Customer Reviews

Laura Warholic: Or, The Sexual Intellectual

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

"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.

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.

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.

Laura Warholic has everything I like in a novel.

Let me count the ways:

(1) It annoys envious critics. Consider just one example. Carping critics of the book complain about the author's vast vocabulary and encyclopedic knowledge. Dear me, are they too lazy to look up meanings and add to their stores of knowledge? Where's their sense of intellectual adventure? (It is regrettable that critics with depth, such as James Wood and Louis Menand, have not reviewed this book. It's also too bad that Dwight Macdonald, the consummate verbal warrior, is no longer alive to embrace the challenge.) So here's my little plea to unqualified critics -- stop being so easily offended.

(2) It's laugh-out-loud funny on almost every page. Theroux's characters, full of jaunty irony and sarcasm, slash at each other (sometimes literally) and their society with sacred and profane brilliance. Among other things, they disdain the inevitable corruption and absurdities so often produced by our cultural, political, and business hierarchies.

(3) It's a take-no-prisoners satire. Let's face it, ours is mostly a decadent culture that deserves to be skewered. And Theroux gives it what it deserves.

(4) It's free of clichés. Except for occasional dialogue that needs a cliché to match a moment, Theroux's sentences are fresh and provocative wherever you dip into the book. As I read it now for the second time, I am continually startled by this remarkable quality. The author is obviously conducting a passionate love affair with words.

(5) It takes on worthy subjects. For example, without flinching, the novel describes relationships of all kinds with understanding and (I admit) sardonically bitter amusement -- especially those between men and women. I know of no other place in literature that features the unique, love-hate relationship conjured up between the main characters, Eugene Eyestones and Laura Warholic. Talk about the comedy and tragedy of mismatches -- you must read this one to believe it.

(6) It contains eye-opening, even astounding, digressions. Take Chapter XXXII, entitled "What in Love or Sex Is Not Odd?" from which the urge to quote is irresistible. (The entire chapter is given over to unusual facts related to sex, enough to make even the kinkiest of readers feel justified in their proclivities.) I will confine myself to just one, selected almost at random: "Memoirist Primo Levi, an industrial chemist, considered love and passion to be the epitome of unstable organic life." OK, just one more: "After comedian Stan Laurel's second wife, Virginia Ruth Rogers, had a wisdom tooth extracted -- the couple had been married for two years -- he lost all interest in her." I will let you discover the more extreme examples. This chapter, I'm convinced, is Theroux's attempt to demonstrate that we are alone, yes, but not as alone as we think.

(7) It reflects the author's persistent, idealistic hopes. In fact, as the book shows, these hopes are all too often disappointed or dashed by us, entrapped in our society. Yet it seems to me that, underneath Theroux's biting satire, there is a man truly wishing things were better, even as he acknowledges they usually won't be. Ultimately, it appears this book is the author's attempt to help us -- perhaps help himself -- gain an aesthetic handhold or two to lift us above the mundane, the squalid, the diminished.

(8) Most important, it's the one book I can take to my nursing home. (Hey, I'm 73!) Provided I'm still able, I'll happily avoid all group activities -- giggling, wincing, and rolling my eyes as, in splendid isolation, I reread the pages of Laura Warholic. Rather like the pre-nursing-home stuff I do now.

Count me in with the five star reviewers. This is a magnificent, sweet, sad, terribly moving and incredibly satisfying book. Astonishing achievement. Never once looked at a dictionary---just let the verbal hyper-abundance wash me over into bliss. Maximalist beckettianism. Nah, that's not it. Just impossible to encapsulate and convey. A comic book blown apart into an epic pop romance meditation. Theroux ponders and pontificates and rants and satirizes and romances the reader with the most reading fun I've had in years. Nothing at all like it----which is a wonderful thing.

"Laura Warholic or The Sexual Intellectual" is the greatest novel of the decade that begins with 2001. A grand hydraulic force drives the most spectacular movements of language, image and character any novelist can possibly achieve today. The sexual psychology evinced in these pages is unmatched in its pertinacity and complexity. There are many shades of humor here which combine in story that crashes into a full load of both salvation and damnation.

One foolish reviewer asserted that the novel did not have a heart. But it does have a heart - a heart swollen to outrage on an epic level. Wave upon wave of harsh satiric force sketches the deranged madness of the American landscape into precise language.

And language happens to be one of the heroes of the tale. Not since James Joyce has a writer in the English language demonstrated such a broad and powerful command of words from the heights of sublimity to the depths of a brutal vulgar hell.

Most of the characters are monsters, exotic figments of doom that haunted the tale, spewing twisted demiurgic verbal concoctions that goe beyond mere humor into an order of sensibility more appalling, and throbbing with doom.

Prospective readers must beware. Theroux is a deadly opponent of political correctness and his grand depiction of our society in decay is hostile to ideology of all kinds - whether on the right or the left.

Alexander Theroux's "Darconville's Cat" is one of my favorite books of all time, so I find myself searching for the reason why Laura Warholic was such a negative experience for me. Both contain dense prose, a world of exaggerated characters, challenging and fabricated words, and ponderous themes.

However, where Darconville's Cat explores both love and hope, casting it through varied and delightful styles of writing (poetry, dialog, checklists, sermons, even a trashy romance novel read aloud in a dorm room), Warholic is a long, steady, monotonous line stretching into the foreseeable future -- and always on a downhill slope. The book's constancy of hate and hopelessness is a relentless barrage to the reader, and the heartless denigration of Laura Warholic is chafing. In how many ways, and how many times, can Theroux describe her as ugly? His characterizations are still brilliant, and his mastery of language is humbling, but if there's nothing to enjoy, and barely a plot to cling to beyond who will deliver the next invective, there is little here to sustain me.

Being an enormous fan of Theroux, I really wanted to enjoy this book. If you loved this book, at least be comforted by the fact that my low rating of two stars is even more disappointing to me.

Yes, Theroux is an writer of invective, however, I think the reviewer who subtitled the novel the "Moby-dick of Misanthropy" was missing the main thrust of Laura Warholic entirely. I'm almost sure said reviewer didn't finish the book at all. Theroux attacks various groups of people, often viciously and at obscene lengths through various secondary characters, whose speech is obviously meant to reflect poorly on the speakers and not the maligned group (those delivered by Discknickers, Minot, etc.) and sometimes through the narrator or through Eyestones. Though even the narrator or Eyestones present various group members (homosexuals, Jews, etc.) as stereotypes in ways that make some readers uncomfortable, they are cartoons, they are meant to be grotesque cartoons. Is satire really unrecognizable by so many readers? Even readers that are well read enough to have heard of Theroux in the first place?

Theroux enjoys name calling and exaggeration, but he is no misanthrope. Examine how he deals with his actual characters, his humans as individuals rather than those characters meant to be cartoon representations. Laura Warholic is pitied by both Eyestones and the author and Theroux suggests that those like Laura need grace and understanding whether or not they choose to accept it. Theroux may or may not 'hate' the masses as masses (see his indictment of democracy in the novel), but the individual he uncommonly feels for.

Laura Warholic is the work of one of the few great writers alive. His sentences are original and vivid. He is a master of the baroque and ornamental, but always readable. His two major works are simultaneously massive and encyclopedic yet fairly plot heavy and character based. As long as you don't misread the book, which is it seems is the biggest problem, I think you will enjoy the novel as much as I did.

This like a dish of Ortolan is not for everyone's reading table.
Embodies the best of Joyce, Vonnegut and Salinger. Sarcastic, witty, and erudite in abstruse--but rewarding allusions.

This book works on so many levels--intellectual, profane, sacred yet existential. Confronts you like a carnival's house of mirrors--you see yourself, others and the human condition in multifarious ways: at times disturbing, funny, yet always entertaining and reflecting truth.

Buy this book--be prepared to have a good dictionary!

Most of this book is devoted to conveying the thoughts of its major character, Eugene Eyestones. This kind of novel can work. Bellow pulled it off beatifully in books like "Mr. Sammler's Planet." But, unlike Theroux, Bellow was a prose genius, and on his worst day could not have written even one of the over-stuffed, pretentious, convoluted sentences that constitute this book. Moreover, Sammler, whether one utltimately agreed or disagreed with him, was a very smart man. Eyestones is not. Eyestones' endless speculations on sex and life are relentlessly, unremittingly, and, alas, interminably stupid. In a vain attempt to hide the fact that his protagonist is a grandiloquent moron, Theroux liberally sprinkles every other sentence with erudite references to both classic and popular culture, but the ostentatious display of learning cannot hide the lack of intelligence.
Structurally, the book lacks not merely plot, but development or movement of any sort whatsover. Even the minor characters are as flat, static, and uninteresting as the dreary protagonist. The eponymous Laura, presented as awful in every possible way, gives new meaning to the term, "one-dimensional." But this one-woman concoction of everything men dislike, however black her crimes, certainly has done nothing to deserve spending 800 pages with Eyestones, and I didn't deserve it either. Realizing that you have spent even a dime of your money or a minute of your precious life reading this grotesque monument to authorial self-indugence will ruin your day. You will be justifiably depressed about the state of a literary culture that allows a book like this to see publication, to say nothing of the tools induced, who knows by what, to offer deeply dishonest complimentary blurbs for the dust-jacket. One of these dust-jacket prostitutes says that this book is "smart, funny, outlandish, angry, and moving." Every adjective in this quote is a lie. This opinion is so divorced from reaity that I believe that thorazine is probably requred. I simply cannot remember ever encountering such a bad book.