The Secondary Colors: Three Essays [Paperback]

Alexander Theroux (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 1997

A new and avidly awaited collection, this follow-up to Theroux's The Primary Colors explores the secondary colors--orange, purple, and green--by way of literature, music, art, poetry, linguistics, sports, religion, food, science, botany, movies, fable, anecdote, and no end of satire and strong opinion.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Novelist Theroux's intoxicating essays on orange, purple and green?one essay per color?comprise a logical sequel to his popular The Primary Colors. In "Orange" he veers from Chaucer's Chaunticleer to Halloween to Al Jolson's joyous shout "Velveeta!" Each color calls forth a multitude of associations drawn from daily life, art, literature, myth, history, music, science, film, cuisine, religion, until each hue seemingly defines an arc encompassing the whole world. "Purple" stimulates Theroux to imaginative leaps as he contemplates the color of sanctity, wit, devotion, vanity, majesty, truth. The essay on green hops from baseball slugger Ted Williams's eyes to poet Anne Sexton's "Suicide Note" as Theroux plumbs "the ambiguous color of life and death." What might have been a random assortment of trivia becomes in Theroux's palette an education of the senses and emotions, a magical tour of the visible landscape, an exploratory adventure of continual discovery and enchantment.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

Written in the same style as The Primary Colors (LJ 8/94), this volume contains three lengthy essays?one per color?featuring the complementary hues. Reflecting Theroux's wide-ranging intellectual, cultural, and popular interests, the essays attempt to elicit tones of orange, purple, and green using snippets of poetry and literature, foreign-language words and phrases, and references to symbols, food, films, sports, cosmetics, artworks, the environment, and everyday objects. Thus, orange is loud, rhymes with nothing in English, is marmalade, Halloween, Wheaties boxes, a side effect of hepatitis, Agent Orange, and fire; purple "is the irresistibly deep and beckoning color of leather, heather, feathers, sagebrush, winter slush, Tibetan mush, age, sage, shade, grapeade, a forest glade, mince pies, winter skies..."; and green is nature, monsters, renewal, slime, poison, envy, the Grinch, and the Jolly Green Giant. These are merely verbose, rambling lists that fail in their purpose. An optional purchase.?Joan Levin, MLS, Chicago
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Henry Holt & Co (P) (March 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805053263
• ISBN-13: 978-0805053265
• Product Dimensions: 7.3 x 4.5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.6 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,079,411 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Whitmanesque catalogue on speed., December 25, 1998

By 

[e-mail] (Lynd, Minnesota) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Secondary Colors: Three Essays (Paperback)

This is an amazing book, which contains everything you'd ever want to know about the three secondary colors, their history and associations. How could anyone have written it? How could anyone know, have found and collected so much? Is there a literary allusion to any one of the colors Theroux has missed? I doubt it. My only explanation: Alexander Theroux must be God. The stylistic brilliance supports that answer.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars "Color is fictive space", November 24, 2008

By 

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

This review is from: The Secondary Colors: Three Essays (Paperback)

"Color is fictive space," Theroux reflects in this companion book of essays to his on blue, yellow, and red as "The Primary Colors" (also reviewed by me recently). The sections on orange, purple, and green, somewhat surprisingly, seem even more detailed than those on the previous hues. They're also even more free-associative in their range.

The book therefore reads more smoothly than "Primary." I'm surprised that there's even more pages in this volume, given that you'd expect red, yellow, and blue to weigh in with greater literary, religious, artistic, erotic, psychological, and musical references. Somehow, once again, I have no idea how, Theroux amasses a prose-poem's three hundred pages of reflections on eager to please, oafish, optimistic, if garish orange, regal and sensuous purple's pomp and resonance, and green's natural hues, that open us vividly to our surroundings.

Typically for readers (like myself, who's also reviewed "Three Wogs" and "Laura Warholic" on Amazon) of his stories, this author engages in a formidable presentation of his wit. He's a skilled translator of Latin and Spanish poetry, even if he leaves a lot of the French in the original! His vocabulary's rather tamped down by his erudite standards, but this helps us along. He's less intrusive as he guides us along his mental trains of thought.

Hearteningly, Theroux keeps his eye out for cant. It's intriguing to find that all three colors feature prominently not only in the fine arts but the invective of "race music," gay subculture, and Catholic iconography-- three of the author's many interests. The book's generally well-paced, although there's a rough edit from the time he takes to correct an unnamed novelist's (I wish I knew who) critique of Theroux's own supposed misogyny, followed by a jump back to blue and yellow's combination. Anyone would be challenged, nonetheless, to arrange the mass of information with any less care than he has.

He cuts down the puerile "poetaster Jenny Joseph" with her insipid "When I am an old woman/ I shall wear purple," nods to thousands of mentions of orange across the edible and visible spectrums, and glides through tangents devoted elegantly to green in all its guises.

Minor slips emerge; his vast erudition prevents me from finding out many, but he misspells Cyndi Lauper's first name twice, and claims Rusty Staub played for the Montreal Expos back in 1964 (rather than 1969-71 and '79). The World's Fair there had not even happened 'til '67; the team started in '69. He also, puzzingly, in one sentence, errs at least twice. He places Jim Jones in "Ghana;" he asserts that Jones shot himself. (He possibly miscounts the total casualties, although I'll grant him leeway as this number has been disputed.)

Such human slips may be inevitable in a book so crammed with data, musings, memories, and critiques. They may make the book a bit more accessible; even Theroux nods! And, as he notes with these three colors near his end, they, in their secondary status, manage to become all the more inviting next to their predecessors and progenitors! Read these evocative essays and find out why.

1 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Uncle Hal, April 19, 2004

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alexander laurence (Los Angeles, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Secondary Colors: Three Essays (Paperback)

My favorite (...)is back with yet another book (I was used to his novelistic gems Three Wogs and Darconville's Cat appearing perhaps once a frugal decade), but now Alexander Theroux comes out with a book of essays two years in a row. I see that he has a predilection for new colors and using pictures of himself from thirty years ago. You may say "How vain!" But I say give the flanneur some slack. For it's possible that only myself, John Updike, Nick Baker, and maybe his brother, Paul, own the exhorbitant extent of this frilly savant's oeurve which spans maybe a few decades of sunny beach's readings. Nothing about anaesthetic Bill Clinton this time, or the fat hirsute ankles of Clinton's wife, but essays which are a celebration of colors rarely remarked upon: orange, purple, and green. I look at the first page and see something disgustingly familiar: I realize that the quote of Goethe reminds me of a writer who was as intelligent as myself. Any reader of Theroux's The Primary Colors should be comfortable with this rolodex of references to colors in the arts, literature, film, nature. I am surprised at Theroux's facility with pop music, but am dismayed at several typos and a reference to Jeff Noon's Vurt as the first cyberpunk novel. I am surprised also of the omission of Gilbert Sorrentino's The Orangery, a book of poems with the word "orange," as well as Edward Dahlberg's obscure essay "The Purple Statue in Green light" which is an anti-technology conpendium. Theroux's achievement may hasten the approaching Armageddon.