulic ram and read. For those who dismiss Theroux as a sub-Nabokovian crank, the final chapter has some of the tenderest, more painfully beautiful prose in the Alex oeuvre, as Laura the tortured autothaumaturgist falls into one of the deepest abysses of loneliness ever rendered in prose. One of the most powerful works of fiction composed this century—indispensable, and perfect for the gynotikolobomassophile in your life.

Song for Laura

[Tony Vacation · Rating 5 out of 5]

In lieu of an actual review (for a thing like that check out the MJ’s review with an accompaniment of pizazz, here or Geoff’s generous breakdown, here) I decided to tinker-out this little hmming about one of the more lurid aspects of Theroux’s style, one that seems to really divide readers on the appreciation front—that is, besides his ludicrous diction, his often-times byzantine syntax, and his proclivity for stuffing his prose with essays, fables, poems, neologisms, trivia, rants, and even the occasional snippet of sheet music—and that is the author’s satirical exploration into the heart of discrimination and hate.

So let me go ahead and list my own grievance to hammer and nail to the door of popular fiction—it’s nothing but a damn disservice that Alexander Theroux’s titanic swan song to the loss of love in an already lost world, Laura Warholic, or the Sexual Intellectual, was virtually ignored upon its publication in 2007, or at most dismissed out of hand by bigot-brained reviewers with hearts the size of a speck of pigeon scat. I’m completely paramangling a point that William Gass made about his own writing in some interview-or-another, but there seems to be this notion that art should conform to whatever popular opinion is currently trending (the better, my dear, for us all to pat ourselves on the backs) rather than make a reader squirm. To squirm is to be in discomfort, to be in discomfort is to be challenged, and challenges call for reactions, reconsiderations, reconfigurations of lines already drawn, retaliations—in short, thinking…or something like that.

Bones have been made about this book and the raffish glee with which Theroux has gone about writing-out his cast of low grotesques and all their vile opinions about gender, race, religion, and sexual identity. And bones, of course, should be made. Repulsion is a valid reaction. Repulsion can mean that maybe you’re at least still trying to pay attention. But if you go about the business of life clop-clopping your way from point A to point B—so long as point A is identical to point B—then have you really accomplished anything? Proved a point? Made a lasting mark? Or have you only built another mini-mall? All of us are too quick to dismiss and then promptly forget that there are Cs that look nothing like Ds, but also Es and Ks, and even awful Qs and Xs, not to mention those overbearing Ns and Ts among all the lovely Ls and Ss…oh yes, so many points to be visited, vacationed in, and then departed from for places with sunnier weather. And that’s all I have to say about being open-minded.

What I really should talk about when I talk about Laura Warholic is how much of a stunning achievement this book is at mapping out the territory of love and relationships. On the hardcore realism front, the constant and seemingly-static binary of Laura and Eugene’s relationship is stretched and found contrived. But as a metaphor—and it’s a winding, repetitive, shaggy, ugly, gaudy metaphor—this carefully-constructed (however not carefully-edited) book is a lovely, lovely painting that shows how in loving and being loved by another we are all scholars, thieves, no-accounts, sinners, lawyers, hypocrites, reformers, bullies, torturers, prostitutes, forgivers, cheats, poets, architects, idiots, and, sadly, as we always learn too late, we always end up being nothing more than just all too human.

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

Update: That other review, of which Alex says, "...whereas someone in a Princeton review gave it their full attention" (see 3 Quarks interview excerpt below), has been identified as that of BURIED author Stuart Mitchner and may be read HERE. Mitchner has also recently reviewed Darconville's Cat, quoting a few of your favorite goodsreaders' reviews, which can be read HERE.

_______________
Interview by Sean P Carroll at Bookslut, March 2008.

Q: Your books, along with many other worthy tomes, have been given the moniker of inaccessible. While I do not agree with this assessment perhaps I am in the minority. What do you expect the reading public will ultimately take from Laura Warholic?

Theroux: The public will never hear of it. Middling reviews. No advertising. Too much TV as a distraction. I believe Laura Warholic will be discovered by somebody who matters, maybe a critic in 2047, and recognition will begin.

______________
Interview with Colin Marshall at 3 Quarks Daily, 2010 May 24. Link to audio included.


A. Theroux: My book hasn't been well-received; it's been basically ignored. I think it's a very important novel, but it's been ignored by people. I even had a hard time getting editors' attention: it's too long, it's too pyrotechnic, it's too multisyllabic, it's too opinionated, it's endless, there are longueurs, there are digressions. But one of the criticisms is that it's pitiless, even cruel and unsparing. That's what people are not used to. They're used to Tom Wolfe's jokey and affectionate lashings-out, kind of cartoon explosions. You have to look at Hunter Thompson's attacks to see real cruelty.

I don't know anybody that's doing the kind of — this book is not being written by anybody, this kind of prose, this kind of writing, because it's too savage, too unflinching. People just don't want this. "Why do you have such attitudes?" people tell me. "You're so extreme! You're so opinionated! This is so savage!" But satire, my point is, is savage. I'm thinking of a remark that Nathanael West made in The Day of the Locust, when he said, "Nothing is sadder than the truly monstrous."
. . .
But my book was given to a complete yahoo from the New York Times Book Review, the kind of sine qua non of reviews in the United States. If you don't get a good review in the Sunday New York Times, your book basically goes into the drink. [This yahoo’s review can be read here.

A lot of writers will say, "Oh, this is just sour grapes and complaints," but my novel Laura Warholic was reviewed by a dunce. A complete dunce, and a rivalrous novelist, I gather. It gave no attention to the book, to the 900 or so pages of the book, whereas someone in a Princeton review gave it their full attention. Not necessarily praise, but a full, large-hearted, open-hearted, humble attention. You can't write a book over the course of four years and have it read in a grumpy Saturday afternoon by some maleducated nitwit and have the book be understood.
. . .

I realize, by the way, in this conversation I've compared myself to Shakespeare, Christ, Cervantes...
. . .
Regarding Pynchon and difficulty:
I thought parts of Against the Day were very inaccessible. I was just in Estonia the last three or four months, and re-read Gravity's Rainbow. I didn't fully announce it in my review of Against the Day, but a lot of Thomas Pynchon is very inaccessible, math and scientific areas that I guess you could really apply — but he's relentless.

I tried to make [Laura Warholic] very readable, with short chapters. Dostoevsky once advised someone to write short chapters, and I always was very appreciative in his novels that the chapters were short. A book is an artifact; you have to be able to pick it up and put it down. Thomas Pynchon doesn't allow you to get certain footholds in his books. I think it's a great fault, and I think it's a kind of vanity on his part. It may be even a closet refusal; he's hiding in experiment, in some ways. Why obfuscate?

I claim that every single sentence in Laura Warholic is understandable, but there are places that are so obfuscated in Against the Day and Gravity's Rainbow, so outré that you can't put your arms around it. That's his failure as a writer. . . .

. . . There are certain writers that just are offensive because they can't be read clearly. I'm proud of the fact that my books can all be read. You might have to look up a word or go back a few pages to check something out, but that was one of the difficulties I've always had in Pynchon's novels. He's intentionally obfuscating.

. . . .but I love Pynchon. I think he has a great sense of humor, and he's so brilliant. That's the tragedy, with a small t, in his books: I have a doctorate in literature, and I'm often left completely outside that cathedral, when I'd like to be a worshiper inside. I understand maybe 82 percent of his books. That other percentage, it's sad that there's no foothold for me there. Maybe there are other people that don't have that complaint, but that's my complaint.


_____________
The Raintaxi review from 2007.

___________
Bookforum review by Paul Maliszewski from 2007.
____________
Overview of Theroux’s work on the occasion of the publication of Laura Warholic. Recommended.

[L.S. Popovich · Rating 5 out of 5]

Rollicking Lowra Roarholic is a book in which a massive quantity of wisdom may be gleaned between the lines, through oblique interpretations of satirical storytelling. The author employs a wide range of styles, some of which I’ll describe. Ultimately, it is a harrowing, difficult, exasperating, and tremendously meaningful book. A few isolated scores elaborate various strengths and weaknesses according to the questionable opinion of yours truly:

Prose depth: 5/5 Pynchon, Gass, Nabokov, Gaddis, DFW, Barth, Rabelais all come to mind. A worthy master of style.
Character depth: 4/5 Mieville-level cartoonish, grotesque descriptions, but purposeful, consistent and magnificent in their exactitude. However, side characters are often 2-dimensional mouthpieces, albeit rendered into 8k hi def.
Character Development: 3/5: the 2 principle characters have arcs, though their actions are not surprising due to the telegraphing interior monologues. The purpose of the characters, and the book in large part, is satire. Very little growth for the first 500 pages or so. The travel section was quite absorbing.
Proofreading: 2/5. A very noticeable flaw. Perhaps 200+ typos total. It’s clear something happened in production or during the final draft. An unfortunate result for such a work of genius.
Satire: 5/5. Memorability: 5/5. Length: 4/5 Enjoyment: 4/5. Deliberate craft: 5/5. Intelligence: 5/5. Overall a feast for the literary-minded. Lists that go on for 40+ pgs were only occasionally interesting, and bogged me down. An overwhelmingly negative viewpoint is expressed until the latter half of the book. Swiftian, pessimistic, misanthropic, but remember that novelists have the right to write saddening and maddening things so that we might see with eyes not our own a world often invisible to our clouded minds, to plumb untouched depths of our drifting souls and anchor our hearts to the passing comets of universal ideas.

This is a cinderblock-sized shag rug, an egregious, corpulent, passionate, jeering, incantatory, hermetically coherent, garish, blatant, encyclopedic, infinitely playful, pure literary orgy.

The evidence presented in E. E.’s “Controversial Essay,” which defines psychological inequalities between genders embedded in societal and biological patterns, is one of a few interpolated, formal examinations of culture and history. Theroux brings impressive skill (and research) to bear without a care toward fiction’s tropes or to whatever political arena the reader subscribes. He speaks to purely analytical readers, and challenges us to pursue meaning amid the posture, argument and representation. How much to take literally? That is up to us. E. E. possesses a diamond-hard mind, but it is still quite flawed.

The tone of the novel grows closer to Joseph Heller’s Something Happened as you progress, but it employs a more virtuosic voice, taking every category of human to the cleaners with digressive, transgressive lampoons. A disheartening catalog of human foibles ensues. The mountain of corpses skewered by the author's wit is admirable, if heartbreaking.

With help from the self-destructive heroine, who is skilled at every form of pitiful underhandedness, this over-muscled and bold and stylistic mess of querulous rants morphs into a novel of manners, of errors and of love. It is by turns Mailer-esque, sinusoidal, schizoid, with cycloning paragraph-spasms meriting comparison with Roth's scalpel-juggling narration. The characters are under the microscope, and in Maximalist fashion every zit is chiseled as immaculately as a newly christened Mount Rushmore.

The closed-minded reader will easily misconstrue the endless jibes, but will likely be swept up in the addictive rhythm, stunned by caverns of crystalline images, and dazed by the shamanistic conjuring of hideous forms. Witness the walking palimpsests, cavorting protohumans, pun-generating automatons, glorious Pantagruelian endomorphs, and don’t forget that it is a critique of popular culture, conveyed through a ceaseless inundation of farcical examples in the realms of music, movies, bumper stickers and every conceivable quote, relevant and amusing, employing the extensive purview of subcultures, amid plaintive word games and zany brainy weirdness. Eyestones, a protagonist of sorts, is a self-isolating writer of unsexy, clinical (advice?) columns on the topic of, you guessed it, Sex. Laura Woah-holic is his stand-out pseudo-GF, with, we are reminded endlessly, a multitude of physical "flaws". Both are hyperaware, paranoid, and I could sit here listing off a hundred adjectives, but suffice it to say they are about as indescribable as any real human being might be.

Have fun with the slang-jangling hipster jive, the menageries of bellicose lyrical jubilation. By and by it remains an attack on platitudinous hacks, an argument for non-censorship and a thought-provoking, atom bomb of a book. If you are afraid of the desolation of Modern Men and Women, of their moral doom, of tradition, of non-tradition, of Joycean cathedrals of diction, and our dark interiors, unhallowed, anti-authoritarian anti-sermons, if you are intimidated by outrage or disdain, but most of all the glorification of eccentricity, then go seek out the cardboard bound books in the waist-high bookshop shelves with lots of pictures and big font with the full spoiler synopsis on the back cover. This is something else. It is a beast which will stand in the corner of the room when you try to close your eyes. It will be there in your dreams. It is the terror of your own humanity. Courage to those who enter. But don't abandon all hope.

[Chris Via]

Video review: https://youtu.be/j_1JLXVmRhs

[Jonfaith · Rating 3 out of 5]

Perhaps the lingering focus of Laura Warholic resonated within my own past. Perhaps there are events and people I'd prefer not to remember. Whatever the extent of my own baggage, this is not a great novel. The overstuffed tome sorely lacks editing. The aspects relating to Vietnam and contemporary musical subcultures are absolutely contrived. The jungles of Southeast Asia are a flimsy device for lost love. The pulsating clubs of present day Boston are but teratologies allowing Theroux to sneer. These nocturnal visions didn't appear as bad as Franzen gushing over Bright Eyes in Freedom, but the authorial intent felt all wrong. Maybe I'm just growing old.

I just didn't care. The rants are epic but distracting. Laura's faults are Sissyphean. Herr Warholic is unctuous. I understand. Fifty references of foreshadowing anticipate the cross-country trip. This journey remains the soul of the book. Echoing Lolita, place names and local curiosity jostle in the American imagination. The novel's plot follows the lead of Miss Lonelyhearts and Otto Preminger's Laura and concludes gracelessly with an expected thud.

[Dan James · Rating 5 out of 5]

Has there ever been a more disgusting group of characters in one novel than the staff at Quink Magazine? Perhaps, but I've yet to meet them. And despite the all around ugliness of this horde of grotesques – and they are truly grotesque – I mean, if ever the type of people existed who, when drowning, deserve that proverbial cinder block, it's them – I do honestly mean it when I say that it was a pleasure to spend nearly 900 pages with them. This is only possible because they're in Theroux's skilled hands and his chops as a satirist are on full display. As he said in a 2008 interview with Colin Marshall (thanks to Nathan N.R. for linking it!), “Satire is savage … Spanking the world is part of [the satirist's] ambition.” Preach! Too few writers abide by this. Susan Sontag felt the same way, believing that the artist's obligation is to be antagonistic to the culture at large. You can't do that and remain kind. And he talks about this inherent meanness one finds in good satire and mentions how it's something that's both sorely missing in modern fiction as well as one of the main reasons he had a hard time getting editors enthusiastic about the manuscript – together, of course, with the usual half-witted complaints about maximalist literature: it's too long, the sentences are too complicated, why digress so often?, ohmigod why are you making me go to the dictionary to look up these super old and really big words?, etc. And let's not forget the novel's tenancy to break 21st century America's first commandment: Thou shalt not maketh thyself uncomfortable. And, with great zeal, Theroux violates our sacred safe spaces on nearly every page. But the harsh and seemingly unforgiving tone remains a major obstacle for some readers (and apparently publishers).

But don't let all this talk of meanness fool you. This is a comic novel, a hilarious and scathing satire that rips apart every aspect of modern America's self-absorbed shallowness and greed and hatred. But this is not a novel without heart. Regardless of the often side-splitting and always offensive assaults exchanged between the characters, some of the most moving scenes of friendship in recent memory are to be found in Laura. Eugene Eyestones and Laura Warholic, our two main characters, are in many ways the complete opposite of one another and have no business being in any kind of relationship, yet they can't seem to find an exit. He's an intellectual, a well-read cultural critic with a steady job and musical talent. And she's the epitome of Gen X slackerdom, a jobless dilettante who seems allergic to the sustained effort required for any of her fleeting artistic interests. And just when we start to wonder why they subject themselves to each other's company, we catch a glimpse of genuine affection, though sometimes it remains just below the surface. There are also several moving scenes between Eyestones and Duxback – the one decent soul, save Eyestones, who works at Quink. I'm thinking in particular of the Chinese restaurant chapter and their snowy Christmas Eve stroll in Central Square. Speaking of Eyestones and companionship, I wish we would have gotten a bit more of Harriet Trombone. Underneath her uproarious and rage-filled rants is a playful bond between her and Eyestones that always left me wanting more.

That this novel has remained obscure since its publication is one of the great literary tragedies of the first part of this century. In these unbelievably stupid times we need even more novels like Laura Warholic. Pointing out our many fatal flaws and mocking without mercy. There's room for at least one a year, as far as I'm concerned. Few could do it with the wit of Theroux. Fewer still could pull it off with his pyrotechnic prose style. But in a slightly better world, more novelists would be attempting this kind of savage satire on a regular basis. Don't get me wrong, I harbor no illusions that a spate of scathing encyclopedic novels will save the world. After all, the addlepated ignorami who have gotten us into this mess would never attempt to read them even if they could. But, in the mean time, while the dullards call the shots, a steady supply of palliatives would help.

[AJ · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have read a lot of books and authors described as pretentious or pedantic, and in most cases not only find that not to be the case, but I very much enjoy them. Some are among my favorites of all time. I think a lot of people are intimidated by what they’ve heard about a novel or novelist, and instead of challenging themselves to attempt the read, adopt and perpetuate these unfair characterizations.

Others believe, and I am more sympathetic to this, that authors who arbitrarily stick obscure words (sometimes resurrecting obsolete ones or even creating their own) into their narrative when other simpler words would have sufficed is an author purposely trying to make themself inaccessible in order to seem deeper than they are. And that certainly exists.

But some authors (and readers) simply love language, and want to branch out and include more whimsical, or technical or neat sounding words not because they are pretentious but because it’s fun. I myself in reading this novel gladly had Google out sitting next to me the whole time, and have compiled a whole list of new words and definitions that I enjoyed. There were even a few where Google threw up its hands and said, “I got nothin.” I add them to a notebook I keep with all the other such words I’ve learned in the past (looking at you DFW, Pynchon, Nabokov). I’ve never really seen why it is a bad thing to do the work and look up definitions for words I’ve never heard of. That’s how I expand my vocabulary. That’s how all of us do. Every commonplace word any of us has ever heard has been learned the exact same way.

I’ll get more to the point here. The characters in this novel are mostly abhorrent. One of the main characters, Eugene Eyestones, by the end actually was more abhorrent to me than Laura, the titular character. He is insufferably pedantic, which after almost 900 pages becomes very tiring. It was not the obscure words, but the constant throwing out of facts and correcting of other characters’ mistakes that was unbearably tedious.

Had it been just Eyestones, it wouldn’t have been as annoying. But the narrator and most of the other characters also get in on the fun throughout, and you can even see characters (like Laura) every once in a while making references and employing a vocabulary entirely inconsistent with everything that Theroux has told us about said character.

Which in my opinion maybe reveals a bit about the author’s character that he can’t entirely hide, and through his characters is able to sate his seeming urgent need to impart upon others the vast amount of knowledge stored inside his head. I can separate author from character pretty well I believe, but I’m willing to wager the author has some of these tendencies, which I understand for someone so erudite must be difficult to temper.

I took way too much time to talk about what really only caused me to subtract a single star, because other than the above grievances this is a fantastically accessible and insightful character driven novel. Theroux has a deep understanding of human relationships and it shows. Beyond his edgelord proclivities, his constant over the top offensive passages spewed by vile characters, this was an honest and deeply moving examination of love, desire, responsibility, death and fate. Also, how everyone is vapid and dumber now and how it’s a bummer. And this was 17 years ago; the major concerns and values of society have clearly become more far more nuanced and complex and varied since then. Right?

[Andrew]

Hey fuckers, if you thought Paul Theroux was a bit too cheery, check out his brother. If Paul writes with a bitter cackle, Alexander writes with a studied sneer from a study filled with untidy stacks of books and napping cats, tulip glass of Grand Marnier in hand.

But get through the embittered monologues and sesquipedalian vocabulary and sheer density, and -- in a manner similar to a hard-mode Infinite Jest -- you'll find a warm, beating heart. Humanity and love made impossibly by the ugliness and venality of contemporary America, centered around a roadtrip awfully similar to that undertaken by one Mr. Humbert Humbert and one Ms. Dolores Haze, but set right at the point where America realized history hadn't quite ended, with as melancholy an ending as one can imagine.

This is as cult as a novel can get. At some future cocktail party, I'm sure Laura Warholic will come up, and I'll recognize someone as one of the happy few, the band of brothers, who dig this shit.

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Too bad I waited so long to read it. Even worse it's only 878 pages. It will require immense self-discipline to resist rereading too soon (I need to forget a little first). Stunning, obsessive, mordant, merciless. A case study of deepest ambivalence. Writing for a very small audience. Gift it to yourself asap. Simply exemplary, enviable wordsmanship.

[Kevin Adams · Rating 5 out of 5]

Every Theroux is worth visiting more than once. Layers upon layers. Funnier the second time. Just a smidge too long but that’s ok. I’ll take the journey from my East coast home to the West and back. Road trip indeed. If you ain’t had the pleasure of spending time with Mr. T do so at your earliest convenience. Another words…#readinggoals2022. Get on it. Enjoy.

[🐴 🍖]

it's rife with typos. in the opening pages the protag calls black criminal defendants "monkeys" and is mystified that it would be considered racially charged language. it quotes in full his 40pp essay about how women lack creativity bc they exist to bear children. we're somehow supposed to buy that eugene, despite being effeteness personified as well as myopic unto the point of blindness, is a freakin' vietnam vet. how did he and laura get together? why is his proudly antisemtic colleague given unlimited ranting space? what are characters in 2006 doing describing things as "jiggy"?

if anyone shared theroux's knack for lampooning mannerisms or drawing up perfectly sardonic lists of epithets or busting out words like "ocellated" such that they actually seem to belong in a sentence i would be tempted to throw the baby out with the bathwater (and, in light of the allegations against him, am still tempted to)... in the meantime, this and darconville's cat are, like, the durian of novels to me: delicious, as long as i don't breathe through my nose. and i wouldn't dare bring either on public transit

[Heronimo Gieronymus · Rating 5 out of 5]

In his sprawling autodidactic screed THE ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY, Robert Burton, the prodigiously note-taking solitary bookworm born in 1577, in plumbing the depths to which mood may abscond with the human soul, likewise has time to enjoy himself immensely or put on a show of doing so: “all my treasure is in Minerva’s tower…I live still a collegiate student…and lead a monastic life, ipse mihi theatrum [sufficient entertainment to myself], sequestered from those tumults and troubles of the world…aulae vanitatem, fori ambitionem, ridere mecum soleo [I laugh to myself at the vanities of the court, the intrigues of public life], I laugh at all.” The author of the encyclopedic ANATOMY OF MELANCHOLY laughs at all? What are we to make of this half-mad boast? Perhaps the oldest and folksiest of truism obtains here: you have to laugh, elsewise yuz dead meat cryin’. Eugene Eyestones, columnist, author of the serial “The Sexual Intellectual,” appearing on the reg in fictional Boston arts fishwrap QUINK, as such the left hemisphere (facing out) of the neurological doublet-fold instantiated in the title of Alexander Theroux’s gigantic and absurdly rude tragicomic masterpiece LAURA WARHOLIC; OR, THE SEXUAL INTELLECTUAL, our columnist in said title joined at the hip, as it were, metaphors mixed and all spun-out, to Laura Warholic on his right, a woman out of whose head, we are at one point apprised, “jutted like pineapple leaves a pair of long, bayonet-shaped ears.” Uh, yikes. “How difficult it was for two people to be at the same emotional place at the same time.” Very diplomatic. Eugene Eyestones is a pitiful and sympathetic figure of positively acromegalic learning that unambiguously mirrors the fantastic/runaway encyclopedism of his creator, Mr. Theroux, but he is surely also one of these dyed-in-the-wool Robert Burton-style zealots of interdisciplinary polymorphism, very early providing us, care of a roving close-hewing omniscient narrator, the telltale aphoristics: “Alone is wisdom, alone is happiness.” Maybe, uh, sure, just keep telling yourself whatever you need to tell yourself, Eugene Eyestones (known as E² to various QUINK jokers and their peripherals), I guess, or whatever. “In a sense Eyestone’s pessimism arose from a true idealism, a deep-seated yearning for a better order, a wish to find perfection in the chaotic facts of reality, an impulse that stood and stands behind much art.” The law of the encyclopaedic zealot: this is an idealism you can work or that you cannot, and character is essentially fate. Unbelievably Rad Dude Buckminster Fuller tells us that “Love is metaphysical gravity,” this a notion onto which the Sexual Intellectual would almost certainly be liable to glom, if only for the elevated copy and the knell of the deadline, but it ultimately does prove to be the serious-as-airborne-cancer “first principle” around which Theroux’s Novel of Everything and Then Some constellates as Burton does melancholy, both Eugene the perspicacious columnist and LAURA WARHOLIC; OR, THE SEXUAL INTELLECTUAL reeling in their sundry conniptions as means “to study,” as page 598 informs the intrepid reader, “all the threnody-befucked oddities of love and sex.” A doorstopper such as Theroux’s is likely to be some kind of Whole World or Exhaustive Celestial Retinue, but it is first and foremost a Boston and a Cambridge and a Massachusetts (including a Newburyport, Massachusetts—for fans of an almost certainly Theroux-influenced Lucy Ellman of recent vintage). There is in Hindu cosmology a principle situating each conscious being as a funnel into some kind of sundering and likewise unifying totality, and there is through the aberration of each human trajectory the singular accident of something approximating identity, the seat of all conditional disappointment and frustration. Laura and Eugene are each a “funnel into,” but I think the magazine QUINK as hideous hydra may be the supra- or super-funnel. “QUINK, which had a modest subscription list, was also sold in various news stands, bookstores and, uniquely, coffee shops—a corporate merger beneficial to reader and drinker—throughout the greater Boston and Cambridge areas and several larger cities in New England. It was the project of an editor’s lucky idea, his mother’s money, and a fairly talented clique of ambitious, hustling, infighting writers, music critics, movie-reviewers, food-writers, people whose job it was to see and be seen, to gossip, to move in social circles, and to get near the edge of what they felt was current in the media, politics, and fashion, a competitive aggregation of semitalented if mean-spirited oddballs: news dinks, journalists, disgruntled critics, grumpy reviewers, culture obsessives, and wise-cracking hangers-on who worked their small jobs and came up with the commercial fads and formulations that made up the contents of the magazine.” The lucky editor, beneficiary of family money, is the wildly debauched Jew Warholic, former husband of the rail thin, homely, and maniacally vindictive Laura. Laura: “no wishes, no width, no warmth.” Her former whoremonger husband, slob, possibly impotent. In the words of typical “hustling, infighting” QUINK gadfly Ratnaster (also, incidentally, no fan of the Irish): “I’ve heard that any virility he might have had disappeared sometime around his mid-twenties, no doubt with an increasing vileness connected to his ambition. You know? First one begins suffering from medomalacophobia, the fear of losing your erection during intercourse, then he becomes sterile. My best guess is that his sex life is asmotic, the subliminal fallout from his resentment of women in general. Hey, but you’re the sex expert.” It sounds like Warholic is a man who has lost love’s gravity, doesn’t it? You better fucking believe it. This may be a garrulous and hilarious novel produced by the most outrageously lapidary sensibility imaginable, but it is no joke precisely in the way “peering ineffectually out of a cave, eating the ashes of sorrow” isn’t, or how despair that drives us away from all earthly pull and toward “transfinite nothingness” isn’t. Treat yourself as though you come with a manual transmission; don’t let the laughter become a cackle, regulate the speed, moderate combustion. Be extra wary of those who can’t! (Theroux can deliver a death blow casual as fuck somehow with the corkscrew insinuation of—of all things—a Robert Frost couplet: “I didn’t like the way he went away. / That smile! It never came of being gay.”) The postwar American map is known for its odd spattering of oddball encyclopedic novelists, many of them loner-types from places like Fargo, North Dakota (Bill Gass) and Charles City, Iowa (Bob Coover) or the wrong Cambridge (Maryland, John Barth). Alexander Theroux, brother of Paul and uncle of two celebrities, comparatively to-the-manor-born metropolitan-dynastic, is also the writer whose encyclopedic mien is most consonant, I believe, with Honoré de Balzac and Charles Dickens, the foremost literary encyclopedists of the 19th century, ribald seriocomic systems-topologist, each, in possession of unnerving crystallinity. We already see the Dickens touch, surely, in the absurd names of the characters, a matter we have only touched upon thus far in a manner most cursory. There is a uniformity of voice, all the cant to one extent or another coloured with hate and put over with excess of hot air. Discknickers is a callow womanizer and virulent anti-semite of astonishing proportions, his hate-on for Editor Warholic homicidally zeroed-in, his snotty disdain for the castaway Laura unambiguously misogynistic. The aforementioned Paul Ratnaster, feature interviews, a bit of a prig, “considered forgiveness a weakness and detente a defect.” The “generally loathed” managing editors of the magazine, Judith and Jim San Diego. Little Bob Merkle: “colorless nonentity, he looked drained or packed in ice, with that coiffure of his puffy white and hairbursts coming out of his ears like the paper frills on a roast.” The militant, conscientiously off-putting lesbians the Krauthammer and Ann Marie Tubb. (Krauthammer: “I have globophobia […] looking at these simon-simpletons”; Tubb: "Wanna thumbscrew them?”). Hate, hate, hate. Nasty invective, everywhere, going every direction, basically just the weather around here, pre-internet and all. And what of the wider world? Yes, we’re burrowing inward unto sundering, but the encyclopedia has to have its widths accounted for also. Horror and horror-comedy. Mostly. And the impetus to connect, to identify and establish meaningful intimacy, positively a commandment, if apparently forgotten by nearly all and compromised by pratfalls no longer funny once technically fatalities. “The problem of AIDS intrigued Eyestones as well, and specifically the cause of it, the worst disaster that we can reasonably expect to befall humanity in our lifetime.” And yet the AIDS crisis ultimately has nothing on the conditional opacity of grounded situational specificity, the locked-in syndrome of consciousness and identity, the failure of a self to either reckon with itself or supersede the hinderances it once imagined protective armour and which at a certain point may have a tendency to become the invisibly writhing self entire. A failure to provide or establish gravity, a failure to recognize the self where it is not flattering to look. Where do we place Euegene Eyestones and what do we do with him? And do we not recognize this as precisely the problem with which Euegene himself wrestles? Laura is at all times a hot mess, a vampire, a leech, a hopped-up vengeance freak, uncomfortably uncomely of aspect. She is not easy to be around, she senses it, and becomes even more unpleasant, habitually, Swiss clockwork. “Mania or depression. Dopey energy or disinvigorating dead-endedness.” That’s Laura, ugly as a picture. “Why did he put up with all this shock-and-awe? Was it because he was convinced that by way of his understanding he had a way to help her? She was weak, he understood that, and yet a weak or soft metal that is alloyed with another weak element, amazingly enough, may produce a strong alloy with strikingly different properties from those of the parent metals. Copper and aluminum are both fairly weak, but the addition of 5X aluminum produces an alloy twice as strong as copper! Buckets, bridges, buttons, boathooks, biscuit tins, bugles, and bells—throw in as well, he thought, the brides and grooms of fate!” Sounds lovely. What could possibly go wrong? “Laura flourished in the malls, Eugene soon saw, who realized that if you have seen one, you’ve seen the Mall.” On a cross-country road trip our pair encounter wonders the likes of “a rattlesnake cattle round-up in Okeene, Oklahoma” and “discussed what foods they hated and chose their top ten favorite travel spots and did Zen exercises such as what does Zen taste like and what color is Zen and what is my original face?” It’s the worst vacation ever, but very close to real intimacy, and ultimately sadder than shit. Eugene confesses, possibly only to himself, that Laura’s “blank, uncomprehending stare irritated him so much he wanted to shove her off a butte,” but, ever with the big picture cross-referenced perspective available for consultation, Our Dubious Father of Sexual Intellection remains able to remind himself the everybody has their reasons, forgive them Pappy for they know not what they do, and “Hadn’t a drugged sleep been forced upon her?” Are we getting somewhere? “His disapproval became a mirror of what she soon saw she needed to hide and to avoid. On that trip but even before, he clearly saw she had become the dark source of his columns. She was a dark Rorschach blot he was determined to puzzle out.” Those final two words, “puzzle out,” are the index of a fatal weakness, the certainty and assurance that desire comprehensive knowledge and actionable sapience but that keep coming up against the same entropic/epistemic foil that is the comic motor of Gustave Flaubert’s (encyclopedic, hilarious) BOUVARD AND PÉCUCHET. “The tiny contribute by totality to tear down.” Alexander Theroux tells us this directly just as the personnel at QUINK do so with full peacock verbal array and persistent soul-murdering resentment in their more indirect manner. But what of the expansive intellectual, the great and open lover, the philo-sopher who ‘cares so’ and evidently does so for the sake of the caring alone? In short, dramatic irony makes of him a monkey, then something more ghastly, and then it pulls out the rug, or maybe pulls back the curtain, leaving us with a profoundly sobering glimpse of actual no gravity and all that was once a person with all the human stuff now “smeared, stained, the way our tears actually mourn for us.” “Eyestones was a dreamer as dreamers go and as dreamers go, he left.” In Alcoholics Anonymous they tell you to identify instead of comparing. It’s good advise, leading one quite possibly from the trap of abyssal indentitarian tribalism, but it comes with a codicil, ‘kay? The thing about the imagination is that operationally you need to decentralize command and avoid getting the tires stuck in the slop. Eyestones: “When in THE SKY’S THE LIMIT pilot Fred Astaire flies off to war, one of the most unforgettable moments in all movies is that final heart-stopping closeup of Joan Leslie whispering…what? A prayer? A vow? A declaration of love?” A lovely string of rhetorical questions, vintage A. Theroux, but I think what is most lovely is the quality of openness here that will allow things to be left hanging. This too is a way, and it may have occasion to sparkle quite attractively. Check this out, for example, from LAURA WARHOLIC; OR, THE SEXUAL INTELLECTUAL, a novel whose title I really like saying out loud. Page 469, a chapter called “Katabasis”: “Did she dream about stags? Did she dream about deer? Did she dream about the wind and the rain in her hair? Did she speak about angels? What did they say? Did music somewhere in her heart start to play? Who was it held her? Gave her her part? Kissed her to fill up the hole in her heart? Why is a fountain? When is a tree? Who walks on the mountain? How breathes the deep sea? Are forests forever? Can honesty bend? How far is never? Why is the end? Wasn’t it time to give voice to her soul? When did she whisper? Where did she cry? Will the feeling of kneeling before love ever die?”

[wally · Rating 5 out of 5]

2nd from theroux for me...the other, An Adultery, 1987...and a review there suggested this is a re-writing of that other...if i have that right...

2007, laura warholic or, the sexual intellectual, hardcover, 878 pages
a dedication: for sarah below that ab imo pectore

3-pages of contents.

this will be...@the 42nd title i will read this year...just started To Kill a Mockingbird...so consider this my "to-read" list that i refuse to list

there are five quotations...how much room do i have?

chapter i, womanifesto begins:
one lover is always murdered in the act of love. the 1st sentence of the column that eugene eyestones, "the sexual intellectual", is writing for a column that is due.

yes...i see there could be similarities to an adultery...okee dokee then! as the good doctor said (the boys are back in town again, april 29th, 1978)...onward & upward!

time place scene settings
*boston...eyestones lives in cambridge
*offices of quink monthly magazine
*on the street...the bakery where rapunzel works
*welfare's, a small tavern, where most/many from quink gather...the first scene is a friday...many present
*e.e.'s old walkup on windom st on the boston side of the charles river
*ho yuen ting on hudson st in boston, where he meets duxbak once a week for chinese
*monsky's, "totaljews"...$2.22 (for two-s)
*the cambridge side of the charles...e.e./l.w. walk


characters...& caricatures...& so forth...won't have space for all the "so forth"...direct ref. to others, a few noted below...indirect ref. to others, a few i've caught...others?
*"the sexual intellectual", eugene eyestones, writes a column for the monthly magazine, quink, lives in a seaside city, boston. "the man w/the faraway eyes". nam-vet. he loved the solitude...lack of attachment, believes more objective therefore. pilgrim of the absolute. yearning for a better order. lives alone, never married. his mother was killed in a traffic accident, his father passed thereafter, "don't be critical of other people, love much," his last words to e.e. he has known l.w. two years, went on a cross-country (tenn. flor. mentioned) trip w/her.
*minot "mickey" warholic, the editor at quink, divorced from laura (in california; she has followed him to boston), lives w/2 strippers from the purple cucumber, muskrat & squishy. the name comes from vercholeryeh
*six savage, unrepentant black rapists in central park...referred to, alas, as "monkeys" by eugene, never intentionally employing the noun as a racial insult...imagine the result.
*the jogger
*e.m. cioran, a observation by (eugene)
*fernando pessoa, some poetry by portuguese pessoa (eugene)
*duxbak, good friend of eugene, looks "like a ball in tall grass." called a "tbf"
*emerson, quoted by (eugene)
*a man, a cripple, a poor beggar, micepockets, aka curbstepper, for the gimp, unequal way he walked...sorcerer at the crossroads, chap ii
rapunzel wisht, works at bakery, e.e. stops after work to look at her thru the window
*customers at the bakery...
*little bob merkle, from the quink office, revolts e.e. w/his words about rapunzel as e.e. watches her at the bakery
*ann marie tubb, food columnist at quink
*the krauthammer, ann marie's constant companion, wears scum (society for cutting up men) sweatshirt
*mr petruchio fattomale, writes the television column at quink
*lackeys at the bar
*varwick, who says everything twice, "it's true, it's true."
*paul ratnaster, major interviews for quink, born w/o a right hand
*gnorm, office layabout & newcomer to the magazine
*larry clucker, quink janitor...is w/others at welfare's
*abe...name only 1st...son of managing editors:
*judith & jim san diego
*r. bangs chasuble, movie critic at quink
*discknickers, magazine's accountant, well-read, "der schwarze adler". was raised by a jehovah's witness.
*spalatin, reporter
*mutrux, the magazine's lawyer
*dippy, chasuble's white poodle
*holman, is jim/judith san diego's dog
*humpy & bumpy, two large females
*creedmore, having a fling w/discknickers. she is a waitress at monsky's, "totaljews" aka, allston area
*laura...warholic...she is bonking the sorcerer...i think...her landlord, micepockets...nee: shqumb. she is 36, many years e.e.'s junior
*marysas...e.e.'s brother, a shifty lawyer, on his 3rd wife
*mrs edna shqumb...laura's mother...she reads sci-fi, and there's a list of about...15? titles, gravity's rainbow among them. heh! i'm not certain who...pynchon?...i dunno...kiss my fist, pit stop nympho, shameless honeymoon among the titles listed w/g.r. & she "had been hoping for the same relief by some sort of romantic deus ex machina..." & she married a rageaholic named
*jasper radziewicz, later sentenced to 10 yrs/lug wrench/edna
*& then she hooked up w/c.g. gailors
*three other daughters, sisters of laura's
*nook, e.e.'s orange cat...calls cat h-2-o, nuoc =water in nam
*other tenants where e.e. is a bit of a recluse, old walkup on windom st. on boston side of the charles river
*a spinster named kate...e.e. asks her to type
*a fat mr. harootootoonian, built like an emperor penguin, sells encl.
*mickey "mouse" mewlingshaw, hack novelist
*neighbors of e.e.:
*airport/lights guy, a van-fix guy w/3 squealing kids & twammy his wife
*closest neighbor, harriet trombone, barbados, 29-yr-old, works as a temp at perfume counter in filene's on washington st.

some words at play
1. telegony
2. idiocy...heh! 'private person' greek

ummm
there are two men in all of us!
what a good definition of nothingness. see quote from theroux, beginning of an adultery
adulteraton...or...enhancement

i could/should list all of the references to others...a few in the list above...but i doubt i have room for them all
*there are many biblical signposts...all...interesting...like about david's 1st wife, michal.
*marilyn monroe
*dante's beatrice

how laura warholic is seen by e.e.
*at the same time, she felt that she was beyond reproach, above criticism, outside the law.
*kindness in others she saw as softness, softness as weakness, and weakness was something she knew she could exploit.

some about e.e.
e.e. has some of the same characteristics as christian "kit" ford from theroux's an adultery...although here, at the page-158 mark, i'd not argue that he is grist for the karen-horney mill, as christian surely is, in the other story. still:
he admires...pessoa's detachment...and above, there are bits listed to-do w/this quality. although, t'would seem that one draw for l.w. to e.e. is the way he interceded in an argument 'tween l.w./m.w.

the controversial essay
is a long-ish chapter, 152-191...and this is the chap w/ the word idiocy at play. the essay's subject is women/some particular woman...creating vs. something...motherhood perhaps...some ideas expressed here that impacted moi: woman alone of the two can make love w/o desire...sexual woman is the antithesis of creative man...no woman has ever written a major biography in english...women commit the majority of child homocides in the u.s....and a quote near the end of the piece, from brendan behan, "the first duty of a writer is to let his country down."

this chapter is followed--warholic/eyestones seem to be reading the essay, together...for any problems that might arise from fuel in the essay that laura might could use etc...chapter is followed by a rather lengthy list...meh, 304 pages...of "short history of creatrixes"

update, finished, 1 apr 13, monday, 10:14 a.m. e.s.t.
this is a story that i'd prefer to read again...knowing now what i wished i knew then...

so...there are few stories that ask questions other stories do not ask, do not approach.

having read the other An Adultery...that other in mind as i read...said it above but this one, while some of the same...ideas...are present, in this story, there are a multitude of characters...and...the result is somewhat the same...
i wonder if here there exists a kind of affirmation of choice...or...a questioning of that choice...or both...this business to do w/the words at play see above (there's more).
my index has more and maybe later on i'll add to the little i've added above. there's not enough room for it all...and all i have, really, are questions.

[Michael Kuehn · Rating 5 out of 5]

I wasn't sure how I wanted to approach a review of this monster of a novel. After a few fits and starts, I'm settling on something just the opposite: extremely brief.

LAURA WARHOLIC, or The Sexual Intellectual, is, it could be said, a long, 878-page character study of the novel's namesake, Laura Warholic. Plot? There isn't much of one, in the conventional sense. Theroux has famously said – I think borrowing a line from F. Scott Fitzgerald, actually – “Character is plot, plot is character.” Most of the scenes revolve around Laura, in one way or another. She is a shallow, self-absorbed, repulsive, unattractive, promiscuous woman. And that's being kind.

Yet, Eugene Eyestones, The Sexual Intellectual of the title, is strangely attracted to her despite that it's mostly through his eyes that we learn of her loathesome character. What does he see in her? It's clearly not physical. Is it pity?

Eyestones, The Sexual Intellectual, writes a column of the same name for the Boston cultural magazine, Quink, edited and owned by Laura's ex-husband, Minot “Mickey” Warholic. As the title suggests, the Sexual Intellectual is the sounding board for all of Eyestone's musings on the human condition, especially relationships. Does he befriend Laura for column material? She does seem to be a bottomless well of what-not-to-be, what-not-to-do.

Not much on plot, the book is full of countless asides, rants, diatribes, transcriptions of columns penned by the Sexual Intellectual, run-ins with a menagerie of odd folk, lengthy lists, jokes, limericks, songs, cultural references galore, quotes by the famous and not-so-famous, obscure references from science, music, philosophy, psychology. In other words, don't expect to understand everything Theroux throws at you. His linguistic skill is everywhere on display: have your dictionary at hand.

Let's face it, we're no match for him.

I said this would be brief, so one more thing. Not since reading Dickens have I discovered a novel populated with such a menagerie of grotesques, characters with monikers like Duxbak, Micepockets, the Krauthammer, Discknickers, Mr. Fattomale, Harriet Trombone, Mutrux, Larry Clucker, R. Bangs Chasuble, Ratnaster, and Rapunzel Wisht. There are no normal-looking characters in this book. Theroux's descriptive power is amazing, and he portrays his characters in near comic book style, again reminding me so much of Dickens. Here is Minot Warholic,

Obese, tall, cynical, Warholic had the thick, everted lips of Oscar Wilde and a moon-fat face that gave him the grey, oily look of soft cheese. He was a big balloon of a man whose luffing bagginess made him look even more portly than he was, but his hands were small and soft and always employed in quick, cozening motions. He had a long, mean head, jutting high and blocklike but tending to the ovoidal when straining with anger. [11]

LAURA WARHOLIC was such an entertaining read, I loved it. Sometimes you discover a writer who just hits all the right notes, is slightly warped, with an envious prose style, who doesn't write down to his audience. Theroux is just that sort of author for me. Sadly, he is an underappreciated author, except for the rabid few, and many of his best works are difficult to find, probably saying more about the state of the reading public these days than anything. This novel, and his DARCONVILLE'S CAT, I found on the used book market.

Finally, LAURA WARHOLIC, for all its comedy, turns out to be something of a tragedy. In its way, it says a lot about American culture, about us, a warts-and-all look. Theroux is a harsh critic, and LAURA WARHOLIC is a very un-PC book, not for the faint of heart, or the easily offended.

I guess this wasn't as brief as I'd planned.

[M. Sarki · Rating 3 out of 5]

Because of its mammoth size and way-too-many words I must concede to fail in completing my reading of it. I am too old it seems to spend what little time I might have left on such a wordy extravaganza. (I am also currently in the midst of another verbose affair titled Don Quixote.) If LWoTSI was even remotely as interesting as the cover photo I might have continued in my sluggish effort to finish it. But my queue contains so many other books that await my attention. I am thrilled with anticipation of my enjoyment to come. But one day soon I will again come to visit two other Theroux adventures I already own and must still peruse before I make any coherent assessment of Alexander’s worth to me as a writer of note.

[nostalgebraist nostalgebraist]

Paused on p. 154, unlikely to return.

I was reading this because I liked Theroux's earlier novel Darconville's Cat. What I have read of Laura Warholic has none of the virtues I enjoyed in Darconville's Cat, and unless those virtues emerge at some later point, I don't think it is worth my time.

Make no mistake -- this is recognizably the work of the same man who wrote DC. Alexander Theroux is a writer so distinctive that almost any one of his sentences could not have conceivably been written by anyone else, and I guess if it's that's voice that you value, it is present here as much as it was in DC. The only problem is that, while all of the writing is Therouvian, almost none of it is what I would call good.

Laura was, notoriously, published with essentially no copyediting. The occasional spelling and punctuation errors would be easy to overlook if they did not feel like the tip of a vast iceberg. It's not just the book has not been copyedited -- it doesn't feel as though it has been edited in any sense, even in the sense of "revised by the author." It isn't just an unedited manuscript; it's a first draft. Again and again, I found myself wondering if Theroux had ever gone back and read what he had written. If so, why didn't he fix glitchy repetitions like "he knew, from several icy references she made with irritated references to her mother" (p. 101)? Was he really fully satisfied with sentences like the following?

The two would meet, usually at Laura's urgency, whenever her mother infrequently returned to the Boston area, simply because her father saw Laura as a misery package and shut her off, she sought out her mother for help on various fronts with a subtle and terrifying furtiveness. (p. 108)

Let's count the problems here. First, "urgency," while acceptable, sounds odd in this context and should probably be "urging" or "insistence." Second, "whenever her mother infrequently returned" makes it sound as though each individual return is itself "infrequent" -- whatever that means -- and should be something like "at each of her mother's infrequent returns." Finally, this is a run-on sentence -- either "the two would meet" and "she sought out her father" should be given their own sentences, or one of them should be placed inside a dependent clause. And underneath the outright mistakes, we have, at best, an rather plain and somewhat convoluted bit of exposition -- "a subtle and terrifying furtiveness" is pretty good but there isn't much else to see here.

Now here is a bit from Darconville's Cat I wrote down because I liked it so much:

The figure of John Harvard sat, dignified and aloof, staring across the Yard in a mood of piety and godliness. Darconville walked back through several centuries under the pleasant trees and had the strange feeling that, in peering up a dim stairway or through an old window or into some dark chamber-and-study, one might just happen to catch an anachronistic glimpse of some students reading The Tatler by candlelight instead of working their sophemes or construing their Demonsthenes or perhaps a group of lads, with wigs a-flap, skipping up out of the buttery — the steam of hasty-pudding in the air — and balancing tankards and sizings of bread and beer or maybe several young blades drinking rumbullion and gowling against the excessive measures of Lord North, Grenville, and Townsend until one of them might leap up to shout, “Step outside and repeat that asservation, Villiers, you damned Tory!”

You've gotta love a guy who writes like this -- who's just having this much pure fun with the sound of the English language, the twists and turns a sentence can take, the lovable trappings of the past. Compare the delighted use of archaisms here -- "asservation," "young blades" -- to the dull, euphemistic modern phrases in the Laura passage ("misery package," "shut her off"). This sentence takes flight in a single charming metaphor ("Darconville walked back through several centuries") and glides effortlessly into higher and higher reaches of rhetoric and comedy; the Laura sentence struggles -- tripping over itself and searching its baggy pockets for some forgotten clause -- to make basic grammatical sense.

Okay, okay, this is a totally unfair comparison. After all, I copied down that DC sentence specifically because it was so good, and that Laura sentence specifically because it was so bad. But my point is that most of DC is kind of like the DC quote and most of Laura is kind of like the Laura quote. Where DC flies on gossamer wings, impeccably coiffed and utterly compelling in its archaic, almost Euphuistic stylings, Laura stumbles into the reader's home, unwashed and unwanted, shedding clunky phrases all over the carpet, desperately in need of some editor with a kindly parental streak who could at least give it a shave and a haircut before sending it on its hapless way. Well, there's the metonymy question -- Laura is, after all, named after its singularly ugly female lead, and is it possible that the very ungainliness of its prose is meant to mimic the deformity of its characters? Is the book's setting so bereft of beauty and goodness that good, beautiful prose would somehow kill the atmosphere? But such thoughts don't make me feel any less like a masochist when I try to read the damn thing.

I'm not feeling nice or fair today, it seems, and I hope -- and not just for the sake of avoiding the wrath of Theroux fans -- that this doesn't just come off as an anti-Theroux screed. If I am frustrated, it is not so much with this book as with the fact that it is in print and Darconville's Cat is not -- an aesthetic injustice of the sort Theroux has in fact made a career of recounting. Anyway, I stopped reading when I hit a chapter that consisted of a 40-page essay beginning with the sentence "A creative woman is an oxymoron." I'm sorry, Alex. Life's too short for this shit.

[Jesse · Rating 5 out of 5]

Notes on Laura Warholic:

1. I read this book immediately after Darconville's Cat, starting Laura on the same day I finished Darconville. Initially expecting another book like Darconville, I was initially disappointed, having noticed and taken to heart some of the critiques of Laura found online. Yes, this book, for instance, has some typos (a distracting and, at least to me, aesthetic problem that might initially cause one to suspect the book of being, like its printing, sub-par). Another complaint lodged against this book was its need of an editor. I'm not normally the type of reader to make such a complaint due to my love of "maximalist" prose and a fear that, like with a puzzle, the act of cutting pieces out inevitably mars the final vision/picture. So, at a certain point, I decided to take the book for what it was. I found the occasional echo of Darconville (particularly in scenes where several characters interact at parties. Recall, for instance, the faculty meeting in Darconville. I personally think that Theroux is at his very best and funniest in such scenes.) Also, Isabel, the female from Darconville's Cat makes a brief appearance at a lesbian bar. All in all, by the time Eugene and Laura's road trip commences, I was hooked and read the remaining odd 600 pages or so in a white heat.
In short, don't let any presuppositions about this book deter you from, at least, attempting it.

2. Ironically, I started this book on Thanksgiving Day.

3. Everyone knows that Theroux is gifted at invective. But somewhere around the latter half of the book, I felt a soft shift towards empathy. I feel as though Theroux earned this shift, building the characters enough to make it reasonable and, by the end, moving. Using my own life as an example, I started out reading this book full of vitriol, my own personal furies feeling justified and magnified by the streams of hate pouring from this book. By the midpoint, I was caught in a web of self-doubt, wondering whether or not my harshness towards other people was merely a projection of my own self-loathing and becoming uncomfortably convinced that I, being completely unable to empathize, was the real problem. I don't know if this book shaped that personal dialectic or if the reading of the book miraculously coincided with these questions.

4. The decidedly politically incorrect tone of the rants within this book was refreshing. There were diatribes against blacks, Jews, gays, lesbians, women, the Chinese, and the Irish. I loved them all. But I'm not sure if other readers would be willing to read page after page of this type of thing. I particularly enjoyed the anti-American rants since they seemed to match my own views, especially on the topic of democracy.

5. I disagree with the reviews that claim the characters are cartoon-like or unbelievable. I spent 900 fucking pages with them and, by the end, recognized aspects of myself in the good, the bad, and the extraordinarily ugly. Not only did Theroux create the most unattractive, hideous, and inane female character in all of literature but he made me EMPATHIZE with her. What a hideous feeling for a misanthrope.

6. Don't be fooled by my repeated use of the word "empathize" and think that this is a sentimental type of book. It is a hate-filled, exasperated, bullying, vicious monster of a book that drags you from disgust to empathy, leaving you in a pit of despair. It's a slap in the face. A punch in the stomach. And then, after an apology, it stabs you in the back. But, unlike the works of lesser writers, Theroux makes you truly FEEL that stab, twisting his typewriter ribbon tightly around your neck.

7. If I inadvertently started a sentence of this review with the word "well", please forgive me.

[Paul Dembina · Rating 1 out of 5]

DNF

[JPD · Rating 4 out of 5]

Who doesn't enjoy a photo of Evelyn Nesbit?

It has been a few years since I read Darconville's Cat and Steven Moore's supplementary material. Still, if you asked me how this book was at around 300 pages, it would eclipse the former, but once our couple goes on a cross-country car ride, the book essentially flatlines for hundreds of pages. I have dated people like Laura and Eye squared, and do not necessarily enjoy reading these relationship dynamics. I've been there. The novel redeems itself in the final quarter, and a lot happens that I really could not believe.

Theroux bends the band of caricature as far as it can go before it breaks. This is a literary rolodex of satire, but where does one draw the line on an appropriate amount? The amount of highly stereotypical people displayed matches only Ralph Bakshi.

Theroux does not hold back on Pynchon (x2), Ashbery, Baldwin, Patti Smith, and hundreds of others. Finding it necessary to call a preface Walt Whitman with "the gay poet". I found myself running out of tabs for literary references.

Theroux has many factoids, and they are a big draw for me, but once you start seeing them repeated alongside sloppy editing, I couldn't give this a perfect rating.

There is also a fable in his Fables collection, and the answer to why he chose Nesbit is in the text near the very end.

This book mirrors The Cat in many ways, but seems mostly to be a lot of showing his ass. It's fine, and the book is more often funny than the opposite.

"When does more mean worse? he wondered" (800).

You tell me, big dawg.

-The Buffoon

[bennyandthejets · Rating 5 out of 5]

Not so much a story as a rhetorical blizzard, a word drunk waltz through life and literature, Laura Warholic sold me on its greatness with the ending. While I sometimes found myself questioning as to why I was reading the near endless digressions from misogynists, anti-Semitics, and other undesirables, their vileness is more than matched by the stirring reflections on love and forgiveness offered throughout the book and peaking most noticeably in the ending, only to be tragically ripped away.

I went in expecting the sumptuousness of Darconville's Cat and got something much more sobering, serious, and heartbreaking.

[will probably write more in the future, not sure]

[Brent Hayward · Rating 5 out of 5]

Everything you’ve read about this book (and Alex T., I dare say) is true (if you’ve read anything, that is): ornery, irascible, in need of an editor, offensive, funny as hell, mercurial, startling, etc. There is more life in LV/SI than in ten other books. Better sentences, too. As Eugene Eyestones would say, why only read what you agree with? Astonishingly good. Easily vaults up the ranks.

[mkfs · Rating 1 out of 5]

In a word: Don't.

Laura Warholic is an unedited conglomeration of Theroux's writing over a twenty-year period. Ostensibly given a thin veneer of plot and character, this novel dedicates the bulk of its pages to essays on a variety of topics (for example, Democracy), and an embarrassing number of rants and screeds.

The essays come off well. Sure, they are out of place, and feel ham-handedly inserted into the prose, but they are generally entertaining and occasionally thought-provoking. The effect is similar to reading the pre-Objectivist and proto-Libertarian philosophy in de Sade's work (does the modern Right realize they are taking their Individualist philosophy from such a worthy libertine?), but de Sade cuts his philosophy with hard-core porn, while Theroux cuts his with day-to-day (I refuse to say quotidian) life in suburban Boston and an incredibly nonlinear cross-country road trip.

As for the rants, it is pretty clear that Theroux doesn't agree with any of them, for they are so terribly written that not even a supporter of the viewpoint in question could sit through one. Like the essays, they come out of nowhere, and feel wedged into the rest of the text - as if the author had this waiting in the wings and was just looking for an occasion to insert it. After enough of these, it becomes apparent that the novel is just a scaffolding on which to hang these various bits of writing, unsuitable for publishing on their own, that Theroux had lying around.

And the lists! When Laura jumps into punk rock, she doesn't listen to "bands like the Misfits and the Cramps, sometimes Crass". Instead, Theroux lists upwards of thirty bands, an amount that is neither illustrative nor exhaustive. It's like listening to a ten year-old autistic kid rattle off all the scores of baseball games he's never seen. This extends to the descriptions of crowds, in what could charitably be interpreted as Theroux trying to be funny, but really comes off as a failed attempt at using slang. Hang on, this excerpt from a rock show is going to be as painful for me as it is for you:

oafs with tattooed cheeks, nutboxes, pirate chicks, teenage girls in tube miniskirts and major lipstick, moshing party-stormers, Devoheads, Brechtian proles, halt-cranked groupies, rude goggle bunnies, metal morons, crueltoids, breatharians on meth, gutter foxes, pot orgasmists, stoned ponies with nipple rings, felchers, Goths with obscene words shaved into their hair, emo-punks, genderfuckers, martini vixens with fake eyelashes, dorky little poontang hounds, level-3 sex offenders, frowning ska-monks, vibration pixies, eerie hairball unidentifiables thrown up by one of the Milankovitch cycles of continental glaciation, dole-drawers, slaves who long for the shade and hirelings who wait for wages, and no end of fat, anti-intellectual Luddites in bat-black leather motorcycle hats and jackets with lightning.

Note the -oid suffix thrown in there. Unpopular since about 1961, Theroux still thinks it is funny, and inexplicably believes that Gen Xers use this as slang. It makes an appearance about every twenty pages.

And the caricatures! I almost gave this a second star as a collection of unfortunately-connected essays, but the tone-deaf and badly-drawn caricatures snatched that one right away. On top of the worst Black Pimp since Confederacy of Dunces (Whoa!), we have the Jew, the Racist Christian, the Butch Lesbian, the Flamboyant Gay, the Social Justice Warrior (are we allowed to say that now without laughing?), the Anti-Semite, each given a soapbox and thirty-odd pages of incoherent rant.

But enough, you say, tell me about the novel as a novel! Well (he says, knowing of Theroux's derision for this interjection, which is stated a mere sixty times in the novel), this is the story of Eugene Eyestones (if you think that name is bad, wait until you hear the clumsy nicknames people have for him - things like "E-squared" that, unlike nicknames, do not work as soon as they are uttered aloud) and Laura Warholic, who have a complicated relationship. They neither love each other, nor anyone else. Eugene, a pompous windbag, is a traumatized Viet Nam veteran when it suits the plot (i.e., rarely), and a stand-in for the author (no? you think he's a clever construction? read Theroux's opinions on music in Grammar of Rock, lifted practically straight from the mouth of this character) most other times. Laura is a miserable loser, with no discernible traits or personality, and is probably a stand-in for someone Theroux had a bad relationship with (I've known a Laura; they're not rare).

At around the 700-page mark, Theroux seems to realize he is writing a novel, and he begins to flesh out the characters and give them feelings, complexity, even moments of reflection. He tries to introduce plot complications and a finale, but these are so obvious that they seem inevitable rather than climatic. It is all too little, too late.

The text itself is described as "overwritten", but if anything it is underwritten. There is no coherence to the paragraphs, no connection between one sentence and another. Dialog is spoken without regard to what another character is saying, just one interjection after another. No editor had a hand in this work, and the joke that Theroux did not even bother to revise his first draft is more true than funny.

Given that this is presented as a satire, picking on the writing may seem unfair. But this is a near-900-page novel. If you can't write well, or can't be bothered to, then for the sake of all that is just and good (i.e., neither this novel nor anything in it) do not write 900 pages. Do what the loons at the anarchist bookstore do, and cut it short at around 75.

[Donald · Rating 5 out of 5]

In "Laura Warholic," Alexander Theroux has created a modern classic. He develops his characters so thoroughly, so magnificently, that the barebones plot is hardly noticeable. Theroux challenges the reader at every turn, with his deep, complex language, intensely detailed character analysis, philosophical discussions, and whirling array of cultural references. Protagonist Eugene Eyestones' columns on the history of sex are especially memorable and scintillating. Each sentence of Theroux's is meticulously crafted; "Laura Warholic" can be appreciated on the most fundamental level, for the sheer excellence of the writing.

In the title character, Laura Warholic, we have a woman without a single redeeming value; physically unattractive, lazy, irresponsible, selfish, uncaring, incompetent, annoying and devoid of monetary worth or any skills. And yet, like Eugene Eyestones, we find ourselves somehow drawn to her; fascinated by her very repulsiveness. Few characters in the history of literature have been so finely drawn, so detailed down to the smallest nuance and quirk, as Laura Warholic.

The other characters in the book, which rival any from sources as disparate as "David Copperfield" to television's "Green Acres," also amuse, enlighten and astound the reader. Minot Warholic; Laura's obstinate, ugly, vulgar, impotent, excessively proud, Jewish ex-husband, with his Yiddish asides and cynical impressions of the world. Discknickers, my second favorite, whom Theroux, in a daring bit of political incorrectness, portrays as a brilliant, basically positive fellow, in spite of his arrogant anti-semitism. Harriet Trombone, the sharp-tongued, Caucasian-hating Island girl; the only female that playboy Discknickers couldn't seduce. All of the characters are outspoken and unique in various ways, and none of them are the predictable, cardboard variety seen in typical best-sellers or on movie screens.

The highest praise one can give Laura Warholic is that it doesn't even need a plot to keep the reader engaged. Alexander Theroux is a literary craftsman unlike any other writing today; he obviously relishes constructing long, provocative sentences, sprinkling in words that rarely make it out of the dictionary. Every page provides food for the intellect. It is not an easy book, or one that can be taken to the beach for light reading. It is dark, it is depressing, it is illuminating. It is thoughtful, it is profound, and it is a mammoth achievement. The reader feels more intelligent just for having read it. I recommend it very highly to everyone.

[Megha]

I am not feeling it. To be revisited, hopefully soon.

******************

I feel like Alex and I are talking through a glass partition. Not even that, perhaps. He is not talking to me, he is talking at me. I could walk away at any point, and he will carry on without noticing.
Not to say I am not liking this, but an immersive reading experience is nowhere in sight.

[June Amelia Rose · Rating 5 out of 5]

An easy Alexander Theroux novel is an oxymoron.

Laura Warholic is the encyclopedic scattershot satire of of a metaphorical car crash, being the relationship between the titular Laura Warholic and the idealistic, uncompromising Eugene Eyestones.

This book is like a bible of current day cancellation. It contains slurs, rants, diatribes, bigotries, and other offensive cornucopias around every corner. This book is not for the faint of heart. Its for few people. If you are easily offended, emotionally react strongly to things you disagree with, or have a need to identify with the characters you encounter, this is NOT the novel for you. Seriously. A large feature of the novel is characters in verbal duels, berating each other with any insult they can muster. It actualy brings some of the most comic parts of the book.

I do have to grant Theroux that he made reading endless bible quotes and musings way more fun than I thought it would be. It's more he views the bible as a spiritual parable of ethics, and not some divine right. He was almost a priest and spent time in a monastery.

Perhaps this novel's greatest achilles heel is its editing. Steven Moore has recounted how in editing the novel he had to leave the project, and thus the final product has many typos, some repetitions, and a few choice incorrect facts. I really think if Theroux had more highly focused on relating his fact-lists to the themes and flow of his novel, he would've seen a bit of a warmer recession. Some of the best parts of the book are the digressions, my personal favorite actually being the essay on democracy.

All in all, this novel, while slow in plot, has a tragic heartstopping finale with a twist of a lingering plot thread i thought would never get resolved, which i thought was done very well - i was certainly taken off guard. Perhaps Theroux is best when writing the internal feelings and poetic nature of his characters.

[Maxwell · Rating 5 out of 5]

It amazes me that Theroux, almost 70 when this book released, had such command satirizing the late 90's/ early 2000’s with his huge cast of breatharians, genitorturers, flagellants, sex elves, alcoholic depressive wannabe rockstar losers, muffketeers, neo-dunces, punk snools, codeinists, pimps and gender benders. This book is unrelenting. Nearly everyone is a blatant caricature. The two central characters, however, feature an incredible amount of depth. Laura Warholic manages to be one of the least likeable characters I’ve ever read. She represents a very modern archetype, one I’ve encountered—the self-proclaimed “artist” with rich parents who never produces anything, yet justifies their freeloading lifestyle with that label. People start to see through that behavior, it seems, once the offender reaches their 30’s.