Alexander Theroux

Despite its subtitle, Einstein’s Beets is not really an examination or treatise on food phobias – no footnotes, no copyright pages. Editing seems to be minimal; particularly annoying is that long quotations are sometimes indented and in a different font, but more often not. Food aversion here is like a familiar – we all have ‘em – musical phrase used by a jazz musician to create an individual artistic expression. A.T. is the John Coltrane of aversion rant. What holds it together show more and makes it more than an 800 page blog of gossipy snark?
Possibly it’s a meditation on human freedom from a Christian, probably Roman Catholic, point of view. If I recall correctly, the author, a novelist, poet, and academic – his better known brother is novelist & travel writer Paul Theroux -- in his younger days considered joining a religious order. In that case, Einstein’s Beets is a kind of spiritual autobiography hidden behind a gourmand Aubrey’s Brief Lives, an encyclopedic collection of curious food facts, fallacies, and poisonous pen portraits, with a range of allusion encompassing popular art (Family Guy, The Simpsons), celebrity culture (Lindsay Lohan, Audrey Hepburn, Jennifer Aniston, Oprah Winfrey), and high culture (Seneca, Thomas Aquinas, Shakespeare) as well as the middlebrow culture of my youth (Holiday Magazine, Playboy Interviews).
For example, with regard to vegetable bete noires, in the span of a few pages, he cites Gabriel Garcia Marquez & Maya Angelou on eggplant phobia, Jim Carrey, Fran Lebowitz, Tom Selleck, Will Rogers, and chef Alexandra Guarnaschelli contra carrots, and Rosie O’Donnell’s aversion to zucchini. Denis Diderot disliked potatoes, while Shakespeare’s John Falstaff considered them to be Elizabethan viagra. Oh, and Russell Baker hated French fries but Julie Andrews’s comfort food is American milkshakes and “the occasional boiled potato sandwich.”
The abbreviated survey above also has a couple of examples of A.T.’s mean streak. Often it appears that his aversion for certain people can overwhelm the examination of their phobias. Maya Angelou is “one of the worst writers on earth.” Rosie O’Donnell may not care for zucchini, but “fattier foods she adores … her weight has at times ballooned to 300 pounds … after her son, Parker got into an accident, she scarfed down three boxes of Mallomars … When a recent online survey asked people to write in, guessing what Rosie O’Donnell’s favorite foods were, several people wrote ‘Plankton and krill.’”
This leads me to consider whether the “Alexander Theroux” of Einstein’s Beets could be a Charles Kinbote character, the nutcase who hijacks the commentary of Pale Fire. This would be a meta-irony, since Nabokov is one of the author’s bugaboos. Apparently. One can’t help be struck by what a troll the author character is, an extraordinary hater! He is surely the least charitable of Christians. To paraphrase Alice Roosevelt, if you can’t say something nice … Well hello Mr. Theroux! The subjects of his rants – Nabokov, Gore Vidal, A.J. Liebling, Joan Didion, Andy Warhol, Oprah, Hillary Clinton, Ariel Sharon, and most of the Food Channel hosts -- anyway, the victims -- often become the author character’s unconscious descriptions of his own personality. (Then again he does note that chefs, fellow creative artists, have their own food phobias.)
For example, regarding the despised Jim Harrison: “Can you imagine this guy sitting next to you on a long bus ride and blabbing away across the endless miles? Hand me my Dramamine.” On Thoreau’s self-portrait, A.T. sees an analogy with Confederacy of Dunces Ignatius D. Reilly, ”a sanctimonius eccentric.” “Nabokov loved to pontificate on every fact and phase of life, making lordly pronouncements from on high.” “What was arid, bare, barren, bleak, deserted, insincere, manufactured, unnatural, and desolate invariably pleased Warhol.” He notes that Thomas Aquinas condemned the sin of gluttony with philosophical subtlety, while being enormously fat, so maybe A.T. is aware of some of the ironies.
Exceptionally, none of the objects of his Biblical wrath (he seems to consider the New Testament to be literal history) comes out as anti-Semitic. “Theroux” seems to have reserved it all for himself. Initially you get suburban anti-Semitism – every Jewish personality is outed with his or her former name (but no one Italian, Greek, or any other ethnics, to the best of my recollection).By the end of the book you get digressions on the kosher tax and the Zionist media. “Kinbote/Theroux” is unable to write about the Nazi treatment of the Jews without going off on Gaza and the West Bank; Sylvia Plath is quoted to snipe at Jewish self-dramatization of the Holocaust, not to mention a passing sneer at Anne Frank. As the spiritual, presumably In Real Life Theroux explains, aversion and phobias are how we negatively assert our freedom. I’m not sure if Theroux is implying an aversion to broccoli is metaphysically equivalent to America First and other expressions of ethnic phobia. To me, it puts his progressive Christianity in a bad light. One of the few Jews who comes out unscathed is secular Leopold Bloom, whose charitable perspective contrasts with the judgmental Christian author. (Could be why a former M.I.T. professor and well-received novelist’s latest has a publisher that ordinarily does Peanuts reprints?).
Anyway, the 800 pages go by quickly; snark can be very entertaining, as is the author’s eggplant to plankton ADD. While the ambiguity of perspective – Theroux IRL or Kinbote/Theroux – gives it more depth, my recollection is that the earlier Darconville’s Cat was tighter and better, and the religious strain more humane, but now I’m afraid to go back and re-read it and, like many memories, be disappointed. For brilliant combining of high and low culture I recommend S.J. Perelman, for literary wit Joseph Epstein (before he started to become overtly right wing), for virtuoso lists John Barth in The Sot Weed Factor, for sly humor The Philosophy of Andy Warhol, and, as already noted, for encyclopedic word and world building, Ulysses. show less

Three Wogs
By Alexander Theroux
Henry Holt and Company, Inc. (1972)
Review by Karl Wolff

Alexander Theroux comes from a famous family. Brother to travel writer Paul Theroux and the actor Justin Theroux is his nephew. I first came upon Alexander Theroux in 99 Novels, by Anthony Burgess. It was an informal survey of the best novels in English since World War 2. Burgess praises the usual suspects (Pynchon, Faulkner, Mailer), but he also brought up some otherwise unknown authors. One of them was show more Alexander Theroux and his masterpiece Darconville's Cat.

But the first piece of prose fiction Theroux wrote was Three Wogs, published in 1972. Wog is a racial slur used by the British. As the back cover explains, "It is used to denigrate people of color - East Indians, Jamaicans, Africans - and, can under duress, be extended to include Asians, Irishmen, Italians, and indeed all people of perceptibly foreign habits or appearance." Wog is similar to the word "bloody" in that it doesn't translate into American English. (Wop is close, but by now it would be considered archaic or obsolete.) In Three Wogs, Theroux regales the reader with three tales of racists who get their comeuppance. (Since this is a literary essay and not a book review, I will disregard spoilers. Even though the title sounds distasteful, I would highly recommend reading Three Wogs. It is the perfect antidote to the dismal headlines in our orange-hued, tiny-fingered vulgar age.)

With geometric precision, Theroux tells three stories, each with three parts. All focus on a WASPy Brit and his or her "wog" antagonist. The first story focuses on a slow burn battle of wills between Mrs. Proby and her downstairs neighbor, Yunnum Fun. The second story deals with Harold Harefoot, a young Brit who works on the graveyard shift cleaning doubledecker buses and Dilip, a Jain from India waiting at the train station. The third story pairs Rev. Which Therefore, a deeply racist and deeply closeted Episcopal preacher having to officiate the marriage of Cyril, a black African singer for whom Which has an unrequited love (or lust). (Theroux has a Wodehousian penchant for funny names and comedic set-pieces.)

What make these short pieces transcend the strictures of comedy is Theroux's verbal pyrotechnics, acidic satirical wit, and characterizations. Theroux is a devout Catholic and an unapologetic leftist. He resembles James May and he has had scrapes with the public, including charges of plagiarism and misogyny. The plagiarism accusations revolved around his two books of essays, The Primary Colors and The Secondary Colors. The misogyny charges are harder to shake, but easier to justify. Let me explain. In Three Wogs the female characters do not come across as positive. Mrs. Proby is an unattractive, abrasive, combative, racist and anti-Semite. She comes across like a monstrous doppelganger to future-Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher. In the third story, Rev. Which Therefore's mother is a withered hateful racist Protestant shrew. (Throughout his fiction, Theroux's villains tend to be conservative and Protestant. Despite his progressive political leanings, he comes across like he still resents Martin Luther and that whole Reformation thing.)

Theroux's genius shines through in his characterizations. While the WASPy Brits and "wogs" wallow in toxic antagonistic relationships, the stories expand on each character.

Case in point: We first meet Harold Harefoot and he comes across as a racist manchild with no impulse control. He gets into an argument with the Pakistani ice cream vendor. All in all, he is an unsympathetic idiot we shouldn't bother caring about. But then Theroux provides us his back-story: Harold lives in Houndsditch. "It was all 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." He works "hosing down and scrubbing up the coaches and buses in a subterranean garage at Victoria Station, duties he performed with ill-camouflaged scorn and a minimum sense of art." He spends his Sundays going to Hyde Park's Speaker's Corner, listening to racist tirades by local crackpots.

His antagonist is Dilip, a Jain, who is receiving a university education to study electrical circuitry. Like Harold, he is no mere caricature, although he speaks like Apu from The Simpsons. He endured his family's destruction during the hellish days of the post-colonial Partition. The relentless suffering and hardship drew him towards the Jain faith, with its emphasis on not harming anyone. In the story, he waits in the train station while Harold chews his ear off.

One of the great set-pieces of Three Wogs is its Speaker's Corner sequence. We listen to several crackpots and bigmouths spew forth a never-ending racist tirade. This is Alexander Theroux at his most brilliant. He describes the speaker's blather as "a shotgun wedding between free speech and common sense." Or put another way:

"But it was the speakers, the metal of Old England, who simply amazed, for it was singularly this vision-haunted (occasionally beer-irrigated) array of nobodies, filled with the arrogance of disenchanted insight, who, in the war between order and entropy, ran hand-over-hand high into their makeshift boxes, and, flying into diatribes and mighty gusts of Homeric wrath against God, Devil, or anything else that bent their wick, they cast - on a Sunday of rain, on a Sunday of snow - imitation pearls before genuine swine. Roland punched and fought to the front of the wide, shifting assembly."

Or in contemporary parlance:

"Make America great again! Lock her up! Drain the swamp!"

Published in 1972, Three Wogs was written in 1970. The date is important. In 1968 Conservative MP Enoch Powell gave his infamous "Rivers of Blood" speech. The speech railed against non-white immigrants coming to England. "We must be mad, literally mad, as a nation to be permitting the annual inflow of some 50,000 dependents, who are for the most part the material of the future growth of the immigrant descended population. It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre." (To be fair, comparing Donald Trump to Enoch Powell would be uncharitable. The better parallel is with the producer-punching climate change denialist Jeremy Clarkson.) I imagine Theroux wrote Three Wogs in reaction to Enoch Powell's speech and the festering racism in the UK following decolonization. The mighty Anglos and Saxons, long since heroes on the battlefields of Hastings and Agincourt, now looked like paranoid buffoons, afraid their daughters will marry a Pakistani or a British African. Alas, racism can't be solved with a piece of literature and a "magic bullet" solution.

Theroux's depictions of non-white cultures may come across as simplistic and a caricature, angering a reader looking at this through the lens of the politically correct. Political correctness is something more people need to be attuned to, especially in everyday interactions and in tolerating other cultures, beliefs, and so forth. As a means to interpret literature, political correctness is a narrow myopic lens. It shuts off interpretation in favor of hysterical reaction. Reacting isn't the same thing as thinking.

Three Wogs is indeed racist, in the same way Blazing Saddles is racist. Racial slurs spatter the text, but words are neither good or bad. But people can be good or bad when using these words. Who is using the racial slurs? The Grand Wizard of the KKK and Richard Pryor will use the same words, but the intent will be different. Intention is everything. In Theroux's case, he's using the racist words against the racists. He also made both the racists and the non-white characters fully rounded individuals. This makes it more challenging to fit any specific character into a particular moral box. Life just isn't simple. We'd like to think so, believing in conspiracy theories and such, when in fact we are each a unique product of time and circumstance. It is good to be politically correct, but, like anything else, don't succumb to wearing PC blinders or using PC as a crutch. Besides, Three Wogs is a comic novel. Lighten up, laugh a little.

What makes this American Odd? That's less easy to answer, since Theroux wrote this in London and the three stories take place entirely in London. (One could understand if someone mistook this book for a piece of British literature.) It's oddness only becomes apparent when we see the rest of Theroux's literary output. Unlike his future works - Darconville's Cat, An Adultery, Laura Warholic - this book is short, takes place entirely in Britain, and has no "woman done him wrong" plot. But Alexander Theroux is also an oddball in American letters for other reasons. He has written biographies of Al Capp and Edward Gorey, along with a travelogue on Estonia. His latest endeavor is an 800-page doorstopper about the food aversions of famous people. Alexander Theroux is an odd, odd man and American literature is all the richer for it.

http://www.cclapcenter.com/2017/01/american_odd_three_wogs_by_ale.html show less

Alexander Theroux’s name returned to the news with the publication of Laura Worholic: or, The Sexual Intellectual. The 878-page work can be intimidating to readers, especially those unfamiliar with Theroux’s bombastic, encyclopedic, maximalist style. A gateway to his larger works would be An Adultery, written more than two decades earlier and less than half the length of Laura Worholic. The writing is as straightforward as the slip of a plot.

Painter Christian Ford loves Farol Colorado. show more Farol is married, and Christian is going out with Marina. Complications ensue. While the adulterous male narrator may be one of the most clichéd characters in American fiction, Theroux uses the stock characters to enter a world of deception, dissimulation, and denial. Between Ford’s introspections into the nature of relationships, he treats the reader to lengthy dissections on East Coast intellectuals, the arts scene, and New Hampshire. The residents of St. Ives, the small university town where he teaches art, “had no manners, only etiquette, and yet to emphasize correctness made every attempt whenever possible to drink port, play racquetball, sail boats, see art films, flambé food, affect ascots, collect paintings, cross their sevens, wear legible clothing, subscribe to concerts, hire help, and in general follow no fashion by which first hadn’t been established a precise – and identifiable – semiotic function.” When Theroux writes satire, it’s like reading a mad cross between François Rabelais and Evelyn Waugh.

Speaking through Christian Ford, his assessment of New Hampshire is no less scathing, vicious, and hilarious. “I saw more of the damn state than I ever thought there was of it. New Hampshire has always been cheap, mean, rural, small-minded, and reactionary. It’s one of the few states with neither a sales tax nor an income tax.” Then he takes the gloves off: “Expecting aid for the poor there is like looking for an egg under a basilisk. It places lowest nationally in what it spends on anything. The state encourages skinflints, cheapskates, shutwallets, and pinched little joykillers who move there as a tax refuge to save money.” I don’t imagine Mr. Theroux gets many calls to write copy for the New Hampshire Office of Travel and Tourism.

Nevertheless, the book contains more than snark and satire. The slow disintegration of Christian and Farol’s relationship is as nuanced as Portrait of a Lady by Henry James. While the premise is basic, Theroux still manages to create an ending filled with devastation and heartbreak. Ford faces irreplaceable loss, but whom he loses is unexpected.

http://blogcritics.org/books/article/book-review-an-adultery-1987-by/ show less

Pisces season wouldn’t be complete without a foray into the fantastical realms illustrated by Brian Froud, so I’m glad I scooped this strange little book by Alexander Theroux a while back and saved it until now. Ironically, the story is far less filled with faeries than I am used to from a Froud book, but it still holds a certain fey quality. Theroux tells a tale of a pair of star-crossed lovers that centres around the titular cloak given from one to the other, which later becomes a show more symbol for the plagues that wracked Europe during the Middle Ages. For all that the characters of the story contain a certain amount of comedy (quietly ridiculous names and funny turns of language abound), the tale of Master Snickup and his love Superfecta is darkly grounded in the harshness of the real world. Froud’s limited palette of naturalist colours suffuses the story with a grounded tone that carries our protagonists through their love affair, Superfecta’s forced marriage, and Snickup’s monastic exile with an essence that feels borderline Biblical. Mirrored by Theroux’s bardic voice that pushes together antiquated rhythms with the occasional modernist vocabulary, the resulting narrative is an exercise in strangeness that is still surprisingly successful. We are drawn in to the majesty of Master Snickup’s cloak and beguiled by the fey creatures who come to call him neighbour, and are left wondering at the fate of the now almost-invisible Superfecta as her place in the narrative is taken by her bombastic husband. The tale concludes in an epic fashion, with an inventive set of compositions by Froud, as Snickup’s death brings the Black Death to Europe and the village that he left is in turn brought to its knees. Is this the faerie story that I expected Froud to have helmed: no; but, the mythical overtones of Theroux’s carefully wrought morality tale that keep us one step away from reality were a strange delight, nonetheless. show less