Early Stories

by Alexander Theroux

Alexander Theroux has taught at Harvard, MIT, Yale, and the University of Virginia, where he took his doctorate in 1968. He is the author of four highly regarded novels, Three Wogs (1972), Darconville's Cat (1981), An Adultery (1987), and Laura Warholic (2007), as well as Collected Poems (2015) and other books of non-fiction. Both Three Wogs and Darconville's Cat were nominated for the National Book Award.




Early Stories , the first book of Theroux's fiction to be published in fourteen years, constitutes an addition to one of modern American literature's most lauded and entertaining bodies of work. It is also the first volume in his story triad (Fables and Later Stories soon to follow).




Nobody writing today has a keener instinct for obsession, hypocrisy, sexual jealousy, envy, human folly, the lineaments of vanity, greed, and romantic disappointment, and, yes, grace. A feast of comic joy awaits you in this long-awaited collection. Here, the sword arm of satire is swung high! We encounter an intractable woman who refuses to divulge the secret to her spaghetti sauce. A tourist discovers a modern Nestor in an English pub. An idealistic teacher who is also a broken-hearted lover leaves us speechless over his overwhelming fixation. A hide-bound feminist goes to Italy to learn pasta making. A beautiful Bostonian, becoming a fashion model, achieves a much different goal. What is the effect of summer camp on a sensitive youngster? How does a hunt in Cracow for the alpenstock of great Copernicus end up a comic farce? Does a young boy with a genius IQ fulfill his promise? What happens when a collector discovers the rarest autograph in American letters?




Nothing prepares the reader for the twists and turns of these unsparing but brilliantly plotted stories. Language is, however, the subject, the splendid gift of one of the nation's word-masters, a magician who fashions words out of his fingertips. Satire, it is said, swipes off the noggin but leaves the head in place. Here, the head still manages to find its voice-to our great and continuing pleasure.

Genres: Short Stories

358 pages, Hardcover

Published August 10, 2021

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

[George · Rating 5 out of 5]

Episode 2 of The Collidescope Podcast, now available to all: https://www.buzzsprout.com/1849671

"A Woman With Sauce"

The culinary stand-off between a potential son-in-law and a potential mother-in-law from hell, with hilarious results. This story is from Early Stories (Tough Poets Press).

If you want to know how I helped to make this book a reality by finding Alex a publisher, be sure to listen to my guest appearance on the BTZ podcast here: https://open.spotify.com/episode/5hm5...

Other links:

Tough Poets Press: https://toughpoets.com/

Interview with Alexander Theroux: https://thecollidescope.com/2020/07/0...

A review of Darconville's Cat: https://thecollidescope.com/2020/03/0...

A review of Laura Warholic: https://thecollidescope.com/2020/07/0...

[L.S. Popovich · Rating 4 out of 5]

When reviewing a book, I like to focus on my enjoyment of the work, rather than it's success or lack thereof in the market or in the realm of experimentation. There are 2 things a book can do well or poorly in my mind. Storytelling and style. Theroux has usually triumphed in style so therouxly that I lose all awareness of the lack of storytelling going on in Darconville's Cat and Laura Warholic. In the short form of his early stories, Theroux's style doesn't mature before the story ends, except in a couple examples from this volume. I also have an aversion to books with the author's face on the cover. (Luckily, Tough Poet's Press remedied this blunder with an incredible cover on the second volume.) That aside, this collection is generally interesting, though the prevailing sentiment expressed is contempt. The protagonist of each story, or those around them express contempt for several subjects in turn: gender, race, society, stupidity, cultural differences, the misuse of language, history, literature, and so on. This emotion may overwhelm some readers or put them off. If the main purpose of a story is to entertain, most of these stories do that. If the sole purpose is to instruct, they certainly don't do that in more than a few close-minded ways. The beauty, emotion, and nuance readers will draw from the tales will vary. What do you want to get out of them? Most likely, you will get more of everything from his two so-called masterpieces. In the end, these stories seem like lesser practice exercises, tangentially related to his great works, suitable for Theroux completionists, but not comparable with the two monoliths. Obviously, he is underrated and underappreciated. His books are going out of print, and he has a stack of unpublished manuscripts taller than you. It is wonderful that a small press has convinced him to put out 3 new books (he is notoriously difficult to publish), and I hope to see more.

The stories take place in Europe and America. There is a decent conjuration of local details and a convincing realism to the dialects he employs. The dialogue verges into diatribe often, as do the internal monologues. Again, contempt is ever-present, occasionally oppressive, drowning the storytelling components in contemptuous observations. Recurring tidbits about bed-wetting, a maudlin society's blindness to taste (both gustatory and otherwise), and a palpable resentment toward Philistines, is expressed by a changeable protagonist who typically speaks in the same elevated manner whether they incarnate as female, male, child, adult, prodigy, or everyman. Theroux's vocabulary hasn't gotten any smaller. His bravado has not disintegrated. His uncompromising, refined style is somehow still rife with typos (as in Laura W.) - possibly pointing toward a refusal to utilize beta readers and a reliance on understaffed presses. Much has been written about the man himself, but what really matters is if his work will enrich and satisfy you. It takes a certain type of reader to savor what society deems unsavory. I will say that the final story in the collection was better than all the previous combined, channeling the pathos I longed for from all the rest. After a couple hundred pages of fireworks, he usually delivers a well-placed carpet bomb. Go ahead and give this book a try if I haven't dissuaded you yet. Most people who like Pynchon will love Slow Learner. The analogy transfers to this work as well.

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 5 out of 5]

Slowly treacling into print after half a century, Theroux’s short stories are finally available to all long-suffering Therouvians in two lavish volumes (Later Stories coming later in 2022), from Tough Poets Press. In the first volume, Theroux serves up a series of character studies à la ‘A Woman with Sauce’, a caustic takedown of a doughy harridan fiercely protective of her secret pasta sauce recipe. Other stories are spun from the writer’s travels, capturing quirks of dialect and mannerisms, such as ‘Fark Pooks’, where pornographic magazines are covertly smuggled into the room of a minister by an impish Moscovian porter, ‘An English Railroad’, where an interminable English pub bore feverishly addled with nostalgia is perfectly parodied, as are the Old World pretensions of a Grande Dame of letters in ‘A Wordstress in Williamsburg’. Elsewhere, ‘Summer Bellerophon’ furthers the theme of nymphet lust explored in Darconville’s Cat, and ‘Chosen Locksley Swims the Tiber’ paints a rather dewy-eyed portrait of beauty within a broadly comic poke at the fashion industry. Less successful stories here are the misfires ‘Scugnizzo’s Pasta Co’ and ‘The Copernicus Affair’, where the mockery spins queasily close to overt racism, or the humour is merely frozen in the period in which the stories were written. Theroux’s prose, sentence-by-sentence is among the most stylishly tantalising and exquisite in the American canon, punching up there with Gass and Nabokov in terms of sheer readerly ecstasy, and this collection is an essential read for anyone who wants to be lifted aloft on wings of heavenly prose mastery and led lovingly into rib-tickling comic vistas in the spirit of Fielding and Dickens.

[Andrew Sare · Rating 4 out of 5]

This collection is so unlike the brainy Theroux mega novels I've read. The humor is more accessible and its more thematic, riffing on tales of students and school, obsessions (ok well that's totally familiar to my past Theroux reading), and exploration of items and even people as objects. What gives it the extra star for me, beyond giving quality short stories, is that the collection provides a couple of origin tales of Theroux as a child and young adult. I got to see what shaped him and his emotional reactions to some powerful life experiences. Really vivid stuff, and definitely a different facet to the man. I suppose I should read his poetry now to look for other angles.

[Josh Doughty · Rating 4 out of 5]

Let’s see.

It seems Theroux is not a one-trick pony having only read Darconville’s Cat and his Collected Poems.

I enjoyed the opening story “A Woman with Sauce” (man dating woman who is obsessed with finding out woman’s mother’s sauce recipe), “The Agonies of James Querpox” (teacher becomes obsessed with student (s h o c k e r) and goes on about math and logic quickly realizing his obsession with the latter makes the prior obsession meaningless and kills himself), “Watergraphs” (allegedly how Bostonians say autographs, we find a character in an auction for a pile of books that is hiding one of the rarest signatures worth millions), “Blackrobe” (coming of age summer camp story that is sympathetic akin to learning about Crucifer in D Cat), “Genius” (college student becoming friends with a child who is a genius and finds decadence), and closing with “Chosen Locksley Swims the Tiber” (an extremely strong story with a female main character joining the fashion industry and suffering all the horrors that are attached to it).

The other stories left me feeling nonplussed or just outright annoyed.

“An English Railroad”, “Fark Pooks”, and “The Copernicus Affair” leave the reader lost and confused with the main characters attempting to communicate with people in a country foreign to them. The latter story, in my opinion, was a train wreck.

Theroux knows how to employ interesting factoids and create u forgettable names, but in short form seems like an interesting challenge for him.

I am intrigued on how “early” these stories are, but not enough to dive deep. I’m inclined to believe these are what was edited out of his major works. Who knows.

There are a lot of interesting and playful ways Theroux creates his stories and since he has made a choice to keep Darconvilles Cat mythologized, this is a good place to start.

A nice passage from “Blackrobe”:

“I can honestly say that most of the time I lived a dream-
life. So many times I saw people, strangers, passersby, and out of nowhere thought: I will never ever see that person again. Everyone always walked in different directions in the world, lost to logic or loyalty or luck. What was fleeting was temporary, and anything temporary broke my heart. Nothing one experienced ever remained permanent or recoverable, I realized with melan-choly-not the moment, not the place, nothing. Whatever it was we encountered or happened to pass by was immediately and forever in the past. It was so strange that the things that I longed for had nothing to do with the future. I always looked into the past. I pondered in consequence-and with mad concentration-the way things used to be. I was always wasting my time as a young boy trying to squint back through space and time or some dimension, making an effort to look into and then past crowded neighborhoods and urban blight and city blocks in an attempt to see, as if by way of photographs, the ghosts of the past. I would sometimes look at a point in a painting or an aerial on a house or a certain word in a book and think, I am the only one in the entire world looking at this right now, no one else.”

[Zachary Tanner · Rating 4 out of 5]

Disclaimer: I helped crowdfund this book. Long live the people’s press!

It doesn’t bode well with my constitution to read short story collections cover-to-cover, but I had a great time with the first three stories, especially “An English Railroad,” which I find more entertaining, funny, and clever than any of the Three Wogs. It will go down as one of my favorite short stories such as Gass’s “The Master of Secret Revenges,” Jerome Charyn’s “Ma petite nazi reine,” or WTV’s “The Green Dress.”

Definitely going to revisit this collection when I revisit Theroux (when I reread the novels or Herbert Head ever is published).

Four stars because, on a bad day, reading Theroux can be taxing like visiting my parents. I love them all to death though!

[Joyce · Rating 4 out of 5]

a bit of a tough one to chew on, i was looking forward to some peak period theroux before he fell off after an adultery, but he has clearly gone back and made amendments (making several references to recent events from long after the original publication), as he apparently did with laura warholic, overstuffing it to make up for lost time.
he is also clearly one of those authors who do better at the length allowed by a novel, most of the stories follow the same structure: the narrator (essentially another theroux stand in for most of the stories) meets someone strange, who goes on at length for the duration. one story is a sort of potted version of darconville's cat, probably a practice run although the sorely missing details of the original publication would allow for that to be confirmed.
it is also sadly dotted with minor copyediting errors, although less so than i remember laura warholic being at least

[Brent Hayward · Rating 3 out of 5]

Three Theroux stars. Maybe his sniping's getting tiresome, though it's not as biting in these short stories as in his novels-- or perhaps it's his misanthropy (which leans, primarily, as always, toward the misogynistic variety) that's wearing thin. Only once did I reach for the virtual dictionary.

[Kalle Vilenius · Rating 5 out of 5]

Short review: pure pleasure.

Longer review:

It may be a misnomer to call this collection “Early” Stories, as consulting Steven Moore’s handy Alexander Theroux: A Fan’s Notes reveals that some of the material was being written as late as the 2010s. A trifling matter. What it is, is a collection of mostly humorous short stories by a writer who relishes the opportunities to pick at the scabs of human ugliness, to take the low character of Man and humorously dissect it.

These stories often play around with language, phonetically representing English as spoken by such exotic types as Russians, Italians, the Polish, Bostonians… or teenage girls with their unique vernacular. Communication troubles occur, misunderstandings both accidental and intentional. Human speech, the messages conveyed, or lack thereof, are a reoccurring motif here, most often as a source of humour. A miniature tour of the world, encounters with many different people in many different circumstances… one might wonder if the plopping of American protagonists in more “exotic” locales is satirizing Theroux’s brother Paul’s travel writing on some level.

My favourite story was Summer Bellerophon; or, The Agonies of James Quepox (these names, they’re amazing, aren’t they?), where a teacher falls in love with his student. An echo of the novel Darconville’s Cat, but smaller in scale, of course. Alaric Darconville was a character to be taken seriously, his agonies to be felt in full, while with Querpox, it all seems so blown out of all proportion; how can his feelings be so strong when he’s never even had a relationship of any kind with Miss Bellerophon, never even confessed his feelings to her? And yet, anyone who has ever felt the same way will know that it really does tend to be that way, doesn’t it?

In falling in love with Miss Bellerophon, Querpox comes to elevate her to a model of perfection, and in contrast to that ideal, all other students fall short. Querpox’s takedown of his students with all their flaws is hilarious in and of itself, but the shallowness of it reveals the true target of Theroux’s scathing criticism to be Querpox himself. This is a repeating pattern throughout the stories, and in fact across the writer’s entire oeuvre, that the character who has the most venom to direct at others is the one under scrutiny, but it’s done subtly enough that many readers may not see this and take the focalizing characters with their thoughts and words at face value. Read carefully.

Another highlight for me was Blackrobe, an account of a childhood summer spent at camp, of the friends made there far from home, of the cruelties of counsellors so gleefully inflicted on the helpless wards, of a boy – the author, obviously – filled to the brim with stories and eager to share them with his fellows. This story in particular features the typical jokes that boys, when left to their own devices, will tell each other. The jokes are, of course, insensitive and offensive. But would they be funny if they weren’t? There’s a cruelty to humour; the sharpest wit always cuts someone. Unless its puns, like the hilarious ending to The Copernicus Affair, or in the story Genius, where a precocious child delights in wordplay:

“Why don’t you have to starve in a desert” he asked me. “Because you might eat all the sand which is there. Why are the sandwiches there? Because there the family of Ham was bread and mustard!”

Top that, I dare you. It’s not all fun and games, though. Though humour is the primary mode of the stories here, a few tragedies, compelling ones, occur. The unrequited love of James Querpox has a decidedly unhappy trajectory, Leon Noel of Genius is a sad tale of potential wasted in the most horrible ways, and Chosen Locksley Swims the Tiber shows an unfulfilling life, though at least that last one, the story that closes out this collection, has a more triumphant ending to it, achieved through the faith in God and Christ that Theroux is such a staunch defender of. In a way, the collection begins with its most trivial story, A Woman with Sauce, where the narrator is trying to guess the contents of a pasta sauce, and ends with its weightiest.

It’s a collection that will keep the reader smiling throughout and maybe leave them contemplating more than a little. Theroux’s stories, much like his nonfiction writings, are always educational, whichever topic he chooses he researches thoroughly, such as the railroad factoids in An English Railroad. Trivia abounds. Trivialities themselves are blown out of proportion, as by the autograph collector in Watergraphs, or the jealously guarded secret of pasta sauce in A Woman with Sauce. Hobby horses, the little things that we obsess over that others don’t share our enthusiasm for, are yet another target of Theroux’s satire, and in this he is probably practicing a little self-flagellation, tongue in cheek.

Tongue in cheek is a good description for many of these stories. That’s not to say they lack sincerity, especially when they get more serious, but that there’s always a twinkle in the eye, a playfulness, to the stories. Through humour the hand of the story gently guides the reader to where they need to get and being led on these little journeys you’ll be occasionally laughing out loud, often chuckling and always smiling. To put it succinctly, reading Early Stories is pure pleasure.