Laura Warholic: Or, the Sexual Intellectual

by Alexander Theroux

Book Overview

In his first novel in nearly twenty years, Alexander Theroux, National Book Award Nominee, returns with a compendious satire, a bold and inquisitorial circuit-breaking examination of love and hate, of rejection and forgiveness, of trust and romantic disappointment, of the terrors of contemporary life. 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,...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1560977981
• ISBN13: 9781560977988
• Release Date: December 2007
• Publisher: Fantagraphics Books
• Length: 888 Pages
• Weight: 3.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 2.4" x 6.3" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Binding completely cutter on both edges

Book is good condition BUT the hardcover completely destroyed cutted both sides of Bindings. Very poor book blinding!!!

Defense of Theroux

Yes, Theroux is an writer of invective, however, I think the reviewer who subtitled the novel the "Moby-dick of Misanthropy" was missing the main thrust of Laura Warholic entirely. I'm almost sure said reviewer didn't finish the book at all. Theroux attacks various groups of people, often viciously and at obscene lengths through various secondary characters, whose speech is obviously meant to reflect poorly on the speakers and not the maligned group (those delivered by Discknickers, Minot, etc.) and sometimes through the narrator or through Eyestones. Though even the narrator or Eyestones present various group members (homosexuals, Jews, etc.) as stereotypes in ways that make some readers uncomfortable, they are cartoons, they are meant to be grotesque cartoons. Is satire really unrecognizable by so many readers? Even readers that are well read enough to have heard of Theroux in the first place? Theroux enjoys name calling and exaggeration, but he is no misanthrope. Examine how he deals with his actual characters, his humans as individuals rather than those characters meant to be cartoon representations. Laura Warholic is pitied by both Eyestones and the author and Theroux suggests that those like Laura need grace and understanding whether or not they choose to accept it. Theroux may or may not 'hate' the masses as masses (see his indictment of democracy in the novel), but the individual he uncommonly feels for. Laura Warholic is the work of one of the few great writers alive. His sentences are original and vivid. He is a master of the baroque and ornamental, but always readable. His two major works are simultaneously massive and encyclopedic yet fairly plot heavy and character based. As long as you don't misread the book, which is it seems is the biggest problem, I think you will enjoy the novel as much as I did.

Seven, Nine, nay Eleven Stars

Count me in with the five star reviewers. This is a magnificent, sweet, sad, terribly moving and incredibly satisfying book. Astonishing achievement. Never once looked at a dictionary---just let the verbal hyper-abundance wash me over into bliss. Maximalist beckettianism. Nah, that's not it. Just impossible to encapsulate and convey. A comic book blown apart into an epic pop romance meditation. Theroux ponders and pontificates and rants and satirizes and romances the reader with the most reading fun I've had in years. Nothing at all like it----which is a wonderful thing.

Pure Aesthetic Force

"Laura Warholic or The Sexual Intellectual" is the greatest novel of the decade that begins with 2001. A grand hydraulic force drives the most spectacular movements of language, image and character any novelist can possibly achieve today. The sexual psychology evinced in these pages is unmatched in its pertinacity and complexity. There are many shades of humor here which combine in story that crashes into a full load of both salvation and damnation. One foolish reviewer asserted that the novel did not have a heart. But it does have a heart - a heart swollen to outrage on an epic level. Wave upon wave of harsh satiric force sketches the deranged madness of the American landscape into precise language. And language happens to be one of the heroes of the tale. Not since James Joyce has a writer in the English language demonstrated such a broad and powerful command of words from the heights of sublimity to the depths of a brutal vulgar hell. Most of the characters are monsters, exotic figments of doom that haunted the tale, spewing twisted demiurgic verbal concoctions that goe beyond mere humor into an order of sensibility more appalling, and throbbing with doom. Prospective readers must beware. Theroux is a deadly opponent of political correctness and his grand depiction of our society in decay is hostile to ideology of all kinds - whether on the right or the left.

In Need of Committed Readers

After a heart-rending loss in Game 2 of the 1975 World Series which prevented the Boston Red Sox from taking a two game lead, starting pitcher Bill "Spaceman" Lee was asked by reporters to describe the Series to that point. Lee's masterfully understated response was, "Tied." Similarly, after spending months working through Theroux's epic, I am tempted to limit my review to "Long." It is long in pages (900), incredibly long in thought, and dense. Through the prism of the relationship between Laura Warholic and Eugene Eyestones, Theroux explores love, identity, desire, modern culture in all its most bizarre permutations and sex. Remarkably, until the final pages, almost nothing happens. Theroux seems to want the reader to experience the quotidian and depressing reality of the character's lives through discussions in bars, rooms, street corners, cars, etc. before moving the plot through its final stages. Through these dialogues, Laura is presented as one of the most fully realized and least likeable characters in all of fiction. Pitied by Eyestones rather than loved, Laura is not evil in any significant way, but is petty and unaccomplished in every conceivable way. Her smallness of character becomes both a metaphor for modern culture and a touchstone by which other characters in the book are measured. Whenever the reader begins to feel some small sympathy for her, Theroux reminds us of her petty dishonesties, her overwhelming plainness of appearence and her unwholesome odor. It is easier to like Eyestones, the Sexual Intellectual, until we realize that he is in love with a girl at a bakery he frequents though he never makes the effort to speak with her. Eyestones becomes more pitiable than Laura in his failure to commit and in his hypocritical pose as a sexuality expert who is celibate. While not uplifting, this work of art is worth experiencing if the reader has the patience to work through its many paces. In doing so, one comes to understand Theroux's description of identity: "We are at odds with our very selves, becoming nothing but what we are not and thus having to despair of being what we are." Theroux describes the dangers of commitment by advising that "We are willing to lose ourselves in another as we exchange fates with one whom we love but on whom our heart is nevertheless impaled." As in Heller's cynical diatribe "Something Happens," we must live the lives of the main characters for an extended period before anything "happens" in a more traditional narrative sense. Even then, Theroux has to help the reader interpret what the final pages mean. "Vision constantly calls to us like a seditious angel with what could be." There is danger, says Theroux, in both responding to and ignoring the call. Strangely, Laura Warholic somehow succeeds in enriching understanding while dampening the spirit.

Brilliant masterpiece--Res ipsa

This like a dish of Ortolan is not for everyone's reading table. Embodies the best of Joyce, Vonnegut and Salinger. Sarcastic, witty, and erudite in abstruse--but rewarding allusions. This book works on so many levels--intellectual, profane, sacred yet existential. Confronts you like a carnival's house of mirrors--you see yourself, others and the human condition in multifarious ways: at times disturbing, funny, yet always entertaining and reflecting truth. Buy this book--be prepared to have a good dictionary!