Laura Warholic: Or, The Sexual Intellectual (Hardcover)

by Alexander Theroux (Author)
Key Phrases: imaginary crumbs, faraway eyes, sexual intellectual, Ann Marie Tubb, San Francisco, The Krauthammer (more...)

Editorial Reviews

From The Washington Post

Reviewed by Jeff VanderMeer

Can a novel about love and the illusions of love be created out of almost 900 satire-laced pages devoted to obscene invective, hatred, pettiness, ignorance, pity, pride and hubris? This is the question raised by Alexander Theroux's first novel in 20 years, Laura Warholic or, The Sexual Intellectual. If the answer is "maybe," the blame lies less with Theroux's prodigious natural talent than with how he has chosen to structure his narrative and the repetitive nature of his characterizations.

Eugene Eyestones writes a sex column for Quink, a Boston magazine edited by the slobbish Minote Warholic and staffed by an eccentric band of misanthropes with names like Duxbak, Ratnaster, Clucker and Discknickers. Eyestones has been seeing -- with the intermittent frequency and heat of a sputtering light bulb -- Warholic's estranged wife, Laura, while obsessing over the unobtainable bakery employee Rapunzel Wisht. Although apparently a Vietnam veteran, Eyestones acts like a teenager, idealizing Rapunzel while cataloguing Laura's every fault. The intensity of this scrutiny is magnified by the torrent of insults offered by Minote Warholic, most of Quink's staff and several others. They present Laura's defects in eloquent and lengthy detail, "slacker and total skullcase" being perhaps the most understated of these comments. Eyestones becomes complicit in this character assassination by his silence, a passivity also exemplified by his unwillingness to either ditch Laura or commit to her.

Theroux's use of metaphor in these sections remains as startling and daring in its brilliance as in his masterpiece, Darconville's Cat (1981). Through the early pages of this new novel, Theroux's genius appears to reflect a generosity of spirit toward character akin to that of 19th-century influences like Dickens and Trollope. However, it soon becomes clear that Theroux is using his amazing powers of grotesquery and caricature to make almost everyone look morally, ethically and intellectually ugly. As a result, the reader's delight at Theroux's descriptive powers quickly changes to disgust at the unrelenting brutishness of these characters, and that disgust, finally, is transformed into boredom as the barrage of details and constant repetitions begin to seem not only gratuitous but insulting to the reader.

Theroux does try to vary the tone and form of Laura Warholic. In addition to insults that have the wit and bawdiness of Shakespearean monologues, he includes pages of Eyestones's sex columns, notes for columns, a fairy tale and often scandalous monologues on Jews, religion and lust. In the middle of a lengthy road trip during which Laura and Eyestones argue their way across the United States, Theroux even offers up chapters on sex and democracy, hodge-podge collections of facts and observations with no particular organization. Darconville's Cat also contained digressions, but they served to intensify that novel's effect. Here, where the main characters practice indecision, digressions merely intensify the lack of movement.

Near the end of Laura Warholic, after the mismatched couple has broken up, Eyestones has a change of heart. He wonders: "Had not he blundered by looking at Laura far too closely, just as he had looked at Rapunzel from far too great a distance? Would not his attempt at solving both riddles have been avoided in a state of proper balance?" This epiphany is offered up around Christmas, that most sentimental of holidays, and it is so jejune -- creates a portrait of a character unaware through so many hundreds of pages -- that I began to wonder if Theroux meant for his novel to be satire, and satire only. But surely not. Surely he means to be sincere on some level because otherwise we have read his mammoth undertaking only to be told that life is a pointless farce, and that is not an answer worth enduring all these pages.

It seems only appropriate that Laura Warholic ends with a two-paragraph lecture from the author after the main characters have exited the stage. A little more space for the reader, a little less for the author, and this fiercely intelligent, frustrating, disturbing, wonderful, dawdling, horrible and ultimately didactic novel might have been a masterpiece.

Copyright 2008, The Washington Post. All Rights Reserved.

From Booklist
Prior to his two elegant essay collections, The Primary Colors (1994) and The Secondary Colors (1996), Theroux wrote push-the-envelope works of fiction. Now in his first novel in 20 years, a work that screams "literary event," Theroux takes up a signature theme, thwarted love. Eugene Eyestones is an erudite man of taste and refinement earning his keep by writing an intellectual yet nonetheless scandalous sex column for a Boston magazine published by the grotesquely fat and foul Minot Warholic. Laura, Warholic's homely, straw-thin, slutty, rock-and-roll-fanatic ex-wife, serves as gentlemanly Eugene's unlikely muse, while he dreams of Rapunzel, a fair lady working in a bakery. Weary of the anti-Semitic, racist, misogynist, and homophobic tirades and insults habitually spewed by his cartoonishly vituperative colleagues, Eugene goes on the road with obtuse Laura, touring America's grand spectrum of tackiness. Undeniably funny and compelling, linguistically and intellectually dazzling, as well as offensive and outrageously prolix, Theroux's spiky catchall satire of the myriad ills of contemporary culture and the divide between idealized love and unbridled lust grinds and thrashes its way to an obliterating conclusion. Donna Seaman
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 878 pages
• Publisher: Fantagraphics Books (December 21, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1560977981
• ISBN-13: 978-1560977988
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.5 x 2.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 3.8 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (8 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #612,246 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "When doesn't more mean worse?", September 2, 2008

By	John L Murphy "Fionnchú" (Los Angeles) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

A true sign of a good book? Finding read-aloud quotes on nearly every page. My wife had to endure quite a few, out of hundreds I kept to myself, chuckling or nodding. I rarely react to a novel this way. This massive, 880-page tome requires Joycean (strange that Joyce gains no mention here) erudition coupled with Pynchonesque ("Gravity's Rainbow" gets included without comment among a shelf of tawdry 50s pulp paperbacks) whimsy. My love of the former quality balances with my impatience for the latter indulgence, and luckily, as the narrative progresses, there's less stress on the outré or clever for its own sake.

However, as a reader of two out of three of Theroux's past novels (and I just checked out his out-of-print "Three Wogs" début from my library), I'm prepared for another few hundred pages of baffling Yiddish phrases, pop culture's detritus, adjectives perhaps not even the OED could elucidate, an essay on the folly of democracy, a fable, a catalogue of sexual oddities, and an exegesis on why the female prefers to channel her creativity into procreation rather than the fine arts. These intersperse with an already rambling, often minimally sketched plot. There's very little action in this novel, and it's nearly all in recollection. Instead, you rummage into the mental chaos, the endless associations of trains of thought, and whatever Theroux ventriloquizing through Eugene wants to complain or celebrate.

Once you get used to the rapid-fire banter, outrageously learned attacks by and against the power wielded by "Red Sea pedestrians," the pitch-perfect reproduction of jive patter, Afrocentric invective, lesbian barroom insults, and queer evocation of pithy put-downs supported by recited dialogue from half the "chick flicks" ever made in Tinseltown's golden age, you're into the mind, mostly, of Eugene Eyestones-- a pre-blog (the year may be unnamed but "5760" in the Jewish calendar gains a toast at what would be a party on Christmas 1999) columnist for a hipster Boston magazine as the "Sexual Intellectual." The novel roams widely and exhaustively through his own obsessions, and his own troubled relationship, dissected over tens of thousands of words, with Laura, ex-wife of the "Quink" magazine's editor. It's not a happy situation, but Eugene feels compelled out of perhaps genuine idealism more than easy pity, to try after years of effort and rejection to accept Laura as she is. It isn't easy. "And what am I to love if not the enigma"-- Eugene's typical plaint (536).

She's 36, beanpole skinny, pretty ugly, promiscuous, unwilling to commit to any job, philosophy of life, or search for meaning. Her scattered forays into rock-club groupiedom, her manic frenzies as she mimics whoever's her latest partner's musical and mental predilections, her depression and slovenly character: all gain merciless representation. Your ability to progress through so much detail may test your stamina. This book will take weeks, perhaps, to finish. But, in its last chapters, a sort of ironic grace manages to emerge, and poignant counterparts between the cruel, backbiting, ever-restless life of the literati, the trendy, and the inarticulate pundits who claim to know it all-- and a deeper, more contemplative stance, as only Duxbak (these names) achieves, move the climax and denouement into glimpsed profundity.

I imagine Theroux labored, given his last novel, "An Adultery," came out nearly two decades ago, long on this magnum opus. For a story so immersed in rock 'n' roll, current fads, and witty repartee, it also carries considerable intellectual heft inside its immense binding. It's excoriating of our lazy American culture. Eugene despises our paucity of invention, and our timidity in placing merit above charm. I figure it's Theroux using Eugene as a thinly (if at all) disguised mouthpiece for his own strong objections to our dumbed-down detritus, featured in Laura's vapidity. Eugene as his own character takes up 80% of the narratively filtered omniscient voice here, but Theroux does appear to blur his fictional character into his own philosophy and politics, from what I can tell. This resembles what we used to welcome as a "novel of ideas," more than a full-fledged novel. It's more, especially in the Quink scenes, akin to Menippean satire (one of the few classical allusions that doesn't gain a mention somewhere in these rarified columns of typeface).

There's reams of lost learning that any polymath will quail to understand, and I can imagine a companion to this text will one day appear to rival those for "Ulysses," or Pynchon's oeuvre. It does wander halfway though into a "Lolita-" type of cross-country road trip that I do not think the novel needed to incorporate. It's recounted haphazardly and the author seemed to tire of the conceit long before the Pacific was sighted. This may reflect Eugene and Laura's falling out during the trip, but it does vitiate rather than charge the central plot, such as it is, considerably.

Inevitably, typos do mar the achievement. For example: Colmer for the cemetery town in California of Colma or Hurst for Hearst. Pauline Kael was not a native of San Francisco, but she was born on a chicken farm in Petaluma; Air Supply and Morphine both are misclassified musically; the Transcontinental Railroad appears to be confused with the completion in "1864" of the Union Pacific section by the Chinese; a Carmelite tertiary is not "unvowed," exactly. I wish the editing had been tighter, given the abundant enthusiasm and apparent years of free time that Theroux must have committed to this, but the weight of this text does weigh upon any reader. We lack his mastery of trivia and we all may pale at keeping up with a very demanding, often entertaining, and seriously argued set of rants, raves, and razzing. The book did not need to be so lengthy; there's some repetition of tidbits, and while particular elements find resolution by the conclusion, you do sense the author's pouring out onto the page information and facts and opinions for their own sake, rather than consistently in the service of a coherent, readable, and rewarding few dozen hours that it will require of even the speediest and smartest reader. Theroux via Eugene never lets you forget he's brainier than you will ever be. I admire such ambition, but I do wonder at his aloof muse.

The slips I cited may be forgivable in a book with thousands of such references, and the daunting range of Theroux knows few rivals in American prose. He may remind you of a Jeopardy tournament winner, combined with a classics major, a fiddler, a memorizer of past gems now dimmed from English verse, a vinyl junkie, a lexicographical obsessive, and an strenuous theologian. Not to mention somebody who's hung out in lots of bars catering to all sexual preferences, musical selections, and ethnic alliances.

"When doesn't more mean worse?" It's asked more than once by Eugene. The gale force assault of this novel may dissuade you, but look up the first chapter at the publisher's site, see if you like it, and take it from there. It's an investment in time and energy, but it's a quite a good read for all its excess and enthusiasms. It teaches you forgiveness, and beneath the verbal pyrotechnics, thought and care rest.

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars In Need of Committed Readers, March 31, 2008

By	The Ginger Man - See all my reviews

After a heart-rending loss in Game 2 of the 1975 World Series which prevented the Boston Red Sox from taking a two game lead, starting pitcher Bill "Spaceman" Lee was asked by reporters to describe the Series to that point. Lee's masterfully understated response was, "Tied."

Similarly, after spending months working through Theroux's epic, I am tempted to limit my review to "Long."

It is long in pages (900), incredibly long in thought, and dense. Through the prism of the relationship between Laura Warholic and Eugene Eyestones, Theroux explores love, identity, desire, modern culture in all its most bizarre permutations and sex. Remarkably, until the final pages, almost nothing happens. Theroux seems to want the reader to experience the quotidian and depressing reality of the character's lives through discussions in bars, rooms, street corners, cars, etc. before moving the plot through its final stages.

Through these dialogues, Laura is presented as one of the most fully realized and least likeable characters in all of fiction. Pitied by Eyestones rather than loved, Laura is not evil in any significant way, but is petty and unaccomplished in every conceivable way. Her smallness of character becomes both a metaphor for modern culture and a touchstone by which other characters in the book are measured. Whenever the reader begins to feel some small sympathy for her, Theroux reminds us of her petty dishonesties, her overwhelming plainness of appearence and her unwholesome odor.

It is easier to like Eyestones, the Sexual Intellectual, until we realize that he is in love with a girl at a bakery he frequents though he never makes the effort to speak with her. Eyestones becomes more pitiable than Laura in his failure to commit and in his hypocritical pose as a sexuality expert who is celibate.

While not uplifting, this work of art is worth experiencing if the reader has the patience to work through its many paces. In doing so, one comes to understand Theroux's description of identity: "We are at odds with our very selves, becoming nothing but what we are not and thus having to despair of being what we are." Theroux describes the dangers of commitment by advising that "We are willing to lose ourselves in another as we exchange fates with one whom we love but on whom our heart is nevertheless impaled."

As in Heller's cynical diatribe "Something Happens," we must live the lives of the main characters for an extended period before anything "happens" in a more traditional narrative sense. Even then, Theroux has to help the reader interpret what the final pages mean. "Vision constantly calls to us like a seditious angel with what could be." There is danger, says Theroux, in both responding to and ignoring the call.

Strangely, Laura Warholic somehow succeeds in enriching understanding while dampening the spirit.

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

1.0 out of 5 stars The Tin Book, June 12, 2008

By	Daniel Myers (Greenville, SC USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 1000 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

"I know not how it was--but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable; for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible."

Thus, Poe's famed short story, "The Fall of The House of Usher" begins. It's passing strange though that the "half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment" that the narrator claims NOT to feel, IS FELT by the reader throughout the work, thus ensuring the longevity of the story's appeal. Sadly, that feeling IS completely lacking in this work under review.

There's not much of a story here at all. Most of Laura Warholic is an extended series of essays and diatribes given by Theroux usually under the guise of Eugene Eyestones, the "Sexual Intellectual" - but also of the Dickensian grotesques (who are, in this case, truly grotesque) constituting the payroll of "Quink" magazine in Boston - all of them gushing over with polysyllabic denunciations, figures ransacked from the Bureau of Statistics and ever so clever wordplay--"You've seen one mall, you've seen the Mall" etc etc ad nauseam. The objects of these screeds include: Women, Jews, the Irish, Democracy, Popular Music since WWII, and many other subjects treated in a most loathsome fashion, especially as personified by Laura Warholic, who serves as a sort of synecdoche for any person born after 1962, Theroux's definition of Generation X. I'm leaving out other subjects of vituperation in order to avoid aping Theroux's penchant for listing every manner of thing under the Sun. ---All of this is continuously supported by out-of-context quotes from the Bible and every highbrow author one is likely (or not likely) to have read, as if Theroux were on some sort of literary life support system and couldn't pen original thoughts himself.

Let there be no doubt, gentle reader, that Theroux has read many more books than you, that Theroux knows more abstruse verbiage than you, that Theroux can charcterise someone more fantastically than you'll ever be able to do in your wildest dreams of writing. But is it not a very hard thing, gentle reader, that Theroux should thus disdain you and me, gentle reader, that he should suck all hope and love from us, that he should lay to waste our longings and imaginings?

Do I exaggerate? Here are the last sentences of the book (p.878):

"The fatal and incapacitating truth is that our dreams are often ONLY a matter of the heart...Dreams offer no recourse. Nor in the end can they be found to renew or redeem us. Dreams, by definition do not come true." THE END (thankfully).

For one thing, this only shows that Theroux has not really read Yeats, whose poems he keeps pushing on Laura throughout their bilious trip across America. "For dreams are also sooth," says Yeats.--And, by the way, the title of the Yeats poem Theroux cites early on is "Sailing to Byzantium" not "On Sailing to Byzantium."

But the main thing it shows is how disheartening the book is. I'm still not sure how I made it through. If you're Jewish or female, I truly don't understand how you COULD make it through. It shows what is lacking throughout the work, a heart. Despite all the talk of sex and love, the only emotion Eyestones/Theroux admits to feeling here is pity, which he prides himself on. Pride-The First Deadly Sin, Alex.

The book is one long snarl from Nietzsche's abyss. But the reason you should stay away from it, reader, is not because of what it is or has, but because of what it lacks...

A heart.