Three Wogs: D

by Alexander Theroux

Book by Theroux, Alexander

Genres: Fiction, Novels, Satire, American, Literature

216 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1972

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

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 4 out of 5]

Alex’s first published thing (we’re on first-name terms now) is almost as bizarre as this review. Three Wogs is a politically incorrect triptych-novel set in late 1960s, with each protagonist representing a particular type of disagreeable racist, and Alex’s task is to flay their backward attitudes alive with his divinely satirical prose. In the first story ‘Mrs Proby Gets Hers,’ Alex lampoons stuck-up petit bourgeois spinsters to hilarious effect, capturing the absurd language of needless precision and trivial preciousness. Her encounter with a local Chinese tradesman ends badly during a Fu Manchu movie in a piece of odd mirroring. ‘Childe Roland’ is the longest and least successful of the three, covering the adventures of young thug and bus-cleaner Roland as he chats up local tarts and engages in a potentially violent dialogue with an Indian chap on a bus. The parody of soapbox bigotry is the funniest thing here, reminiscent of the pulpit hissings of President Greatracks in Darconville’s Cat. The last story ‘The Wife of God’ is the wittiest, reminiscent of Ronald Firbank and other pomposity-skewering wits. Taking on the arch sexual cowardice of the church, Alex’s prose reaches its most dazzling peak as the sexless vicar tries convincing his African choirmaster not to marry by threatening him with impossible karmasutric sexual feats. As first books go, Three Wogs is the weirdest I have read in yonks. Since Alex squeezes humour from cultural stereotypes and accents, the book will offend many. But clearly the focus of this book is to ridicule the attitudes of the period (Alex wrote the book during his stay in London) and at this task, he succeeds magniloquently. If Nabokov had written Up the Junction, this might’ve been the result.

[Geoff · Rating 5 out of 5]

A bizarre triptych of grotesqueries satirizing racism, bigotry, hypocrisy, and blithe dunderheadedness in 1960-70's UK, written in Theroux's inimitable ultra-deep, ultra-obscure, ultra-musical, ultra-archaic lexicography-obsessed prose. Writing like this is a rare thing - writing like this used to skew the slack-jawed, dim-eyed, moth-brained, dipshit xenophobe-jingoist-nationalistic element in all our societies, using their own squinting, half-thought ideologies against them, is a treat for us blessed readers. What more could you want? His first novel, and everything you love about Laura Warholic is already present, in a lovely little stinging embryonic form. (Relevantly enough, the dinks satirized herein would fit snugly into this season's crop of Republican presidential hopefuls!) Read this book.

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

Alexander Theroux is a postmodernist of unique flowery style and his burlesque triptych Three Wogs is simply inimitable.
His extraordinarily juicy vocabulary, the impassable barrage of archaic, bookish and vulgar words highly enhances the derisive effect of the narration…
Mrs. Proby Gets Hers is about the everyday life of philistines and smugness in general.
“Your how is not necessarily my how, nor is ours theirs.”
This formula defines the relationships between the characters of the entire novel.
Childe Roland is of ignorance and stupidity…
“An underground wall is invariably the Rosetta Stone of the troglodyte. Roland skated his eyes over the surface of the wall which was scored with calligraphies barbed and illiterate. It was as full as the Personal Page in the London Times: pan-sexual suggestions (telephone numbers, trysts, preferences); a sprightly, if vile, series of anatomical studies done in indelible lipstick; single familiar verbs (nouns? adjectives?) spaced out alone; an omeletted reproduction of the Union Jack; the vivid declaration by Edwin of eternal affection for Angelina crossed out to question mark, crossed out to what read like the entire male population from Giggleswick to the lower Americas; unmetrical limericks; lavatorial allusions accompanied with hieroglyphs, predominantly tumescent; lovers’ names ballooned in asymmetrical hearts pierced through with shaky arrows; and, finally, in bright chalks, the socio-political proclamations of the chthonic historian burdened with unscrolling his views on immigration and ethnic balance, which tripped in large, semi-uncial slants through descending letters to frantic exclamation: ‘Down With The Tongs!’ ‘Baboons Out, Now!’ ‘Keep Britain White!’”
This is rock art of the modern troglodytes…
Wife of God is of sanctimony and arrogance…
“‘Ugly races are always primitive. It’s their form of sour grapes. The lower classes,’ Lady Therefore whispered, confidentially pushing his head into her shoulder, thin as a wishbone and suffocatingly perfumed, ‘have been the raspberry seed in our wisdom tooth for a long, long time.’”
When folks start thinking that they are the better beings than their fellowmen everything always ends up in trouble.

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

We’ll begin with that dull question which always interests me, the question of the truth of the subtitle, “: a novel.” One might be tempted to declare Three Wogs a mere collection or assemblage of three novellas, three short stories. And indeed each might be read independently, much as selections might be made from Moby-Dick or War and Peace for pedagogical convenience; or as sections of works-in-progress are frequently published. But the subtitle is reinforced by the title itself, three. And I find no compelling reason to disbelieve the title. In high school english classes we might have learned, too, that theme is a unifying convention of the novel, just as are character and plot. And Three Wogs is thematically unified. All that a novel really needs in order to be truly itself as a novel is to be so called by itself and to have some minimum of unity. So what we have in Three Wogs is a novel with a triptych structure, straight out of the medieval tradition of paintings in triptych. Enough of that. A pretty picture ::



“I’m not racist, but I just don’t trust Obama.” I’m happy to have not heard this howler for quite some time (news tune-out on my part?), but back in 2008 it seemed to occur every time I listened to NPR, and it was nearly never commented upon by NPR’s ethically-objective reporters. It is a not-at-all-clever self-defensive, heel-digging reaction of the reactionary and racist which is merely smiled upon by the liberal know-better. It’s the kind of comment to which the first response ought not be forgiveness and understanding. But it’s the favored form of self-determination for our self-conscious racist. Bugger them, we know what they mean. Theroux’s dip-shit, maliciously ignorant brits in Three Wogs aren’t as self-conscious, but there’s no mistaking them for their thick skulls. But boy oh boy, in Theroux’s linguistically baroque hands they sure do string together some fantastic little diatribes and games; shorter than Laura’s to be sure. Racists like these are properly shut up within the covers of a novel, of a fiction, where they should sing as eloquently and offensively as the pen can cause them to do. One should continue with other diabolically talented bigots like Simon from Take Five, not to mention Theroux’s subsequent three novels.

I preach here. I make a few anti-racist remarks. It’s important to do that. And Theroux’s book is a kind of anti-racist, anti-misogyny, anti-bigot rant. But it sells fiction a bit short if that’s what it is. Were that all it were. And frankly Theroux’s book is likely not to be interested specifically in what his characters believe qua their beliefs, but rather more so what role a certain attitude towards language and its being play in relation to the holding of those beliefs; that there is some relationship between the desacralization of language, a clinging to its mere rude and crass use, and the mud-brained kind of things bigots hold to. That there is perhaps some kinship between cultivation of language and a knowledge of what difference means. Look into the manner in which its characters speak. This comes out most clearly in Roland’s speech, the American version of which can be found on talk radio and country music circuits. Even should a causal relationship between a cultivation, refinement, holding-as-sacred of language and some kind of moral elevation not hold, there would seem to be a direct line between ignorance (and all ignorance is ultimately grounded upon language) and malice. Malice is the political and social problem. Amelioration of ignorance, ie, education, is part of the solution. And fiction plays its role as a fix to the foreshortening of language which is the natural position of all of us; in fiction language might have its being.

This is not Theroux’s argument. It is mine. And it might be wrong. And it might not hold water. And it might not satisfy. But but there is another piece of this triptych which should not never be passed over, & Theroux Metaphrastes: An Essay on Literature, which was added as a supplement to the 1975 Godine edition. It should not be missed. Totally at odds with my above thesis, but perhaps not entirely, Theroux argues in favor of his style, his erhobene, baroque style, on the basis of a few extended quotations from this ancestor Pierre Christophe Cardinal Théroux-D’arconville, that misogynist of Darconville’s Cat fame. Alex defends his style, qua style, from charges of having caused the “exasperation” of a reviewer (her word) by having written and published the following sentence,

The utter impossibility of alteration, determined through centuries of unquizzical resignation and fortified by a trust in the fancy of a capable God, makes of the grey day in London an inexorability that translates into the accepted gratitude of a traditional pain known to an untraditional pleasure not.

Apparently this reviewer (and does one begin to suspect the God-like powers of editors spurned?) held to the mistaken preference that Theroux should have said, “The English can’t change their rainy weather, and so they accept it.”

So, it might be a stretch on my behalf, and it might miss a bit of what Alex is arguing in his fictions and in his essays, but I suspect that I’m standing on at least a little bit of solid ground when I suggest that the manner in which we relate to our language, the kind of thought we give to it, the manner in which we treat our language as an end in itself, perfectible as a walnut serving bowl turned upon a lathe is perfectible, our intention to speak truthfully and beautifully, that we never treat our language ever as a mere means but as something to be loved for itself, well, I think that such a cultivation of our relationship with our languages just might have something to do with the way we relate to our world and to the other human beings which populate that world.

I leave you with a final word from Alex, the prefatory note to the essay.

I have a very amplified prose style. You will understand little of this white paper, reader, and sympathize with less, in assuming outright that nothing worthwhile can proceed from that extremity. I want to make a distinction between two rhetorical terms: inflatio and amplificatio. Amplificatio is not a fault. I would plump for it being a virtue. I come down on the side of amplificatio--as did Burton, Montaigne, Rabelais, Sterne, and others memorably innumerable. It is a group in advocate of the many-membered period. I excerpt myself from this list in order to win you over right away. --A.L.T.

_______________
Obligatory Links ::

Anthony’s extended review.

A Blog Review, 2008.



A Wogs vocabulary produced by gr Thorouvian Sam ::
https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/...

[Eric · Rating 5 out of 5]

Three Wogs is the work of a verbal sorcerer and deep-seeing satirist unafraid of prolixity or obscurity in the pursuit of a complex effect: the grotesque real, the dusklight under which social aversions reveal erotic fears and fantasies – the depths where "horror and pleasure coincide” said Leiris. The important physical spaces are liminal or subterranean. The theater where the Sinophobe and refugee-tormenter Mrs. Proby goes to be deliciously alarmed before giant projected scenes of Fu Manchu's lubricious villainy:

The theatre, with its smell of weak lilac and cheap caporal, was the perfect hush in soft red lights that Mrs. Proby loved: funereal, anonymous, the nethermost retreat where the tired, amorous, and lonesome could sleep or fondle or expatiate in ones or twos or threes, far from the madding crowd and unbothered in the reliquary of pure imagination.

The nocturnal depot under Victoria Station where the troglodytic lout Roland McGuffey washes buses before emerging to menace an Indian student asleep on bench awaiting his train:

The sound of water was coming from some sourceless spot, a broken aqueduct, perhaps, or maybe some conduit water spilling out of an ancient furrow or some lead Roman leakage of Londinium. Roland blinked his eyes to adjust them to the darkness, then disappeared into a stairway like a bit of dirt into a Hoover—and stepped into the damp cellar. The cold light of tiny bulbs, blue and pennysized, strung out between eerie shadows and revealed a hushed ash-grey tomb, a cell of must, cannibalized, as if by Mulciber, into a warehouse for those who work by night – the dark, witching hours that slowly pass, soured, it always seems, by those deep and unassignable final causes that desperately remind us of our odd naked frailties and whisper to us we owe God a death.

The “dark labyrinth of shale-colored stone and traceried windows” where Reverend Which Therefore, a foppish ghoul of a clergyman whose bookplate is a “ferroprussiate reproduction of one of Rouault’s mauled Christs, with Which Therefore’s name in ten-point type substituted for Pilate’s inscription,” reluctantly officiates at the marriage of the African choirmaster with whom he is besotted to a girl who he can only picture “performing jack-flips on a runway in Great Windmill Street at a half-crown a go, a Salomé who’d divest down to the bone for a posy bag of shillings”:

Next to one of the columns sat a small table where one could purchase, for a shilling each, leather bookmarks embossed in pinchbeck, shiny postcards of the Family Windsor, and small pamphlets which stapled together the church’s history…and prose accounts of various legends more than willingly enlarged upon, as was usual in these churches all over London, by little pie-faced but dedicated shawlies who sat lost in their mufflers, blueing in the cold, chatting with Japanese businessmen and troops of German girl scouts, and recommending this or that with chirps of delight and sad smiles—grumbling mercilessly only in the off chance they should be locked in overnight, a not infrequent hazard for the napping octogenarian placed in the same corner with long dead ladies and snipenosed, marmoreal queens.

I’ve quoted Three Wogs at its most scenic-atmospheric, but dialogue and indirect discourse are just as important in the book. Theroux creates comedy from the immigrants’ accents and pedantically precise diction (especially in contrast with the grunts and growls of their tormentors), and elaborates the racists’ fantasies with astounding rhetorical verve. Every page is rich and weird. Asked in the Bookslut interview why he incorporates “a multiplicity of narrative forms” into his novels, Theroux answered: “Pedantry. The delight in living. Brio. The chance to act, to mime, to mock, to mimic.” A wonderful credo. I am very excited to read Darconville’s Cat.

[Cody · Rating 4 out of 5]

There is really only one word to describe Alexander Theroux, one which I’m sure would make him chartreuse with anger: charming. I’m sorry, AT, but you may very well be the most charming bastard that has ever lived. I acknowledge that I’m pretty much a killjoy when it comes to literature and generally avoid anything that may make me laugh (that’s what people falling down in the rain are for), but I’ll be damned if there’s a single page where I don’t positively beam with a smile when reading Theroux. More often than not, I’m stifling a laugh. Sometimes, despite my pallor and Black Metal make up, I bust up audibly and loudly—completely blowing my reputation as the Dark Lord of the 74-string Bass (all low-D’s), which I then must reinstate by battling would-be usurper Elfinhorn “Meatrape” Rabinowitz in the Rectangle of Despair (his parent’s garage). Damn it all to heaven, it’s worth the trouble.

Three Wogs is ‘hard’ farce, something that, if done wrong, is going to fail spectacularly (like “Meatrape”). The characters are walking clichés to only heighten the absurdity of the racial divide. When Theroux digs in—see: “Childe Roland”—he ratchets up the tension (and correlative message) like only a master can. (I was actually cringing through much of that one.) And make no mistake: Theroux a master is. In a world that disvalues beauty that defies commoditization, he’s bad for business; where onomatopoeia has become the lingua franca, his verbosity is lost on clogged ears; and with a book that decries the ignorance that compels the racist to hate, his potential audience is delimited by the very same ignorance and reticence to do any “book-learnin.” That Three Wogs has just as much applicability to the state of racial affairs 44-years after publication is sad testimony to how spectacularly we’ve failed to progress. By my super special Black Metal tape measurer (black with yellow numbers, evil), it looks to be about one-eighth of an inch. Whether that’s forward or backward is impossible to tell.

[Ian "Marvin" Graye · Rating 2 out of 5]

A PROPER GANDER (LET'S PULL DOWN THE AVERAGE OF THE MEAN!):

Against the Baresque

This is a silly little book whose only saving grace is that it didn’t attempt to be a silly big fat book (as did two of its successors). Like many first novels, the author’s primary goal seems to have been to fill the allotted pages, so that what are essentially three stories could collectively be called a novel.

Descriptions of it throw around words like “baroque” and “grotesque”, but I prefer the neologistic Australian malapropism “baresque”, which entails a little bit of both, without implying too much anger on the part of the author. For what is ostensibly a satire of racism, it doesn’t really care too much about the issue. Nor does it care about women, who, with one exception, are always described as fat (and not by the protagonists); the poem in the epigraph reads, in part, "O fat white woman whom nobody loves..." Whether or not it’s a parody, this isn’t satire: it's fauxtire or subpar-ody. To label it satire is to fall victim to an intentional fallacy. Like William H Gass after him, Theroux wallows in his own meanness, bigotry and hatred and that of his characters, hence the fitful exuberance of his prose. He was too incomplete a writer to wholly transfer the responsibility for his own predilections from the author to his narrator or his characters. Instead, he indulges in the subject matter as far as humanly possible or, dare I say it, as far as is apparently tasteful, so that readers are forced to legitimate it in terms of the difference between the author and the (omniscient) narrator; Theroux himself warns us ingenuously to “Learn how to separate the duck from its quack.” I'm not sure whether this is good advice. What is it if it quacks, if not a duck? As the scorpion said to the frog:

"It's in my nature to sting."

The novel doesn’t condemn racism (explicitly or implicitly), for that would be politically correct. Like Gass' "The Tunnel", It's more (voyeuristically) obsessed with those who attack the wogs than the three wogs themselves. It’s content to capture and describe character traits like a botanical expedition that results in a Wunderkammer or cabinet of curiosities with the most ornate labels conceivable. Theroux self-consciously uses a list of uncommon and unusual words that enrich neither the text nor the vocabulary of the reader. His self-imposed task: to use them correctly in a sentence, even if they simply occupy the space of an adjective. Having looked them up, you will never use or encounter them again, in any context. It’s really an exercise in multimedia, to see whether it’s possible to force the reader to escape the confines of one book while consulting another - a dictionary - before returning, supposedly enlightened, to the novel, a precursor to the practice of compiling annotations for more substantive or heftier works of maximalism (itself a high brow version of trivial pursuit).

The novel, if that’s what it is (“I have book here”), is set in England in the early sixties, before England went pop. The language is that stuffy, pompous product of attempts of the lower middle class to mimic the upper classes (“people like us”) or the literary style of the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, only it lacks the imagination or the endurance or the humour or the generosity of John Barth’s earlier “Giles Goat-Boy”. If nothing else, the author’s disdain for his characters (even the wogs) is infectious, so you can’t help feeling the same way about the book as a whole, assuming you don’t approach it in the spirit of apologism (as practised by “weird little apostles” and “juvenescent...American-born stooges”). It is after its time, rather than before it. If it were a curio, you might be tempted to buy it, so that you had something from that period, though it would slowly but inevitably move to the back of the cabinet, where it would soon be ignored or overlooked in favour of better specimens, the result of a moment of indulgence or lack of discrimination. In better company, it stands out as kitsch rather than quality.

Lead-Heavy Prose and Tortured English

There were three sentences that had some modest appeal for me (I couldn’t resist the temptation to search for at least one), so, to save you the cost and the effort of locating them yourself, I’ll quote them here:

“It was now a crumbling and smoke-grimed necropolis in boarded windows, mummified everywhere by old railings, stagnant air, and cobwebs, where draughty hallways reek with the smell of stale cabbage, Blakean children weep soot, and merchants patter with Mammon and make God evanescent.”

“The mercantile week thereabouts was busy, rather like the First Circle: from Eastcheap to Shoreditch, axeheaded harridans went slogging by in their hushpuppies, and old ladies like draggled ducks, with rush baskets and carrier sacks, nosed, bargain-wise, into the markets of Stepney for hukkabuk, Spitalfields for bruised vegetables, and into the arcades of Smithfield for low-priced, if purpureal, cuts of meat.”

“Every weekday morning as the steam of the world burnt away, their pertussic selves were revealed hobbling across gutters and crouching busily forwards into the pushcarts of fabrics, produce, or fowl, with a relish for the contentious and a determination nothing if not evangelical.”

“Purpureal” = of a purple colour, purple (why wouldn’t you just say “purple”? Remember that Prince song, “Purpureal Rain”?)

“Pertussic” = suffering from the whooping cough.

Would either word or meaning warrant breaking off your reading and consulting the dictionary?

Note how all three of these sentences expand uncontrollably by use of the Post-Modern list technique (that notorious substitute for story-telling and character development), which gives the misleading impression of encyclopaedic observational and descriptive skills (“Tell them everything...perceive, do not analyse”).

All this is a sign of over-writing, which Theroux mastered before the proliferation of MFA courses:

“My compulsion to overwrite, for circumlocution, I can probably attribute to the ponies I read in the early grades, the lead-heavy prose I turned into even more tortured English in my Latin and Greek classes.”

https://www.dalkeyarchive.com/a-conve...

Black Mischief

The third story, “The Wife of God”, is a more straightforward comedy than the two preceding stories. To the extent that it is satirical, it is the attack of a conservative American Catholic on English High Church Anglicanism. The protagonist is a priest who lusts after a black member (literally and figuratively!) in his congregation, so it involves moral and sexual hypocrisy.

Apart from the hyper-vocabularism, this story most resembles the comedies of Evelyn Waugh. It’s like “Black Mischief” meets “Brideshead Revisited”, only it's less stylish than either Waugh.

As was said by the Catholic Church of “Black Mischief”, this story is -

"disfigured by outrageous lapses, which would be a disgrace to anyone professing the Catholic name." (Not that I have any sympathy or concern for the good name of Catholicism.)

The irony of Alexander Theroux’s writing is that he is an evangelical Conservative Post-Modernist who does in the name of Post-Modernism what he can’t do in the name of Conservatism. And potentially vice versa.

Colonial and Post-Colonial Racism

What emerges indirectly from a reading of this novel is a better understanding of the conservative underpinnings of racism at least as far as it regards immigration.

Until the recent wars and disputes in the Middle East and Africa, migration followed the breakdown of colonialism, as former colonies fought with their mother countries for independence and civil wars resulted between the rivals. On the other hand, inhabitants of the mother country were confronted by and forced to acknowledge its failure, and they looked for scapegoats.

When refugees arrived in the mother country, they encountered massive racism. More recently, this has fuelled the Brexit movement in England, which joined forces with UKIP. Ironically, what unites both movements is a commitment to the sovereignty of the mother country. This is disingenuous, when the mother country rode roughshod over the sovereignty of its colonies and was determined to exploit their wealth despite opposition and resistance. Its empathy for the inhabitants of a colony was conditional upon their remaining in their place (in the colony), continuing to generate wealth, and not migrating over here, into our backyards. White conservatives don’t want black people or wogs walking past their white picket fences, because they perceive them as a threat to the (hypocritical) traditions (of empire and domination) they want to uphold.

Just Like Milo Yiannopoulos

In this book, Alexander Theroux positions himself in the Post-Modernist vanguard of this movement. You would have to be blinded by the right, to join him there or to validate or apologise for him and his furtive views.


SOUNDTRACK:

Mental as Anything - "The Nips are Getting Bigger"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VVnLJ...

Robyn Hitchcock - "You've Got a Sweet Mouth on You Baby"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nxsi3...

February 16, 2017

[nostalgebraist · Rating 1 out of 5]

Could be two stars for some good lines, fun word games and bits that made me laugh. One star, though, out of frustration and annoyance with an author who has done so much better.

Alexander Theroux's most distinguishing characteristic, besides his very distinctive and odd prose style, is the no-holds-barred fashion in which he attacks his own characters. Theroux calls his own writing "satire," but in a way it seems more accurate to call it a kind of "insult comedy." As I understand it, satire homes in on hypocrisy and moral failure, pinpoints its targets, catches them in their most indefensible moments. It is precise and surgical.

Theroux is the opposite: when he doesn't like someone, he criticizes every aspect of them. Everything is fair game -- not just moral failures, but, say, inarticulate speech, or physical ugliness. This creates an oddly juvenile, black-and-white quality to Theroux's characterization. His heroes are usually physically attractive, his villains usually physically grotesque. The bad guys, as in a children's story, are bad in every possible respect, including those that have no moral weight, only aesthetic weight (from Theroux's, and the implied reader's, perspective). Pages and pages at a time in Theroux's books are dedicated to long, unrelenting attacks on his own fictional characters from every possible angle.

Again, it's insult comedy. Theroux is the kind of guy you imagine having a large personal collection of "your mother" jokes stored away in some private notebook. He would probably say that by writing this way, he is reviving an old tradition of "unforgiving" or "unflinching" satirical writing, the kind of thing you'd find in Rabelais or Cervantes. (Maybe those aren't quite the right authors, but you know what I mean.) On the other hand, even if this kind of thing is rarer in written literature than it used to be, it's still everywhere in popular culture. The atmosphere of Three Wogs, in particular, often feels a lot like the atmosphere of lazy, "equal opportunity offender" comic figures like Seth McFarlane -- everything sucks, everyone's grotesque, let's all have a laugh about it. Whatever Theroux's aspirations, the book he has written unfortunately feels a lot like a highbrow (or, from another perspective, pretentious) version of Family Guy.

His later novel Darconville's Cat is full of this kind of invective as well, but in that case the invective was thematized, contextualized. That was a book about intoxicating emotional states, and the way it ran away with itself -- lapsing into both hyperbolic descriptions of beauty and hyperbolic descriptions of ugliness, and conflating beauty with truth throughout -- was appropriate for that thematic emphasis. The worldview in the third-person narration was implicitly the worldview of the protagonist Darconville, a guy who in the end was greatly misled by treating physical appearance as though it were a proxy for virtue. The book critiques its own perspective; there's irony and self-awareness there.

But in Three Wogs there is no Darconville, merely a sneering third-person narrator and a set of nasty characters who the narrator savages for 200 pages. Occasionally, this savagery is quite funny or verbally clever, but mostly it's just tiresome: where Darconville's Cat explored a whole range of emotional states, Three Wogs is just about a single one, the emotional state of sneering at people who suck. And, again, this is not ironized or contextualized in any way; the narrative voice is not challenged; if one begins to feel that Theroux is at least as much of an asshole of any of his characters, the book provides one no refuge.

What's particularly frustrating about the sneering insult comedy in this case is that this book is putatively about race and racism, and sneering insult comedy seems like a uniquely ineffective way to talk about racism. Many of the targets of Theroux's invective are racists, but the terms in which he criticizes them -- they're physically grotesque, their speech is inarticulate and ungrammatical, they're in some nebulous sense "deformed" relative to an implicit, normative standard -- is very similar to the terms in which racism expresses itself. I guess Theroux might say that the point here is to turn the racists' lenses back on themselves, to show them the beam in their own eye -- to show that if you take this kind of distaste for the alien to its logical conclusion, you reach a worldview that hates just about everyone, including the distasters themselves.

But I think this is too charitable an interpretation. After all in Theroux's other books the insult comedy is still present, and though it may not be as pervasive, this is only because it is given figures of contrast who pass Theroux's stringent tests of non-despicability by being beautiful and brilliant and well-spoken -- and white, straight, Catholic, erudite in an old-fashioned sort of way, prone to collecting factoids and clever quips, in short suspiciously similar to one Alexander Theroux. In the end I couldn't help feeling like Theroux's objection to racism -- and to everything else he criticizes in Three Wogs -- is fundamentally that "the people who do this are not enough like me." It's a shallow, boring, childish worldview, and one from which I have a hard time extracting anything interesting.

This is disappointing. Darconville's Cat is a wonderful book and one I will certainly read again some day, but this is the second of Theroux's other books that I've found almost unreadable (I only managed to finish Three Wogs by skimming the last 20 pages or so, and I only got around 100 pages into Laura Warholic). I don't know what is going on here -- there's just a liveliness and moral complexity in Darconville's Cat, a self-awareness about all the mean jokes and a welcome ironic distance, that is just missing from his other writing. In books like this he sounds like a parody of himself, working one qualitative level of awareness down. I think at this point I've exhausted my curiosity about reading more Theroux, and if I am ever tempted I will just talk myself into re-reading the Cat instead.

[Chris Via]

Video review: https://youtu.be/Yk9qFScj55g.

[Mariela · Rating 3 out of 5]

enyways>mpeople think that age diffrences some books example age just because ima 14 dont mean i cant read little books example old time book mah favorite book [the wolf:] this book is odeh nice it teaches kids not to lied and to always keep it real with people lies dont go no where i read this book by mah self and is mah 5th time reading it is about a wolf who keep on making bad choices witch at the end he learns is not god to lie.i really recomend this book>

[Sam · Rating 5 out of 5]

You can find an annotation of the vocabulary right here: https://www.goodreads.com/story/show/...
Yes, Theroux can be daunting, but my guide will hopefully help you navigate Alex's Scylla-and-Charybdical sesquipedalianism!

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Three Wogs, Alexander Theroux's first novel/collection of novellas, showcases all the goodness apparent in his later works: Satirical to the brim which easily switching between the Horatian and Juvenalian variety, poignant in its descriptions, verbose par excellence and fitted with an amazingly finely tuned ear for sociolects.

The three stories are only related by a common theme, an encounter with a 'wog', a non-white foreigner in England. Mrs. Proby, in the first story, encounters Mr Yunnum Fun, a Chinese grocer; Robert McGuffey encounters Dilip, an Indian student of Electrical Engineering; Reverend Which Therefore finally encounters the African Cyril. The encounters are marked by their succinct, jingoistic racism; which more often than not turns out to be the hamartia, the tragic flaw, that trips our protagonists and leads to their individual demise.

While Mrs. Proby Gets Hers and Childe Roland lean more towards the traditional spectrum of story-telling, it is the last story, The Wife of God, which showcases Theroux's distinctive voice the best: A jumble and tumble of Saints, fictional and real books, Theosophists, Philosophers, archaic and rare language, Religion, History and Art - it's all there. If you have read Darconville's Cat before, Reverend Which Therefore will seem like a wild blend of Darconville, Dodypol and Crucifer - the Reverend even owns one of the books used in one of the epigraphs (Pierce's Supererogation, used in Chapter VI). This might seem minor, but it's extremely interesting how Theroux's earlier stories shape his later works. One can see that this is one of the places where he honed his voice.

Should you read Three Wogs? If you can get a copy, absolutely! It's not only funny and witty, but also a good indicator of what's to come in Theroux's later, monolithic and Maximalist novels, especially his unanimous masterpiece Darconville's Cat. If the casual racism is too much for you, well, boo. For all the others: Embark on this journey! It's very much worth it.

"It was nightfall. And, remorselessly, the characteristic of nightfall, only once again, was its blackness." (216)

[Lee Foust · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well, that was a troubling read. Equally wonderful and equally troubling. Allow me me explain:

Wonderful: The prose! The fabulous, witty, acrobatic, overdone, yet usually utterly fantastic leaps and bounds of a masterful grip on the English language--imagine the mostly incoherent, racist, and fragmentary imbecilic gruntings of the current US president and reverse them and you have the linguistic prowess of Alexander Theroux.

The humor! It's really, really funny sometimes--less, I thought, as many reviewers here want to have it, for merely insulting his characters than the very clever turns of phrase with which the text denigrates them. Does that make sense? It's like an insult is only an insult, but a deftly turned and perfectly timed insult becomes an amusing joke, satire, what have you. There are insults and there is satire and it's the framing and language of the insult that separates the latter from the former.

Troubling: Another whitemansplaining of racism? Sigh. The world does not need that--and it didn't even need it in 1970 when this luscious little volume was penned. Also, the unifying theme, or topic, I guess, WOGs, is patently British--so A. T., an American, can wash his hands of it to a certain extent, although I find that superficial as the USA is equally if not more racist than England--but it still allows for the humorous spouting of a lot of racism.

OK, racism is made fun of here, therefore presented with irony and we assume ridicule, but only for the stupidity of its practitioners. Granted, your average racist, like your average religious zealot or political conservative, is of lesser intelligence--as all three of these things are pretty much intellectually abhorrent, or at the very least illogical--and yet there are intelligent racists. Thus this novel is not really going after racism, political conservatism, or the C of E in the final section, as most commentators and book blurbists hold. Rather it's ridiculing stupidity.

Thus the third of its three sections is perhaps the most interesting of the three as the non-WOG of this section is only passively, culturally racist, and is actually in love with a man of color, and is being ridiculed for his passion and niavite rather than his stupidity or racism. Being male, though, and an Anglican priest, the ridicule here is mostly aimed at his homosexuality, and PC me was a little uncomfortable with that.

However, uncomfortable, troubled, are, in my vocabulary, also partially good things, as I oppose them to boring and worthless. Therefore, even if I'm sorry that a writer of Theroux's talent disagrees with my views of decorum and what one is allowed, as a white American male, to ridicule (only those greater in power, never lesser than he: women--no, gay men--no, other religious sects than one's own ridiculous sect--no, politicians--yes, powerful public figures--yes, bosses and higher-ups--yes, all forms of military power and hierarchical structures--yes!!!) I admire that this novel forced me to confront its acidic satire and it involved me. Alas, mostly intellectually only. And often I added a tsk tsk to my laughter, as one does to an off-color joke.

The only moment I felt true profundity here was in the middle section's description of its WOG's youth in India, his trials and travails, and the beauties of India itself--it was a surprising relief from the acidic satire. There were a couple of really moving, beautiful passages here. But I also realized during these passages, that the second two WOGs were cut from the quilt of Caucasian cliche--they were innocents. The first not so much, but he was a mysterious Chinese fellow, another cliche that actually seemed to justify his victim's racism.

[Rick Harsch]

Turns out the third part was the funniest.

[Marc Nash · Rating 4 out of 5]

Having read Darconville’s Cat, this is what I associate Alexander Theroux’s craft to be - love of language, (a vocabulary drawing on Classicism, Catholic liturgy, a good knowledge of flora and fauna and mineralogy), his own neologisms and a high octane narrative pitch to demolish his characters. I don’t think he’s misogynistic, more misanthropic. This debut serves up more of the same and has left me with mixed feelings. First of all it’s a challenge thrown down by its very title and subject matter; the study of 3 British racists around 1970. Now the first thing to say is what a remarkable job Theroux an American has done with capturing English idiom and dialogue with all its cadences. Apart from tiny giveaways of candy for sweets and spelling it ass instead of arse, there’s no way you’d think this wasn’t written by an Englishman. However, there is a disconnect between the small-mindedness of his characters with the heightened language of Theroux in showing them up in all their foibles and falls. Their dialogue is not overwritten, it is in how characters regard one another. Widow Mrs Proby (who could well have driven her husband into his grave) in her loneliness, sinks her claws into a female friend who shares her casual racism, but whom when there isn’t a handy immigrant to target, sinks her talons into lambasting her. The last story of a Reverend and his aristocrat mother, who lacerates and castrates him through her own anxieties about modern, democratic and post-imperial Britain. Indeed the subject of this book is class as much as race, again kudos to Theroux or nailing it so accurately. But as I say. I struggle to balance the heightened language with its small-minded characters.

But it is this third tale that was a standout for me that lifts the novel to its high achievement. We have the complex relationship between mother and son, but also between the reverend and his choirmaster, an African who dominates his celibates fantasy life. The choirmaster is going to get married and the reverend realises this will take him from his fantasy reveries and does everything he can to dissuade him, including a hilarious book of illustrations of sexual positions produced by the Church. So race here is a force of attraction and it is the prospect of this bond being torn apart, that brings out the Reverend’s racism. But it is his mother’s panegyric for a lost Britain that closes the tale that is remarkable. As Britain in the 1980s talked about traditional values, and it arose again in the context of possible Scottish independence and more definitively in the aftermath of the Brexit referendum, it has proved impossible to define what being English is and what traditional English values actually are. Theroux shows a masterful definition of it, again remarkable for an outsider to be so comprehensive, but it is the tone in which the mother delivers it, both wistful and defiant in its crescendoing pace that is utterly extraordinary.

Video review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h6rS3...

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

these ivy league knowitalls taking all our words wearing them out don't leave nothing for a honest reader to review with back in my day any little penpusher was tickled pink to sell a book at all put food on the table join hands with the common man share in what real men really mean but this feller ain't a real man just really mean

What a gift. A deed too good to go unpunished. If Trilling was right that we have a moral obligation to be intelligent then Theroux is a saint, martyred by those not naturally deaf but willfully resistant to grace from the profane paraclete of immaculate conception. The Metafesto is pure psalm, a music whose truth is more impossible every woe-clamored hystrionic day. To hell with the day then, heaven is neither more nor less than a Word, from beginning to end, genesis to revelation. Illiterate fundamentalists know nothing of rapture, thinking it happens but once and that the waiting must be filled with censorious, supercilious, stentorian, narrow, crooked judgement. They are wrong, but they are legion. Or so it seems when need compels my commerce with that beyond the shelves of my beleaguered bibliotopia. Like a naive proselyte I once thought, "If only they knew!" Ha. Either you smile and simper and smalltalk in the throng of degrading joys or you get flayed alive. Book burnings were a modern fantasy about the power of language. Those were the days, eh? Everybody's got words now, the best words, tremendous great great great words, believe me. And they would sooner kill themselves than read Theroux, but best, easiest, most desirable of all would be to preemptively kill anyone suggesting that there is something quintessential in literature that cannot be found anywhere else and it is supposed to be difficult, challenging, and uncomfortable in direct proportion to the expansive, transformative rewards. Oh well, it's irrelevant for sure and likely ungenerous. At least 2020 permitted me one more brief reprieve. Was it too much to hope for President Bernie Sanders to give me $2000 a month and (or?) health care so I could revel in Laura Warholic for the entirety of 2021?

[Frederick Jackson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Some of the finest prose I have encountered. His prose in this, the only book so far of his that I have read, is up there with Djuna Barnes "Nightwood" and Vladimir Nabokov's "Lolita". Don't know why he speaks of taking his words out of a Victorian Attic because his prose is the opposite of Victorian: fine, chiseled, minimalist. And the stories here of racism in 60's London are amusing.

[wally · Rating 4 out of 5]

i've figured a way around the "to-read" list, a list i'd prefer not to make...as there are too many i'd like 'to-read'...who needs all that grief?
update, reading this one now, 1 apr 13, monday

three wogs, a novel by alexander theroux, 1972

there is this on a white page:
spiritvi sancto omnis scientiae et sapientiae fonti hic liber dedicatvs est

there is no contents page, but there are three separate titles within:
1. mrs. proby gets hers
2. childe roland
3. the wife of god

these lines before the 1st:
o why do you walk through the fields in gloves,
missing so much and so much,
o fat white women whom nobody loves
why do you walk through the fields in gloves?
--frances crofts cornford

1. mrs proby gets hers begins:
picric, antagonized, scuffling forward with a leer, fu manchu readily confirmed a common fear: a distorted mind proves there there is something on it.

later, gator

update, finished, 5 apr 13, friday afternoon, 2:15-ish p.m. e.s.t.
the three titles w/i are related by content, types, happenings. if this is his first, one can read some of the same ideas that are contained w/i his other work and reading this one after i'd read An Adultery & Laura Warholic: Or, the Sexual Intellectual influenced what i read...some of the same themes/ideas...the suggestion or glimpse of others developed more so in the previous reads.

it has been some time since i've read any title that contained words whose meaning i've had to search for...theroux's stories have all contained more than a few...some, one knows by context, others one must find a definition.

the middle story has more...action...mayhap, than the other two and all have one or two characters on stage at any given moment although there are scenes where multiple characters are present. the middle story, "childe roland," reminded me of stories from Flannery O'Connor...and maybe the proverb, as iron sharpens iron so one man sharpens another, roland, a man whose refusal to learn from others the same kind of character that populates so many of ms o'connor's stories. but really, all three are variations on that theme.

the dialogue is super, the dialogue coming from the various nationalities here in london.

worth a read.

[Joyce · Rating 4 out of 5]

perhaps an inappropriate title given the characters who use that language are the targets of its satire, but theroux is clearly not the kind of man who cares about that. i imagine his subsequent books will clear up some of the awkwardness in the writing. my main complaint is the americanisms he sometimes slips into the speech of nativist little englanders (i doubt you'd hear a proud white london boy of 70s using "ass" instead of "arse" for example.

[Joshua · Rating 5 out of 5]

Alright, I will start by acknowledging the obvious: this novel takes the form of a triptych, as alluded to in its latter story. It is full of (according to the dictionaries I was lucky enough to find these terms) archaic words that you are guaranteed to have never seen before. Lastly, it is incredibly, subversively, politically incorrectly (?) hilarious. Laugh out loud funny; holy shit, this guy is absurd.

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Now, onto my own thoughts. While some of the language and those god damn words (I looked up EVERYTHING I didn't know) hurt my little brain, the humor in this book was enough to keep the roughly cup worth of stagnant protoplasm between my ears happy. A happy lil guy my mind was reading this. I actually enjoyed very much looking up the words, learning Latin, and ultimately challenging myself. Contextually, there is plenty of guidance to help you stay on track even if you don't know (you don't) the words Theroux uses, as well as his relentless allusions to religion and British idiom, so I was never lost. I will be forthright in my admission: even great deals of the racist humor he uses are contextually very, very funny. From the verbal pronunciations of Dilip and Cyril to the absolute sexual proclivity of Cyril, he isn't trying to make us NOT laugh. He also creates moral ambiguity, particularly in the first and last stories: Mr. Fun is horrifyingly misogynistic, and one of Cyril's main reasons for wanting to wed Anita is to "hold on to her tits." Make no mistake, the three main antagonists are horrible people with archaic beliefs, and choosing to write a novel about the racism of Britain from someone who grew up in Boston is itself pretty god damn ridiculous.

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What a fucking first novel. For its brevity, it is like opening up an encyclopedia of British history. Theroux really obfuscates the line between humor and tragedy, and in my opinion, nothing is off the table in terms of comedy. The characters portrayed in this novel, unlike ham-fisted "racist" characters in movies made to make you feel bad about living in a society with a racist history, seem real, authentic. Actually, horrifyingly real. And subtle. It has to be said without irony, the true three wogs of this novel are Mrs. Proby, Roland, and Which. They are definitely, not one of us.

This review is also definitely NOT a triptych to the scale of the book. Nope.

[Judy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Well, it was a struggle and I almost gave up. Thank goodness I didn't because toward the end I was finally "getting it." There were so many passages I would have liked to have memorized or at least shared with someone with a sense of humor, but there were also many of his very long sentences I had to reread and was still thinking, "What?" I suppose the groupie in me is responsible for choosing the book in the first place, because the author has a house in the neighborhood. Who knew my neighborhood on Cape Cod housed so many interesting people. If I should ever meet the man in public, I would dare not say a word, lest he know I am a troglodyte. I had to look up the meaning of a "wog"(British "racially offensive slang word referring to a dark-skinned person from Africa or Asia") before I even started the book. Now that I'm in a rhythm, I should probably read the book again, but no, it's already overdue. The book consists of three "stories" and the author's essay on literature, responding to a major American woman newspaper reviewer who believes that "less is more."

"Will I have to use a dictionary to read your book?" asked Mrs. Dodypol. "It depends," says I, "how much you used the dictionary before you read it."
— Alexander Theroux (Darconville's Cat)

Looking forward to reading Darconville's Cat.

[Kevin Tole · Rating 2 out of 5]

Verbose, prolix bollix!!!
Written when on a Fulbright in London and a clear example of how not to write a first novel.
Judging by this and his Primary and Secondary Colours I shall be giving Theroux Alexander a wide berth. I struggled to finish it and in fact managed 2 2/3rds of the three parter and coiuld not bring myself to read any more utter tosh by an American writing about race and consequences in England.
Give this a WIDE berth.

[Louis · Rating 2 out of 5]

A hundred pages into this book I decided that it didn't have more to offer than its word play and promptly stopped reading. The wordplay is good, though, and I've utilized it to great effect, exacto-kniving out nice phrases and word combinations to glue them together in a tiny, pocket sized notebook of dada poems.

[Oliver St john · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was exceptionally beautiful

[Ben · Rating 4 out of 5]

I kindly begrudge Alex this four star rating. This book is an artifact of white gaze literature, the kind of thing well-meant but not in the end well-spent. L'aîné de Theroux is one of the great virtuosos of all Englishes, which he writes and presumably speaks with as much cool aptitude as anyone I've ever read. It purports to be a satire of pea-brained racist Britishers, an evergreen subject, but it drops precipitously into that rather ordinary category of art that, in its critique, manages to portray the recipient with more depth and sympathy than anyone else. Cyril, the third in this triptych of non-white characters, is not only seen by the two white people, a mother-son duo, as little more than a primate, he is thus written.

But really, wherever the author's views on race end and his characters' begin, a reader would be hard-pressed to prove that there exists any such division or demarcation between Theroux's opinions of women and what constitutes the same in his fiction. Though I've not read it, I have it on good authority that his Laura Warholic contains some seriously casual reactionary takes on women, to the effect that they shouldn't create art because their true purpose is to create babies. Anyway, back to the work at hand: almost every woman in this novel is fat and thoroughly unpleasant, and the two are made to go hand-in-hand as if the former were part of one's personality just as much as the latter. This is a horribly persistent pet peeve of mine that requires awesome patience for me to look past.

But look past it I do, with reservations, because I can admit that Theroux is one of those stupendously brilliant writers whose opinions, not always agreeable or even fundamentally acceptable, are several generations removed from my own. I also enjoy the fiction of D. Keith Mano, who perhaps not coincidentally blurbs this novel favorably on the back of the first edition of The Cat. Both are writers who will likely remain hidden, because of social and cultural trends that I do not in the least lament. To be explicit, I mean the wider acceptance that non-white perspectives on life, in the form of art or otherwise, are just as legitimate as white perspectives. Melville told us this re: novels 170 years ago, Faulkner once more just as recently as the 1960s, and I hope we can now start listening for good.

As something of a postscript, however, I will say that "Mrs. Proby Gets Hers" is like a wonderfully ribald, coarse adaptation of a Graham Greene thriller and easily the best part of the book.

[Heronimo Gieronymus · Rating 5 out of 5]

The ladies understood each other
in the careful way that ladies do
once they understand each other.

It was only a matter of time
as maters go
that Mrs. Proby began to recognize
many Chinese on the streets:

hunched, shuffling, dry-mannered,
and recondite in the carapax
of the inaccessible and unproven….

What is a pair, it seemed proven
only once again,
is not who is a couple.

Disconnected, mutually irrelevant
sentences crackled along
the communications, post to post.

…

Sending old barrels jouncing expeditiously—
upended and spilling in their wake
klaxon of tins, squishy dreck, indistinguishable
rubbish:

the old hoary cripple
nose like the scranlet of a plow, bulging eyes of a
pill bug:

an underground wall is invariably
the Rosetta Stone of the troglodyte.

Your body and your spirit will be nourished
by my moonlight.

…

Royal Opera House sat
dead centre in the sacramental universe
the primeval swamps of transpontine London—

Its: nights of songs; evenings of momentary illumination….

They rode on, a solved antinomy.

This Realm, this England
interposed as a disputatious sign
it would reveal its infinite variety only
in its own good time and would blot out
with fluffy sullage any imposition
divine or otherwise
it did not ask for
and consequently need not abide.

And those carnal acts were especially to be feared
which didn’t have a name.

[Stewart Mitchell · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an interesting first “novel” from Theroux, especially considering how unwaveringly bizarre it was. I wouldn’t say that either of these three stories wowed me, but the writing itself was consistently great and full of life, humor, and verve (yes, verve, I said it). I find it hard to really enjoy novellas that have been collected as a book (too long to afford not to stick the landing, but too short to get their claws into you), but I’m still glad I checked this one out. A nice stop on the way down the rabbit hole.

[Casey · Rating 4 out of 5]

My first encounter with Alexander Theroux has left me craving more. He's funny, ruthless, and a stylist whose style never feels superfluous. Though some seem to see an American author criticizing racism in England as an unusual choice, I don't see how racism in England is that much different from racism in the US. And even after over fifty years, the attitudes and prejudices Theroux depicts are much the same as ever. Where this book excels is in Theroux's ability to capture the voice, the cadence, the character specific to the place, often with hilarious detail.

[Bill · Rating 2 out of 5]

Three Wogs has its moments. It doesn't matter. The entirety of Three Wogs is disgraced, stomped on and destroyed into the limits of the negative, I don't mean dark matter, but the flattest possible space excrement can be according to physical law, by the "Therooux Metaphrastes" author's reply to his critics. I've never read anything so completely pompous and ruinous to the stories it's bent on defending.

[Susan Katz · Rating 1 out of 5]

Not only did I HATE this book (I read one of the three short stories in the book), I am going to THROW IT IN THE TRASH! Racist, Ageist, Sexist. . .I know it's from a different time, but the blurb said it was "a highly original comic novel." There is no way that this is humorous. Even if I try to think of what the world was like in 1972 (when it was published).

[Berkles · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolute laugh out loud classic. Will send you to the dictionary constantly. An exquisite Anglo PoMo riot. A triptych of stories centered around a Londoner encountering a wog. both leave changed after, for better and worse. But it's not a preachy book, Theroux is too smart for didacticism. Hugely recommended, can't wait to read more.