A review by george_salis
Laura Warholic: Or, the Sexual Intellectual by Alexander Theroux

5.0

George Salis, his wife Nicole, and Alexander Theroux in Cape Cod (10/4/22)


******An artillery of trigger warnings.******

Just as one doesn’t read Theroux for a Patterson-patterned plot in lieu of the wonder of words, you shouldn’t read him if you make the perennially stupid mistake of confusing a character’s actions and beliefs with that of the author’s, nor if you read books in the facile hope of becoming besties with the characters. And at the apex of a current cult of outrage in this cuntry, the censorious-saurus rears its empty head to gnash at anything offensive, which is everything, so if you haven’t already noticed, beware that this review adopts the bellicosity of the novel in question.

The term ‘shaggy monster’ is often used for any novel above, say, 500 pages, yet if only one novel deserves the label, it’s Laura Warholic, for it boasts digressive soliloquies on venomous hatred and idealized love and vice versa, lists of sex facts, historical curiosities, unsavory characteristics, freaks and phonies, as well as poems, song lyrics, and even sheet music. Like Ulysses, high and low culture and everything in between is used. Though it does have some nagging pleonasm and repetition, this did not significantly affect my reading experience. The novel is also similar to Infinite Jest not only in its shagginess but also in its merciless indictment of that great oxymoron (emphasis on moron) known as ‘American culture.’ All of it ending with the echo of a Greek tragedy, not unlike that far slimmer, more soft-spoken novel, The Great Gatsby.

While Darconville’s Cat is the epitome of titillating verbosity, a lingual animus of animosity and amore and more, Laura Warholic is less so, yet it still maintains a consistent flow of delightful words, such as ipsissimus, feuilleton, xeriscape, gletz, chemotaxis, actirastic, ostinato, cachinnation, geosynclinals, eutectic, aposematically, and azoic.

Speaking of the Cat, it’s often said that revenge is a dish served cold and, as cold as it is, it also hasn’t gotten cold, as it were, in the fired-up mind of Theroux because about 20 years later we get a hilarious cameo, Darconville’s lost cat Isabel Rawsthorne, who womanifests in a lesbian club called the Sewing Circle no less, a place infinitely more freakish than the medusan music venues in modern vampire movies. Amid this raucous scene of big and small racks screaming on the rack: ‘“I’m an acomovulvate,” shouted fat-assed Isabel Rawsthorne, a wallop-thigh-sized middle-aged greyball going up to another woman who looked like a tin-cup chimp.’ Rawsthorne is only one among alien throngs, for we get multiple humorous lists of the mostly grotesque-sounding club-goers, such as “amazons, cowboy girls, berdaches, women in lumber-jackets, dime bull-dykes, inertinites, female mastodons, kickboxing bansheettes, tribadists, succobovaients, gynoids, sex sufists, dandle queers, sexual variety artists, female infonauts, exchromonians, tinjinkers, bold she-males, old boy actresses, lumber-mothers, algogenesolagniasts, gregomulcts, mammathigmomaniacs, asylum-seekers, nerdoïdes, two-fisted falsettists, ambiguas, half-and-half figures, neurosthenic seek-arrows,” and much more.

The Sexual Intellectual of the novel’s subordinate title is Vietnam War veteran and poly-hobbyist Eugene Eyestones, who writes a column that explores the many faces and facets of sex and love. Eyestones, or E2 as some of his acquaintances call him, has a gyneghost in his past and a gyneghost in his future, Snow and Rapunzel Wisht respectively. Snow was a Vietnamese lover Eyestones had had, a Utopian relationship in which arguments were nonexistent and he reminisces how “there were so many sounds that made so little sense in the silences of night, except their souls.” Conversely, Rapunzel, as her name would suggest, is the unrealized fairytale, the beautiful mirage who works at a bakery. Rhapsodizing upon Rapunzel, Eyestones admires her from afar, taking it to hyperromantic if stalkerish levels, though “an undevout astronomer is mad” too. Yet this pure and pulchritudinous icon turns into something of a Necronomicon near the novel’s end. Caught between these two, Eyestones’s worship is curbed by the warship USS Warholic, the war alcoholic who is the titular Laura, conducting her scurvied skirmishes with Eyestones by using the hole in her head, likewise with others when she isn’t using the hole between her legs.

Laura is the embodiment of moronic America: debauched, plastic, ugly, incurious, delusional, pitiful, hypocritical, historically amnesic, pridefully ignorant, someone who has “the courage of her contradictions” and “always managed to see a tunnel at the end of the light.” Her unintelligence, if not anti-intelligence, is exemplified in a multitude of ways, including the fact that “her trains of thought had no cabooses” and “she needed a recipe to make ice cubes,” and anytime Eyestones utters an allusion or a generally lucid remark, she perceives it as an attack on the silly citadel of her dullard duck mind. Unlike many McDonald’s-sponsored Americans, however, she is disturbingly thin, fatuously skinny, a characteristic that the novel almost becomes unhealthily obsessed with, yet even Eyestones is in constant disbelief at her musculature or lack thereof. Thus she is something of an inverse ascetic, empty of everything those hungerkünstlers usually strive and starve for.

One of the thematic questions is the reason why Eugene is ‘with her’ at all, because it’s not even for the base excuse of bathetic coitus, for even when he had transient thoughts about such transactions, it came with the condition of an AIDS test, which she refused out of an irrational fear that echoes Schrödinger’s, not Darconville’s, cat, as though medically opening her box of “bushy scrubbing-brush pubes” would unsnatch one or more fatal diseases—Pandora’s pussy.

Read the full review in my Invisible Books column: https://thecollidescope.com/2020/07/05/laura-warholic-or-the-sexual-intellectual-by-alexander-theroux/