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Alexander Theroux: A Fan’s Notes
"Since the publication of his first novel in 1972, Alexander Theroux has won great acclaim for his dazzling style and forceful intellect. That first novel, "Three Wogs," was named Book of the Year by "Encyclopedia Britannica," and his second, "Darconville's Cat," was nominated for the National Book Award. Since then he has gone on to publish 20 more books and has been the subject of several interviews and academic studies. The 2020 publication of his "Collected Stories" will bring him renewed attention. This is the first book-length study of Theroux's complete body of work-novels, fables and short stories, nonfiction books, poetry, journalism-concluding with a chapter on his contentious relationship with his best-selling brother Paul Theroux. Critic Steven Moore, who has known Theroux for nearly forty years and helped with the publication of some of his books, illuminates Theroux work in a scholarly yet accessible style. While appreciative of most of what Theroux has written, Moore doesn't shirk from what he regards as some of his weaker efforts in order to provide a balanced evaluation of this unique writer. Moore's book will appeal to Theroux's fan base as well as to students of modern American literature"--
- GenresEssaysNonfiction
264 pages, Paperback
Published September 1, 2020
146 people want to read
About the author
Steven Moore
124 books175 followersLibrarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
Steven Moore is a literary critic. He received his Ph.D. from Rutgers University in 1988.
While Moore has been a teacher, bookstore owner, book reviewer, and columnist, he is most well known for his work as an editor and author of literary criticism. Moore is the foremost authority on William Gaddis, having written a book on this author, supervised the collection of several critical essays, and assisted in the translation of Gaddis' work into Chinese.
The wikipedia entry.
Steven Moore is a literary critic. He received his Ph.D. from Rutgers University in 1988.
While Moore has been a teacher, bookstore owner, book reviewer, and columnist, he is most well known for his work as an editor and author of literary criticism. Moore is the foremost authority on William Gaddis, having written a book on this author, supervised the collection of several critical essays, and assisted in the translation of Gaddis' work into Chinese.
The wikipedia entry.
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Displaying 1 - 14 of 14 reviews
April 30, 2023
Wait, what is this, why did you read a book about Alexander Theroux, you hate Alexander Theroux don’t you? You never even finished a book by him! Admit it!
Well, I read a hundred or so pages of Darconville’s Cat, and about half of The Grammar of Rock. That was more than enough, you know. Darconville’s Cat showed me that AT was a formidable, extraordinary showoff stylist, a brilliant linguistic excavator and museumkeeper who demonstrated on every page that if you empty out the recherche, the obsolete, the froufrou and the sesquipedalian from the 15th to 17th centuries into your every paragraph you are gonna sound like one smart cookie. Let’s quote AT himself – he wants to write fiction that is
Always erudite, as game, pleasure, hobby and puzzle – a mottage of rich and well-born nouns that can roister with sluttish verbs and prinked-out allusions, snoozy bedfellows all, content and uncomplained of
- possibly the opposite of what 99.9% of people want to read, but that’s ok by him, and Steven and the fanboys who are the 0.01% and proud of it.
The Grammar of Rock showed me that AT was a big fat fraud, so bloated in fatuous self-importance that shooting fish in a barrel and missing most of the fish was the very thing his fans would lap up. Would they excuse the billion mistakes and the obvious fact that this was a first draft which he hadn’t even bothered to reread? Of course. His fans excuse him everything.
But… but… why on earth would you want to read a book about him then? This is eccentric!
Well, er… it’s kind of complicated but since you ask… Do you know about maximalist writers?
Yes, yes, do you take me for an idiot – Marguerite Young, Vollmann, McElroy, Pynchon, Gaddis, Gass, etc.
Well, there’s a kind of maximalist fanboy type who adores all of those and Alexander Theroux is one of their pinups.
You aren’t a fan then?
Well, I SHOULD be a fan, since I love Ulysses so much, but mostly these authors intimidate me. But I discovered that there existed on the earth the very quintessence of the maximalist fanboy, who eats 800 page difficult novels for lunch, dinner and supper and still wants more, and his name is Steven Moore, very appropriately. So I thought he would be the very person who could explain to me what is great about Alexander Theroux. Because really, he has been the world’s greatest Theroux fan ever. No one could be greater.
How can you say that?
On page 25 he says about Darconville’s Cat
Simply thinking of the novel can bring tears to my eyes… it exhausts my superlatives
Next, he secretly paid AT $500 to write an introduction to a Dalkey Archive book. This was when Steven was working for Dalkey. He pretended the cheque came from Dalkey but they didn’t pay people to write introductions and AT wouldn’t have written it for free. So there was that, and also he copyedited AT’s massive novel Laura Warholic for FREE, a horrible job that lasted over a year and nearly caused him to have a nervous breakdown, because of AT’s intransigent unreasonableness, which is gruesomely detailed right here in chapter 5. This is the saddest part of this book. You don’t expect literary criticism to be sad!
What went wrong?
Instead of helping, AT just bombarded him with extra material, which even Steven came to realise was “excessive, unnecessary verbiage at the sentence and paragraph level”. He describes the novel as being periodically interrupted by
The author’s volcanic rages and verbal bullying, his intemperate displays of misogyny, antisemitism, body-shaming, ethnic bigotry, homophobia, slut-shaming, misanthropy and very unchristian intolerance
But AT fans can wave away all of that and more and Steven ends this painful chapter by declaring Laura Warholic to be “one of the first great novels of the 21st century”. He writes:
The novel is very funny, though I often felt guilty for laughing, since so much of the humour is cruel: ethnic slurs, making fun of people because of their appearance, comparing them to animals, etc.
Well you know, I don’t think you were ever going to be convinced to give old AT another go, were you.
Not a chance. Steven Moore does a frantic dance throughout this book of painful worship, acknowledging Theroux is a very rarefied taste but bemoaning how he is never reviewed or read or reprinted :
It may be that Darconville's Cat’s chief virtue, its style, is for many its chief fault. It is a mode that fewer and fewer readers are capable of appreciating…a style that demands of its readers an almost antiquarian devotion of English language and literature.
He will defend this novel in ways that might make some gentle readers turn pale:
The novel is piously Roman Catholic, unapologetically elitist, unfashionably misogynistic (unfashionably? As opposed to fashionably misogynistic?) (Steven is constantly describing AT’s opinions as “unfashionable” and of course this is a euphemism for reactionary.)
All right so you really don’t like Alexander Theroux – what about Steven Moore?
I think you can’t help but like this guy. He is such an AT doormat your heart goes out to him. Also, he is the world’s fastest and bestest reader. AT’s third novel An Adultery was considered a disappointment by his fans, who were
reluctant to trade the exuberance of Darconville's Cat for the inquisitorial grimness of An Adultery. But repeated readings bring out the third novel’s many strengths
So when Steven is disappointed in a Theroux novel, why, he just rereads it repeatedly until he gets it! Other authors would hack off their right arm for such devotion.
Steven also has read all of AT’s many reviews and articles, his poetry, his books about oddball subjects like food phobias (Einstein’s Beets, 792 pages) AND all of his many unpublished novels in manuscript.
And I might add that he has done all this whilst at the same time being the world’s leading authority on the novels of William Gaddis (says Wiki). I mean, fair play.
A CONCLUSION OF SORTS
This is a great book for thinking about taste, what you admire or detest in literature, where commonplace morality fits in, how much bellyaching you can take from elderly white men anymore, how much authors should be allowed to take revenge on the girlfriends who dumped them in their giant novels of bloat, whether some readers are being honest with themselves, what a brilliant style can conceal, how much of realism you need in your fiction or is it all just a web of inspissated gestures towards a dwindling concept of what might be mistaken as meaning, that kind of thing.
Recommended.
Well, I read a hundred or so pages of Darconville’s Cat, and about half of The Grammar of Rock. That was more than enough, you know. Darconville’s Cat showed me that AT was a formidable, extraordinary showoff stylist, a brilliant linguistic excavator and museumkeeper who demonstrated on every page that if you empty out the recherche, the obsolete, the froufrou and the sesquipedalian from the 15th to 17th centuries into your every paragraph you are gonna sound like one smart cookie. Let’s quote AT himself – he wants to write fiction that is
Always erudite, as game, pleasure, hobby and puzzle – a mottage of rich and well-born nouns that can roister with sluttish verbs and prinked-out allusions, snoozy bedfellows all, content and uncomplained of
- possibly the opposite of what 99.9% of people want to read, but that’s ok by him, and Steven and the fanboys who are the 0.01% and proud of it.
The Grammar of Rock showed me that AT was a big fat fraud, so bloated in fatuous self-importance that shooting fish in a barrel and missing most of the fish was the very thing his fans would lap up. Would they excuse the billion mistakes and the obvious fact that this was a first draft which he hadn’t even bothered to reread? Of course. His fans excuse him everything.
But… but… why on earth would you want to read a book about him then? This is eccentric!
Well, er… it’s kind of complicated but since you ask… Do you know about maximalist writers?
Yes, yes, do you take me for an idiot – Marguerite Young, Vollmann, McElroy, Pynchon, Gaddis, Gass, etc.
Well, there’s a kind of maximalist fanboy type who adores all of those and Alexander Theroux is one of their pinups.
You aren’t a fan then?
Well, I SHOULD be a fan, since I love Ulysses so much, but mostly these authors intimidate me. But I discovered that there existed on the earth the very quintessence of the maximalist fanboy, who eats 800 page difficult novels for lunch, dinner and supper and still wants more, and his name is Steven Moore, very appropriately. So I thought he would be the very person who could explain to me what is great about Alexander Theroux. Because really, he has been the world’s greatest Theroux fan ever. No one could be greater.
How can you say that?
On page 25 he says about Darconville’s Cat
Simply thinking of the novel can bring tears to my eyes… it exhausts my superlatives
Next, he secretly paid AT $500 to write an introduction to a Dalkey Archive book. This was when Steven was working for Dalkey. He pretended the cheque came from Dalkey but they didn’t pay people to write introductions and AT wouldn’t have written it for free. So there was that, and also he copyedited AT’s massive novel Laura Warholic for FREE, a horrible job that lasted over a year and nearly caused him to have a nervous breakdown, because of AT’s intransigent unreasonableness, which is gruesomely detailed right here in chapter 5. This is the saddest part of this book. You don’t expect literary criticism to be sad!
What went wrong?
Instead of helping, AT just bombarded him with extra material, which even Steven came to realise was “excessive, unnecessary verbiage at the sentence and paragraph level”. He describes the novel as being periodically interrupted by
The author’s volcanic rages and verbal bullying, his intemperate displays of misogyny, antisemitism, body-shaming, ethnic bigotry, homophobia, slut-shaming, misanthropy and very unchristian intolerance
But AT fans can wave away all of that and more and Steven ends this painful chapter by declaring Laura Warholic to be “one of the first great novels of the 21st century”. He writes:
The novel is very funny, though I often felt guilty for laughing, since so much of the humour is cruel: ethnic slurs, making fun of people because of their appearance, comparing them to animals, etc.
Well you know, I don’t think you were ever going to be convinced to give old AT another go, were you.
Not a chance. Steven Moore does a frantic dance throughout this book of painful worship, acknowledging Theroux is a very rarefied taste but bemoaning how he is never reviewed or read or reprinted :
It may be that Darconville's Cat’s chief virtue, its style, is for many its chief fault. It is a mode that fewer and fewer readers are capable of appreciating…a style that demands of its readers an almost antiquarian devotion of English language and literature.
He will defend this novel in ways that might make some gentle readers turn pale:
The novel is piously Roman Catholic, unapologetically elitist, unfashionably misogynistic (unfashionably? As opposed to fashionably misogynistic?) (Steven is constantly describing AT’s opinions as “unfashionable” and of course this is a euphemism for reactionary.)
All right so you really don’t like Alexander Theroux – what about Steven Moore?
I think you can’t help but like this guy. He is such an AT doormat your heart goes out to him. Also, he is the world’s fastest and bestest reader. AT’s third novel An Adultery was considered a disappointment by his fans, who were
reluctant to trade the exuberance of Darconville's Cat for the inquisitorial grimness of An Adultery. But repeated readings bring out the third novel’s many strengths
So when Steven is disappointed in a Theroux novel, why, he just rereads it repeatedly until he gets it! Other authors would hack off their right arm for such devotion.
Steven also has read all of AT’s many reviews and articles, his poetry, his books about oddball subjects like food phobias (Einstein’s Beets, 792 pages) AND all of his many unpublished novels in manuscript.
And I might add that he has done all this whilst at the same time being the world’s leading authority on the novels of William Gaddis (says Wiki). I mean, fair play.
A CONCLUSION OF SORTS
This is a great book for thinking about taste, what you admire or detest in literature, where commonplace morality fits in, how much bellyaching you can take from elderly white men anymore, how much authors should be allowed to take revenge on the girlfriends who dumped them in their giant novels of bloat, whether some readers are being honest with themselves, what a brilliant style can conceal, how much of realism you need in your fiction or is it all just a web of inspissated gestures towards a dwindling concept of what might be mistaken as meaning, that kind of thing.
Recommended.
December 5, 2021
A few of the essays/reviews in Steve Moore’s new work, Alexander Theroux: A Fan’s Notes, appear in My Back Pages, making an already slim book slimmer, but Moore is upfront about this in the preface: “As the subtitle might suggest, this isn’t so much a book as a compilation of things I’ve written on Alexander Theroux over the years, with early ones retained in their original form rather than reworked into a harmonious whole with much later ones in order to record my changing opinions on his work. […] It attempts to be both a personal and impersonal evaluation of Theroux’s multifarious oeuvre, and if nothing else provide a treasure trove of Therouviana to aid others in making their own evaluation of this most singular writer.” (7) This compact compilation is indeed a treasure trove, and although it isn’t the wide-ranging book of academic writing that Theroux’s work deserves, it’s a great starting point and I hope a preliminary and necessary spark for the ignition of a conflagration of recognition (alas, knowing how lost the gatekeeping literary community is, this will probably not happen anytime soon, if ever. Any chance will come from you, dear reader, spreading the Therouvian gospel in a choir composed of the other Theroux wooed).
It would be no exaggeration to say that Alexander Theroux is one of the greatest writers of all time. All one has to do is read the masterpiece Darconville’s Cat (if you can afford a copy; it has been wrongly out of print for almost a quarter of a century), but Theroux has written a lot more than that masterpiece, including the shaggier but still very much masterful Laura Warholic. In an email, Theroux told me that "I can promise you, my best work is sitting on my desk, unpublished!” I believe him. Moore’s book mentions Artists Who Kill and Other Essays, full-length books on the (non)colors black and white, Shop Around: An Examination of Plagiarism, the epic novel Herbert Head, and much more.
In Moore’s book, there’s everything from a great interview that was originally published in 1991 in RCF and information on the as-yet-unpublished Collected Stories to errata for Laura Warholic and an index to the Collected Poems, the latter and other bits being pretty much only useful to Theroux scholars.
When it comes to material written for this book, there are several intriguing essays. “The Original of Laura: The Making and Unmaking of Laura Warholic”, as you can tell from the subtitle, sees Moore in an oscillating attack mode, which as noted above, seems to be out of his comfort zone and makes for some uncomfortable reading at times. However, the context allows one to empathize with Moore to an extent, and there is plenty in the essay that illuminates the work and offers tantalizing behind-the-scenes facts and drama, as well as a photo of the real Laura Warholic who is as thin as she’s described in the book (and let’s leave it at that). There are other moments of criticism too, for this book is no hagiography. Fair or not, one of the deepest burns comes from Moore’s disappointment that Theroux is closer to Mailer in his eclectic output than, say, John Barth, whose allegiance was to fiction first and foremost, especially the novel. Considering Theroux’s prodigious books on curious facts, Moore writes:
Adding all these unpublished books to Theroux’s published ones, these miscellanies constitute the largest percentage of his oeuvre, larger than his combined novels and short fiction, larger than his complete poetry, and larger than his uncollected literary essays and reviews. Despite Theroux’s high opinion of them, they are essentially books of trivia, which may be the most inconsequential genre there is. I can’t think of any other major writer who has spent so many years compiling so many books in a trifling genre like this—imagine Nabokov writing more books on chess and butterfly trivia than fiction—especially when Theroux could have been completing his ambitious novel-in-progress Herbert Head instead. (176-177)
Once again, to an extent I can both empathize and agree with Moore, because I too would love to have much more Therouvian fiction than is currently available, even at the expense of, say, Einstein’s Beets.
With “The Novelist as Critic”, Moore makes a great case for novelists being better critics than critics period, then gives us an hors d'oeuvre overview of Theroux’s criticism over the decades, including his wonderful review of Pynchon’s Against the Day in The Washington Post.
In “The Brothers Theroux”, Moore creates a portrait of one of the most unique and unfortunately venomous relationships between sibling writers.
Overall, Alexander Theroux should definitely be useful to Theroux scholars (precious few they may be) and is a convenient and fascinating collection of criticism and factual information for fellow fans. As Theroux wrote in Darconville’s Cat, “The complexity of language […] lies not in its subject matter but in our knotted understanding.” (622) Moore’s offering unknots so that we may better understand and appreciate Theroux’s oeuvre.
I've interviewed Steven Moore here: https://thecollidescope.com/2020/01/2...
I've interviewed Alexander Theroux here: https://thecollidescope.com/2020/07/0...
It would be no exaggeration to say that Alexander Theroux is one of the greatest writers of all time. All one has to do is read the masterpiece Darconville’s Cat (if you can afford a copy; it has been wrongly out of print for almost a quarter of a century), but Theroux has written a lot more than that masterpiece, including the shaggier but still very much masterful Laura Warholic. In an email, Theroux told me that "I can promise you, my best work is sitting on my desk, unpublished!” I believe him. Moore’s book mentions Artists Who Kill and Other Essays, full-length books on the (non)colors black and white, Shop Around: An Examination of Plagiarism, the epic novel Herbert Head, and much more.
In Moore’s book, there’s everything from a great interview that was originally published in 1991 in RCF and information on the as-yet-unpublished Collected Stories to errata for Laura Warholic and an index to the Collected Poems, the latter and other bits being pretty much only useful to Theroux scholars.
When it comes to material written for this book, there are several intriguing essays. “The Original of Laura: The Making and Unmaking of Laura Warholic”, as you can tell from the subtitle, sees Moore in an oscillating attack mode, which as noted above, seems to be out of his comfort zone and makes for some uncomfortable reading at times. However, the context allows one to empathize with Moore to an extent, and there is plenty in the essay that illuminates the work and offers tantalizing behind-the-scenes facts and drama, as well as a photo of the real Laura Warholic who is as thin as she’s described in the book (and let’s leave it at that). There are other moments of criticism too, for this book is no hagiography. Fair or not, one of the deepest burns comes from Moore’s disappointment that Theroux is closer to Mailer in his eclectic output than, say, John Barth, whose allegiance was to fiction first and foremost, especially the novel. Considering Theroux’s prodigious books on curious facts, Moore writes:
Adding all these unpublished books to Theroux’s published ones, these miscellanies constitute the largest percentage of his oeuvre, larger than his combined novels and short fiction, larger than his complete poetry, and larger than his uncollected literary essays and reviews. Despite Theroux’s high opinion of them, they are essentially books of trivia, which may be the most inconsequential genre there is. I can’t think of any other major writer who has spent so many years compiling so many books in a trifling genre like this—imagine Nabokov writing more books on chess and butterfly trivia than fiction—especially when Theroux could have been completing his ambitious novel-in-progress Herbert Head instead. (176-177)
Once again, to an extent I can both empathize and agree with Moore, because I too would love to have much more Therouvian fiction than is currently available, even at the expense of, say, Einstein’s Beets.
With “The Novelist as Critic”, Moore makes a great case for novelists being better critics than critics period, then gives us an hors d'oeuvre overview of Theroux’s criticism over the decades, including his wonderful review of Pynchon’s Against the Day in The Washington Post.
In “The Brothers Theroux”, Moore creates a portrait of one of the most unique and unfortunately venomous relationships between sibling writers.
Overall, Alexander Theroux should definitely be useful to Theroux scholars (precious few they may be) and is a convenient and fascinating collection of criticism and factual information for fellow fans. As Theroux wrote in Darconville’s Cat, “The complexity of language […] lies not in its subject matter but in our knotted understanding.” (622) Moore’s offering unknots so that we may better understand and appreciate Theroux’s oeuvre.
I've interviewed Steven Moore here: https://thecollidescope.com/2020/01/2...
I've interviewed Alexander Theroux here: https://thecollidescope.com/2020/07/0...
November 9, 2020
My email to Moore re: A Fan's Notes
I was struck by what an honest account of Theroux fandom this was. It immediately put me in mind of Roger Lewis's tempestuous bios of Peter Sellers and Anthony Burgess, where a granular probing of the men themselves leads to huge internal conflicts on their subjects.
I also found admirable this honesty, as Theroux is an author hostile to hostile remarks on his work, although eager to sling barbs around willy-nilly, so the very carefully considered, and no doubt possibly painful or problematical for you to write, insights into the contradictions and contrarianisms of AT were refreshing. At no point either was any personal animus towards AT based on your relations apparent, as it is in Theroux's baroque unspoolings of revenge. The tone is entirely of someone desperately seeking another Darconville, watching an author unable to control the monstrous range of his vast talent alongside his own monstrous rage. Your compassion for what Theroux could have achieved is well-felt. You also demonstrate, in your factoid-packed homages (as in 'The Brothers Theroux') a more controlled attitude to trivia, which serves as an elegant rebuke.
There's a tendency to invoke the Peter Cook fallacy, that Theroux somehow squandered his genius, that he was engulfed by his own encyclopaedic enthusiasms (I'm more fond of the factoid books than you, although I would swap them all for another novel), but as you make clear, the eccentric, utterly unique approach of Theroux gives him his Therouvianity, or Therouxitude, and your praise sings sweetly on the prose.
The book is a fabulous burrowing into the personal shortcomings that have hindered Theroux ( I find the Menippean mayhem, the wildly comic monsterings of people hilarious, but you correctly identify when this biliousness drifts from art to mere pettiness), and really works as a partial biography, along with a robust critical rogering of his oeuvre. I thoroughly enjoyed the whole experience.
I was struck by what an honest account of Theroux fandom this was. It immediately put me in mind of Roger Lewis's tempestuous bios of Peter Sellers and Anthony Burgess, where a granular probing of the men themselves leads to huge internal conflicts on their subjects.
I also found admirable this honesty, as Theroux is an author hostile to hostile remarks on his work, although eager to sling barbs around willy-nilly, so the very carefully considered, and no doubt possibly painful or problematical for you to write, insights into the contradictions and contrarianisms of AT were refreshing. At no point either was any personal animus towards AT based on your relations apparent, as it is in Theroux's baroque unspoolings of revenge. The tone is entirely of someone desperately seeking another Darconville, watching an author unable to control the monstrous range of his vast talent alongside his own monstrous rage. Your compassion for what Theroux could have achieved is well-felt. You also demonstrate, in your factoid-packed homages (as in 'The Brothers Theroux') a more controlled attitude to trivia, which serves as an elegant rebuke.
There's a tendency to invoke the Peter Cook fallacy, that Theroux somehow squandered his genius, that he was engulfed by his own encyclopaedic enthusiasms (I'm more fond of the factoid books than you, although I would swap them all for another novel), but as you make clear, the eccentric, utterly unique approach of Theroux gives him his Therouvianity, or Therouxitude, and your praise sings sweetly on the prose.
The book is a fabulous burrowing into the personal shortcomings that have hindered Theroux ( I find the Menippean mayhem, the wildly comic monsterings of people hilarious, but you correctly identify when this biliousness drifts from art to mere pettiness), and really works as a partial biography, along with a robust critical rogering of his oeuvre. I thoroughly enjoyed the whole experience.
January 7, 2021
Nathan N.R. Gaddis's admiration and love of the Dalkey Archive Press/Review of Contemporary Fiction —of which PoMo Chieftain Critic Moore was the managing editor— drew my attention to Alexander Theroux's writing. Theroux's work is a feast for lovers of language. Alexander Theroux: A Fan’s Notes is a detailed study of Theroux’s complete oeuvre including novels, fables and short stories, nonfiction books, poetry and literary journalism. It's also essential reading for lovers of American Modern Literature.
August 26, 2020
Many thanks to the great Steven Moore for writing this book. It’s phenomenal to see something so well written about an author that deserves the same. Not just for the Therouxheads. It’s a great collection. Read on everyone!
Read
April 8, 2023Video review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WMB1A...
November 25, 2021
Once a year, when the week of Thanksgiving rolls around, I pull Einstein's Beets off the shelf and prod through a few pages. This time the ritual inspired me to finally give Alexander Theroux: A Fan's Notes my full attention.
I read it as a postmodern novel. Easy enough to imagine Sorrentino, O'Brien, or the Nabokov of Pale Fire pitching the concept for book:
A largely-ignored literary talent abandons his genius in favor of petty fussing and fixation on factoids. His sole remaining champion tells the story of his life through criticism, correspondence, and essays on the author's failed projects and family feuds.
It occurred to me while reading that it might be funny for someone to write a biography of Theroux in the style of his trivia books.
Alexander Theroux is the acclaimed author of Darconville's Cat. Theroux is known to have greatly favored books over movies. Incidentally, no cats feature in any of David Lynch's movies, two of which star Theroux's nephew, Justin Theroux. And did you know that Justin for a time was married to Jennifer Aniston, star of Friends, in which a character named Phoebe (played by Lisa Kudrow) sings a song called "Smelly Cat?" Kudrow would go on to star in the HBO program The Comeback. She also has a number of film roles to her name, including such titles as...
Anyway.
The chapter on Laura Warholic was harrowing. Each new numbered draft populated previously pristine facial territory with fresh tics. I love anecdotes about absurdly impotent tech, so I found the bit about the "cutting-edge" scanner at Fantagraphics especially ticklish. I won’t spoil it for you.
One need not have read all of Theroux in order to appreciate Moore’s book. I myself have merely skinned the Cat and pecked at his Beets. Theroux’s character is the main attraction here. The (dark) pleasure comes in watching the incisive satirist fail to self-reflect, the literary scholar drown in trivia, the under-appreciated artist fumble his genius.
I read it as a postmodern novel. Easy enough to imagine Sorrentino, O'Brien, or the Nabokov of Pale Fire pitching the concept for book:
A largely-ignored literary talent abandons his genius in favor of petty fussing and fixation on factoids. His sole remaining champion tells the story of his life through criticism, correspondence, and essays on the author's failed projects and family feuds.
It occurred to me while reading that it might be funny for someone to write a biography of Theroux in the style of his trivia books.
Alexander Theroux is the acclaimed author of Darconville's Cat. Theroux is known to have greatly favored books over movies. Incidentally, no cats feature in any of David Lynch's movies, two of which star Theroux's nephew, Justin Theroux. And did you know that Justin for a time was married to Jennifer Aniston, star of Friends, in which a character named Phoebe (played by Lisa Kudrow) sings a song called "Smelly Cat?" Kudrow would go on to star in the HBO program The Comeback. She also has a number of film roles to her name, including such titles as...
Anyway.
The chapter on Laura Warholic was harrowing. Each new numbered draft populated previously pristine facial territory with fresh tics. I love anecdotes about absurdly impotent tech, so I found the bit about the "cutting-edge" scanner at Fantagraphics especially ticklish. I won’t spoil it for you.
One need not have read all of Theroux in order to appreciate Moore’s book. I myself have merely skinned the Cat and pecked at his Beets. Theroux’s character is the main attraction here. The (dark) pleasure comes in watching the incisive satirist fail to self-reflect, the literary scholar drown in trivia, the under-appreciated artist fumble his genius.
August 6, 2024
Written with Steve's usual scholarship and tone (those who've read him will know what that means), this is a helpful book that assesses Theroux's works and his character. So, his character seems appalling, but that doesn't distinguish him from some other writers. The intrafamily disputes with Paul (and a nephew) will be familiar to anyone with siblings, only the squabbles are conducted in public.
Theroux's novels, those that have seen the light of publication anyway (and they go in and out of print), appear to sink in quality as time goes on, to my mind undercutting his (or anyone's) classification of him as a great novelist. But distinct, yes. Bloat is shown in the quotations Moore provides. The seen and unseen books are all, it appears, available to Moore, through archives or from Theroux directly, and though the book verges on catering to the completist only, it never falls over into the weeds. Moore has a steady hand for keeping to a course. Whoever would want an overview or introduction to Theroux and his output will benefit greatly from this book.
Theroux's novels, those that have seen the light of publication anyway (and they go in and out of print), appear to sink in quality as time goes on, to my mind undercutting his (or anyone's) classification of him as a great novelist. But distinct, yes. Bloat is shown in the quotations Moore provides. The seen and unseen books are all, it appears, available to Moore, through archives or from Theroux directly, and though the book verges on catering to the completist only, it never falls over into the weeds. Moore has a steady hand for keeping to a course. Whoever would want an overview or introduction to Theroux and his output will benefit greatly from this book.
July 28, 2022
A wealth of information from the most insightful critic out there.
Since learning of the unpublished works, I am excited to know that more of these are being published down the pipeline.
Sadly, we will probably never see “Darconvilles Cat” published in his lifetime. Google your library for a copy or find yours on eBay ranging from $250-$2500.
Looking forward to diving into Moore’s “My Back Pages” even more now.
Since learning of the unpublished works, I am excited to know that more of these are being published down the pipeline.
Sadly, we will probably never see “Darconvilles Cat” published in his lifetime. Google your library for a copy or find yours on eBay ranging from $250-$2500.
Looking forward to diving into Moore’s “My Back Pages” even more now.
August 20, 2020
Review at The Arts Fuse: https://artsfuse.org/209677/book-revi... "Theroux is the opposite of today's compunctionless publicist/writer eager for attention—he chooses to willfully withhold out of a well-delineated spite at the US literary industrial complex, once saying “ I'm convinced that most editors, of course, couldn't tell a good manuscript from a box of shingles,” and more recently admitting that his writing is too politically incorrect for many publishers."
Want to read
August 20, 2020CRITIQUE
In which the consumer adviser/fan/massivist not unexpectedly describes the author's oeuvre as "a gigantic iceberg of writing."
More to come when the book is remaindered...
In which the consumer adviser/fan/massivist not unexpectedly describes the author's oeuvre as "a gigantic iceberg of writing."
More to come when the book is remaindered...
June 27, 2021
Impossible to put down. In Steven Moore's clear, engaging account Theroux emerges as a character as fascinating and tragic as any in his (or really anyone's) fiction: a vengeful, bigoted and childish old crank of boundless pettiness... who was somehow blessed with the ability to write beautiful prose about love and charity. It recalls Salieri's exasperation (in the movie Amadeus, probably not in real life) at the seemingly arbitrary distribution of talent among artistic hopefuls.
October 24, 2025
Paul Bryant wrote one of my all-time favorite reviews on this entire website of reviews (how big of a book would this website make by now, this date in the year 2025?) for this same book. I can't add really anything to his perfect and very funny review.
I have to admit that I do not much like to read Alexander Theroux. That said, I very much like to read about Alexander Theroux.
I finally gave Darconville's Cat a go via Interlibrary Loan. While I've disliked all of the fiction I'd read of Theroux's before, which was Laura Warholic and Three Wogs (I do like Einstein's Beets in a masochistic way, but it's not fiction, it's just garrulity), I found Darconville's Cat to be written by a very young and earnest writer, the Alexander Theroux of the Before period (before his post-The Adultery period, aka the rest of his life, when he had an accident from which he never recovered*). I found everyone in the novel, which is the narrator only, unlikeable. Every other character wasn't. Isabel certainly isn't anyone. But then I got to the evil Dr. Crucifter, and things began to be a little more fun. Before I knew it, my two weeks with the novel had expired since I had ordered it by Interlibrary Loan, and unlike with local library stock an IL will fee you. So I need to give it another go and finish this time.
I was at a friend of a friend's house once and was able to read a chunk of The Adultery and it was more mature and to my liking. I'll have to read it completely sometime. His "good" books are stupidly unavailable. I can put on a blindfold in a bookstore like Powell's or The Last Bookstore or any Half Price Books and won't be able to help knocking my forehead against Gilbert Sorrentino or Walter Abish or goddamned Raymond Federman but you'd think Alexander Theroux had written in some obscure language that only a few dozen people on the planet knew how to read, and none of them were much into books because they liked TV. I want this son of a bitch to be very available so that maybe people can stop treating him like this wonderful secret author.
This is the wonderful thing about Steven Moore. Reading him is like that friend you wish you had who has read every book that you hadn't gotten to yet. He tells you just enough to make reading whatever book you ask him about irresistible. He makes me want to read Alexander Theroux, though I have none of his admiration for Theroux's prose or his uniquely irritating so-called style.
I had to find this book because the Theroux brothers' feud is bizarre and Alexander's takedown of his brother is one of the most embarrassing pieces of work in so-called criticism in recent years.
I do appreciate and celebrate that Alexander Theroux is on this planet. I just find him to be the most insufferable writer's writer's writer since the supremely insufferable Vlad Nabokov.
*he apparently fell down and a broomstick so splintery it resembled a broomhead of unruly straw was permanently inserted into his ass
I have to admit that I do not much like to read Alexander Theroux. That said, I very much like to read about Alexander Theroux.
I finally gave Darconville's Cat a go via Interlibrary Loan. While I've disliked all of the fiction I'd read of Theroux's before, which was Laura Warholic and Three Wogs (I do like Einstein's Beets in a masochistic way, but it's not fiction, it's just garrulity), I found Darconville's Cat to be written by a very young and earnest writer, the Alexander Theroux of the Before period (before his post-The Adultery period, aka the rest of his life, when he had an accident from which he never recovered*). I found everyone in the novel, which is the narrator only, unlikeable. Every other character wasn't. Isabel certainly isn't anyone. But then I got to the evil Dr. Crucifter, and things began to be a little more fun. Before I knew it, my two weeks with the novel had expired since I had ordered it by Interlibrary Loan, and unlike with local library stock an IL will fee you. So I need to give it another go and finish this time.
I was at a friend of a friend's house once and was able to read a chunk of The Adultery and it was more mature and to my liking. I'll have to read it completely sometime. His "good" books are stupidly unavailable. I can put on a blindfold in a bookstore like Powell's or The Last Bookstore or any Half Price Books and won't be able to help knocking my forehead against Gilbert Sorrentino or Walter Abish or goddamned Raymond Federman but you'd think Alexander Theroux had written in some obscure language that only a few dozen people on the planet knew how to read, and none of them were much into books because they liked TV. I want this son of a bitch to be very available so that maybe people can stop treating him like this wonderful secret author.
This is the wonderful thing about Steven Moore. Reading him is like that friend you wish you had who has read every book that you hadn't gotten to yet. He tells you just enough to make reading whatever book you ask him about irresistible. He makes me want to read Alexander Theroux, though I have none of his admiration for Theroux's prose or his uniquely irritating so-called style.
I had to find this book because the Theroux brothers' feud is bizarre and Alexander's takedown of his brother is one of the most embarrassing pieces of work in so-called criticism in recent years.
I do appreciate and celebrate that Alexander Theroux is on this planet. I just find him to be the most insufferable writer's writer's writer since the supremely insufferable Vlad Nabokov.
*he apparently fell down and a broomstick so splintery it resembled a broomhead of unruly straw was permanently inserted into his ass
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