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Laura Warholic: Or, The Sexual Intellectual (2007)

de Alexander Theroux

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1668162,912 (3.36)64
Eugene Eyestones, an erudite sex columnist for a Boston cultural magazine, becomes enmeshed in the messy life of a would-be artist named Laura Warholic. Repulsing and fascinating him at the same time, she becomes a mirror in which he not only sees himself but through which he is forced to face his own demons. Not only does she inadvertently supply him with material for his columns, she represents all Eugene considers to be wrong with contemporary America - a garish and dunce-filled Babylon that Theroux scorches with relentless satire.… (més)
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    Hadrian the Seventh de Frederick Rolfe (slickdpdx)
    slickdpdx: Both are stories of embittered artists redeemed, told by authors who love language and the esoteric.
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Es mostren 1-5 de 8 (següent | mostra-les totes)
In a word: Don't.

Laura Warholic is an unedited conglomeration of Theroux's writing over a twenty-year period. Ostensibly given a thin veneer of plot and character, this novel dedicates the bulk of its pages to essays on a variety of topics (for example, Democracy), and an embarrassing number of rants and screeds.

The essays come off well. Sure, they are out of place, and feel ham-handedly inserted into the prose, but they are generally entertaining and occasionally thought-provoking. The effect is similar to reading the pre-Objectivist and proto-Libertarian philosophy in de Sade's work (does the modern Right realize they are taking their Individualist philosophy from such a worthy libertine?), but de Sade cuts his philosophy with hard-core porn, while Theroux cuts his with day-to-day (I refuse to say quotidian) life in suburban Boston and an incredibly nonlinear cross-country road trip.

As for the rants, it is pretty clear that Theroux doesn't agree with any of them, for they are so terribly written that not even a supporter of the viewpoint in question could sit through one. Like the essays, they come out of nowhere, and feel wedged into the rest of the text - as if the author had this waiting in the wings and was just looking for an occasion to insert it. After enough of these, it becomes apparent that the novel is just a scaffolding on which to hang these various bits of writing, unsuitable for publishing on their own, that Theroux had lying around.

And the lists! When Laura jumps into punk rock, she doesn't listen to "bands like the Misfits and the Cramps, sometimes Crass". Instead, Theroux lists upwards of thirty bands, an amount that is neither illustrative nor exhaustive. It's like listening to a ten year-old autistic kid rattle off all the scores of baseball games he's never seen. This extends to the descriptions of crowds, in what could charitably be interpreted as Theroux trying to be funny, but really comes off as a failed attempt at using slang. Hang on, this excerpt from a rock show is going to be as painful for me as it is for you:
oafs with tattooed cheeks, nutboxes, pirate chicks, teenage girls in tube miniskirts and major lipstick, moshing party-stormers, Devoheads, Brechtian proles, halt-cranked groupies, rude goggle bunnies, metal morons, crueltoids, breatharians on meth, gutter foxes, pot orgasmists, stoned ponies with nipple rings, felchers, Goths with obscene words shaved into their hair, emo-punks, genderfuckers, martini vixens with fake eyelashes, dorky little poontang hounds, level-3 sex offenders, frowning ska-monks, vibration pixies, eerie hairball unidentifiables thrown up by one of the Milankovitch cycles of continental glaciation, dole-drawers, slaves who long for the shade and hirelings who wait for wages, and no end of fat, anti-intellectual Luddites in bat-black leather motorcycle hats and jackets with lightning.

Note the -oid suffix thrown in there. Unpopular since about 1961, Theroux still thinks it is funny, and inexplicably believes that Gen Xers use this as slang. It makes an appearance about every twenty pages.

And the caricatures! I almost gave this a second star as a collection of unfortunately-connected essays, but the tone-deaf and badly-drawn caricatures snatched that one right away. On top of the worst Black Pimp since Confederacy of Dunces (Whoa!), we have the Jew, the Racist Christian, the Butch Lesbian, the Flamboyant Gay, the Social Justice Warrior (are we allowed to say that now without laughing?), the Anti-Semite, each given a soapbox and thirty-odd pages of incoherent rant.

But enough, you say, tell me about the novel as a novel! Well (he says, knowing of Theroux's derision for this interjection, which is stated a mere sixty times in the novel), this is the story of Eugene Eyestones (if you think that name is bad, wait until you hear the clumsy nicknames people have for him - things like "E-squared" that, unlike nicknames, do not work as soon as they are uttered aloud) and Laura Warholic, who have a complicated relationship. They neither love each other, nor anyone else. Eugene, a pompous windbag, is a traumatized Viet Nam veteran when it suits the plot (i.e., rarely), and a stand-in for the author (no? you think he's a clever construction? read Theroux's opinions on music in Grammar of Rock, lifted practically straight from the mouth of this character) most other times. Laura is a miserable loser, with no discernible traits or personality, and is probably a stand-in for someone Theroux had a bad relationship with (I've known a Laura; they're not rare).

At around the 700-page mark, Theroux seems to realize he is writing a novel, and he begins to flesh out the characters and give them feelings, complexity, even moments of reflection. He tries to introduce plot complications and a finale, but these are so obvious that they seem inevitable rather than climatic. It is all too little, too late.

The text itself is described as "overwritten", but if anything it is underwritten. There is no coherence to the paragraphs, no connection between one sentence and another. Dialog is spoken without regard to what another character is saying, just one interjection after another. No editor had a hand in this work, and the joke that Theroux did not even bother to revise his first draft is more true than funny.

Given that this is presented as a satire, picking on the writing may seem unfair. But this is a near-900-page novel. If you can't write well, or can't be bothered to, then for the sake of all that is just and good (i.e., neither this novel nor anything in it) do not write 900 pages. Do what the loons at the anarchist bookstore do, and cut it short at around 75. ( )
  mkfs | Aug 13, 2022 |
  chrisvia | Apr 29, 2021 |
Perhaps the lingering focus of Laura Warholic resonated within my own past. Perhaps there are events and people I'd prefer not to remember. Whatever the extent of my own baggage, this is not a great novel. The overstuffed tome sorely lacks editing. The aspects relating to Vietnam and contemporary musical subcultures are absolutely contrived. The jungles of Southeast Asia are a flimsy device for lost love. The pulsating clubs of present day Boston are but teratologies allowing Theroux to sneer. These nocturnal visions didn't appear as bad as Franzen gushing over Bright Eyes in Freedom, but the authorial intent felt all wrong. Maybe I'm just growing old.

I just didn't care. The rants are epic but distracting. Laura's faults are Sissyphean. Herr Warholic is unctuous. I understand. Fifty references of foreshadowing anticipate the cross-country trip. This journey remains the soul of the book. Echoing Lolita, place names and local curiosity jostle in the American imagination. The novel's plot follows the lead of Miss Lonelyhearts and Otto Preminger's Laura and concludes gracelessly with an expected thud.
( )
  jonfaith | Feb 22, 2019 |
When the very first thing your book does is kick in with a thinly fictionalized analogue/pissy defence of the time you called the black men who raped a woman in Central Park "monkeys" and then pretended not to understand why everyone thought this was racist of you and here it is ten years later and you're still feeling all aggrieved over it, it's not a good sign. Especially not when the vicious racist that you're setting up as something very close to a fictional you (though see below) cannot manage to see himself as such or see why his attitudes toward women (they are all dirty and damaged, except for the ones who are angels who will save him and pure as the driven snow--he literally used to date a woman named Snow, until she melted) are so repulsive or see why he can't live a life. He thinks of himself as "the man with the faraway eyes," but his name is Eugene Eyestones, and the blinkeredness that implies, the way that leavens the author's misanthropy with a dollop of self-disgust at not being able to be different than he is, helps you take a deep breath and trust that he's going somewhere and keep reading, even when the next four hundred pages are nothing but racist screeds from a cast of sundry screaming ids brought to life with names like Discknickers (I kept reading "Dicksnickers") and Krauthammer and Micepockets.

With the amount of time I wasted on those four hundred pages--Theroux refused to have a copyeditor sully his work, so there are constant, and I mean constant, repetitions of whole snippets of dialogue and embarrassing typoes and blatant factual errors (and Theroux with his resentment and ego, possibly traceable back to the fact that his brother is the more popular novelist Paul Theroux, would no doubt try to pawn them off like a tinpot Joyce, as intentional, as something that will keep the professors busy for years), and it gets you down and in a hurry. Some blogger said there was a 700-page masterpiece hidden in this 900-page shitshow--I'll grant Theroux a 250-page stirring double portrait, but not more than that. Luckily, he starts to properly fill out the other half of the helix just as you're fed up to here with the clueless raging (one of the most perceptive comments on the book I've seen was by my LibraryThing friend Slick, who said something along the lines that this would have been a decent slab at seventies/eighties sleaze had it come out in, yeah, Street Hassle 1978 and not Hot Chip 2007), just as you're prepared to toss this brick in the air (but not too high, lest it come down and kill a kid--I think this is literally the heaviest book on my shelf) and write it off with a review like "Longer is not better" or "If you cant say anything nice ..." or "This made my life worse."

But the other half of the helix. Is Laura Warholic (the trick in the title is that the "Sexual Intellectual," retch, is Eyestones, not her), who is something like 35 (it doesn't add up, because to Theroux there are two generations, people who were in Nam like him and Eugene and lesser people who are young but also in their thirties but also should be in their forties if you do the math but are also referred to as Generation X and "slackers" but also use the most moronic version of teen slang you ever. I think he did it just to hurt me. Especially "klub kids." Long and the short of it is for Theroux--who is Eyestones, despite his efforts to maintain a majestic distance--time passed as normal until 1975, and then everything happened at once from disco to the Internet but we still are all men in our fifties who act like men in our hundred-and-twenties, absurd admixtures of every type of stereotype that doesn't exist anymore. You imagine him penning a particularly delightful bit of Yiddish/Nazi constant-shouting vaudeville duo--what? or gayhate and then going "Yes, Lexy, you've still got it, my man." The only people in this book I respect are the lesbians, because they had the perspicacity to realize they were in an Alexander Theroux novel and rebel by embracing it, just dialing the repulsive nonsense up to 11, caricaturizing their master).

Oh God! I forgot! All the black people are crack addicts except one sassy Caribbean sweetheart who wants to fuck Eyestones but can't cos she too dirty and one of them is actually called "Jamm the Wesort." I just don't even know where to start with this shit.

Aw, fuck this review, man. This book made me feel sour and small and tired. All the characters are the same, rant on max, except for Eyestones and Laura Warholic, whose bad dad gave her a sad and who is gangly and unperfumed and disaffected and therefore must die. They go on a road trip in the middle and are both so unmitigatedly awful that you're like "oh yeah, there's a bit on nuance here." That's right--"unmitigatedly awful" is what passes for nuance. I.e., the nuance is just that it's both Eyestones and Laura that are basically bullshit. Then it's four hundred more pages of rants, then some violent death, then it's over. And the only thing Theroux could find to praise about his own awful book was that the chapter full of factoids he looked up on the internet is full of life. Actually, he harangued the interviewer with it: "Did you like that part? Even a little? If you couldn't find something to like there you're dead inside!" And it was so pathetic and sad and he ended up calling the book a "total attack on mediocrity," which is just.

This book was petulant and bullying. It's like A Confederacy of Dunces if it wasn't a satire. It did make my life worse. I feel used by Theroux, like sometimes you somehow end up having to swallow your tongue at the guy who hates homeless people or the Chinese because he's, like, the bride's dad. It's not the worst book I've ever read; if you accept the premise that people=shit, it does an intermittently okay job at vividly sketching out what that would look like. But It is among the worst, and certainly the most dispiriting. ( )
4 vota MeditationesMartini | Jan 19, 2012 |
At its heights, Warholic is brilliant, fun and thought-provoking. There can be a razor sharp edge between a misanthropist and a person who is able to appreciate even those things that are most unlikable about us. That second type of person is the opposite of the misanthropist. I suggest that A. Theroux is among the second type. He relishes even the most unlikable people, at their worst. Unfortunately, that portrayal of unlikable people at their worst, and the fact that the novel is at points poorly copy-edited, will turn off many readers. Theroux also has, in this novel, a problem writing sufficiently distinct voices. The similarity of many of the characters' names only aggravates that problem.

I look at this novel like an infernal engine; throwing off sparks, but also fumes. Disappointing, but worth your time if you are looking for something really different or you are already a fan of A. Theroux. I regard Warholic as a must read if you liked Darconville's Cat. In many respects, its a bookend and a response. ( )
5 vota slickdpdx | Jan 14, 2012 |
Es mostren 1-5 de 8 (següent | mostra-les totes)
It is a pissed-off book, and reading its six hundred pages is as much fun as a hot August road trip with Don Imus, Ann Coulter, and Andrew Dice Clay. Yet it is also a remarkable achievement, a bombastic, squirm-inducing, and belief-rattling satire on political correctness shown through the lens of a sexless love story between two of the most unlovable (if not repulsive) characters in recent American letters.
 
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Vectors converge in tensegrity, but they never actually get together; they only get into critical proximities and twist by each other. - R. Buckminster Fuller
You can write on a wall with a fish heart, it's because of the phosphorous. - Anne Carson
The crows maintain that a single crow could destroy the heavens. Doubtless that is so, but it proves nothing against the heavens, for the heavens signify simply: the impossibility of crows. - Franz Kafka
There is another world, but it is in this one. - Paul Eluard
Every sin is the result of a collaboration. - Stephen Crane
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Little Bob Merkle:
Ducking down, Gnorm all of a sudden loudly moaned to Dicksnickers, who looked up and sardonically quoted, "Shut the doors, shut the windows, shut everything! Here comes the Invisible Man!" It was Little Bob Merkle, white mouse and office uniformitarian, who at every chance he got took anything for free, stole things, and was even now boosting a fistful of multi-colored plastic cocktail stirrers that he thought he could sell later at a flea market. A skinflint, he would never waste a motion not to his direct benefit and even held inexplicable grudges, for at the office it had not gone unobserved that he refused to be in the same room with Larry Clucker, whose exit like some solar/lunar recirpocation usually precipitated Little Bob Merkle's appearance. He was heartles in his conniving need to keep solvent, constantly walking around outside with his head down searching the ground for lost coins, a nickel or a dime, or anything that might come his way. He cheated and lied and was envious but basically frightened of life. He had small sharp incisors and pointed ears like yucca leaves and a weak handshake, warm and obsequious and moist as a used bowling shoe. A colorless nonentity, he looked drained or packed in ice, with that coiffure of puffy-white and hairbursts coming out of his ears like paper frills on a roast. It was widely asserted that he had one less layer of skin than anyone else. His pink cheeks puffed in rather than out, and when his mouth opened only tiny words emerged.
Mutrux (the lawyer):
Mutrux had a square, sawed-off head with straps of dark hair fastidiously swept over to one side, manifesting the fop's endless concern about head-to-back-hair ratio. His raptor's eyes, which were hooded above and pouched below, gave his face a look both defiant and madly eager to impart bad news. He seemed whenever he looked at you continuously to be counting, weighing, surveying, measuring with a slow grim smile that cut into his face like a wound. Whenever he did speak, his words were clipped with cold authority, sharp stunts of strong opinion, like the sound of iron bolts being drawn.
On San Fransisco: People don't actually walk there, ever notice, but rather meander, following, needless to say, the now decade-long yuppie rubric of devoting an entire morning --'California matins,' I call it-- to purchasing a cup of coffee...which, while taking little sips from it, they hamhandedly proceed to squire around the office or the streets or a park all morning like a fucking trophy!
Eyestone's rooms, like his own dense prose, suggested a point of view: diverse, adorned, amused, premeditated, filled with details, highly inclusive.
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Wikipedia en anglès (2)

Eugene Eyestones, an erudite sex columnist for a Boston cultural magazine, becomes enmeshed in the messy life of a would-be artist named Laura Warholic. Repulsing and fascinating him at the same time, she becomes a mirror in which he not only sees himself but through which he is forced to face his own demons. Not only does she inadvertently supply him with material for his columns, she represents all Eugene considers to be wrong with contemporary America - a garish and dunce-filled Babylon that Theroux scorches with relentless satire.

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