Laura Warholic
by Alexander Theroux
(Fantagraphics)
Theroux’s first novel to appear in twenty years concerns the reclusive Eugene Eyestones, a sex columnist for the magazine Quink, who becomes entangled with his corpulent, eructating boss’s equally repulsive ex-wife—the titular Laura Warholic, née Shqumb, a “homely, long-shanked, bony, spindle-nosed slattern of crucial need, low hopes, impoverished account, and undisguised but pathetic greed.” To Eyestones, Laura incarnates the vacuity of contemporary America: “Her trains of thought had no cabooses.” At nearly nine hundred pages, this behemoth of a book seesaws between romantic meditation and frothing jeremiad, and the relentlessly peacocking vocabulary (“obnubilation,” “strabismic,” “lutulence”) may test the reader’s patience. Still, the hypercerebral Eyestones is an indelible character, delighting in arcana (“The Etruscan word for love—flucuthukh—sounds like the act of regurgitation”) and musing, “Arson, kleptomania, compulsive gambling: are all rape?”
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