spellvexit7's reviews
145 reviews

Laura Warholic: Or, the Sexual Intellectual by Alexander Theroux

Did not finish book. Stopped at 17%.

Alexander Theroux's "Darconville's Cat" is one of my favorite books of all time, so I find myself searching for the reason why Laura Warholic was such a negative experience for me. Both contain dense prose, a world of exaggerated characters, challenging and fabricated words, and ponderous themes.

However, where Darconville's Cat explores both love and hope, casting it through varied and delightful styles of writing (poetry, dialog, checklists, sermons, even a trashy romance novel read aloud in a dorm room), Warholic is a long, steady, monotonous line stretching into the foreseeable future -- and always on a downhill slope. The book's constancy of hate and hopelessness is a relentless barrage to the reader, and the heartless denigration of Laura Warholic is chafing. In how many ways, and how many times, can Theroux describe her as ugly? His characterizations are still brilliant, and his mastery of language is humbling, but if there's nothing to enjoy, and barely a plot to cling to beyond who will deliver the next invective, there is little here to sustain me.

Being an enormous fan of Theroux, I really wanted to enjoy this book. If you loved this book, at least be comforted by the fact that my low rating of two stars is even more disappointing to me.

Content Warnings