Alexander Theroux

Alexander Louis Theroux^[1] (born 1939) is an American novelist and poet whose best known novel is perhaps Darconville’s Cat (1982) which was selected by Anthony Burgess’s Ninety-Nine Novels: The Best in English since 1939 — A Personal Choice in 1984 and in Larry McCaffery’s 20th Century’s Greatest Hits ^[2] He was awarded the Lannan Literary Award for Fiction in 1991 and the Clifton Fadiman Medal for Fiction in 2002 by the Mercantile Library in New York City.^[3] He is the brother of novelist Paul Theroux.

Life and career

Early Life

Theroux was born in Medford, Massachusetts, the son of Catholic parents; his mother, Anne (née Dittami), was Italian American, and his father, Albert Eugene Theroux, was French-Canadian. His mother was a grammar school teacher and his father was a salesman for the American Leather Oak company. Theroux graduated from Medford High School where he attended Boys State in Amherst, Mass., was class president in 1956, was a starting member of the Medford High School basketball team which went to the Tech Tourney in Boston two times. He entered the Trappist Monastery at St. Joseph’s Abbey in Spencer, Mass. in 1958, and then the Franciscan Seminary at Callicoon, N.Y. in 1960. He took his BA at St. Francis College in 1964, his MA in English literature in 1965 and his PhD in English literature, 1968 at the University of Virginia, where he won the Schubert Playwrighting Fellowship in 1967 and where he belonged to both the Raven Society and the Society of the Purple Shadows.

He spent a year on a Fulbright Grant in London, England in 1969. He was awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1974.

He has taught at the University of Virginia in 1968 as well as at Harvard University as Brigg-Copeland Lecturer from 1973 to 1979. He was writer-in-residence at Phillips Academy in Andover from 1979 to 1982. He taught at MIT from 1982 to 1987 and at Yale University from 1987 to 1991.

He has lived in England, Estonia, and France.

Literary Work

His first novel, Three Wogs, was written during a stay in London and was briefly considered for performance by BBC television by the actor, Roy Doctrice. His second novel, Darconville’s Cat was nominated for the National Book Award. He published the fable, Master Snickup’s Cloak, which was illustrated by Brian Froud in 1979. That was followed by several other fables, The Schinocephalic Waif and The Wragby Cars with illustrations by Stan Washburn in 1974. In 1987 he published An Adultery, and his longest, most satirical novel Laura Warholic was published in 2009. Several of his non-fiction books on color, The Primary Colors (1994) and The Secondary Colors (1996) were briefly on the best-seller list in Los Angeles. As a writer, he is known for his encyclopedic, highly-allusive style, and learned wit. “Literary broadcaster Michael Silverblatt once questioned Theroux’s “perverse appreciation” at how inaccessible his books are thought to be. Perhaps he sees his finely-wrought works of language and their lack of purchase on the culture as an apocalyptic indictment of that culture, of the intellectually (and especially verbally) careless society that could corrupt them. Were I him, I feel as if I’d want revenge: against lazy readers, against unengaged critics, against risk-averse publishers. But maybe, given what they’re all missing out on, he’s already taking it.” Critic Colin Marshall wrote, “Defending of his prose, Theroux once likened it to 'a Victorian attic.' He delivers more inner life than outer, more desire for vengeance than for anything else, and more sheer stuff per page — stuff you don't expect — than in any other novels.”^[4]

Alex Kurtagic reminisced, “At my wedding, my cousin Pierre remarked upon the fact that when in my teens I used to enjoy reading dictionaries and collecting rare, antique, and obscure words (a criterion that defines my collecting in other areas as well). Several such dictionaries consisted purely of such words, and one of them helpfully illustrated their usage with quotes by modern authors. One of the authors most frequently mentioned was Alexander Theroux, who wrote Darconville's Cat (1981) and whose last novel, Laura Warholic, was published in 2007, following twenty years of silence. I presented my wife with a copy of the latter two days before our wedding, and, having only recently begun reading it, she has been sharing with me selected passages, where the author's contemptuous wit has iridesced with particular brilliance.”^[5]

Theroux’s work has appeared Esquire, London Magazine, Antaeus, The New York Times, Harper’s, the Massachusetts Review, Art & Antiques, Mississippi Review, Review of Contemporary Fiction, Chicago Tribune, San Diego Reader,

His poems in The Yale Review; The Paris Review; Poetry East; Conjunctions; Graham House Review; The San Diego Reader; Exquisite Corpse; Denver Quarterly; The Literary Quarterly; Urbanus Magazine; Boulevard; The Michigan Quarterly Review; Rain Taxi; Review of Contemporary Fiction; Image; Helicoptero; Seneca Review; The Recorder; The Journal of the American Irish Historical Society; 3rd Bed; Fence; Anomaly; Subdrive; Sahara Sahara; Nantucket Magazine; Gobshite Quarterly; Gargoyle Magazine; Italian-American; Bomb; Provincetown Arts; Green Mountain Review; The Hopkins Review

Personal Life

Theroux is married to the artist, Sarah Son-Theroux, and they reside on Cape Cod. Sarah is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania and the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts, as well as Indiana University where she took an MFA. She was also a Fulbright Scholar in 2007-08 where she spent much of her time landscape painting.

Controversy

“Hateful, Hurtful, and Hellish” was an article by Alexander Theroux that was published on June 1, 1995 in the San Diego Reader in which he stated, “I was being charged with plagiarism in a work of non-fiction with less than 150 of about 80,000 words – in a book citing upwards of a thousand or more disparate quotations taken from film, literature, science, art, religion, cooking, painting, botany, music, etc. – which amounted to an offending .0001875 percent, according to the San Diego Reader, a periodical that published the full explanation that I composed within a week of the charges being made, when the New York Times, particularly editor Chip McGrath of the ‘Book Review’ cravenly refused to run it, although that it was that newspaper that on March 3, 1995 made the front-page allegation. “It was an ignominious moment in my life, to be sure, although the accusation, which was literally true but morally not -- since intention was not involved -- had a dirty provenance, to my mind, not only because it was a nonstory but because it involved but a few sentences.^[6]

Select Awards

Schubert Playwrighting Award (1967)

Fulbright Grant (1969-70)

Guggenheim Grant (1974)

National Book Award Nominee (twice)

Clifton Fadiman Medal from the Mercantile Library (2002)

Lannan Foundation Grant (1991)^[7]

Selected works

Novels

• Three Wogs (1972)
• Darconville's Cat (1981)
• An Adultery (1987)
• Laura Warholic or, The Sexual Intellectual (2007)

Fables

• The Schinocephalic Waif
• The Wragby Cars (1974)
• The Great Wheadle Tragedy
• Master Snickup's Cloak

Poetry

• The Lollipop Trollops (1992)

Non Fiction

• The Primary Colors (1994)
• The Secondary Colors (1996)
• The Strange Case of Edward Gorey (2000) (revised, updated edition 2011)
• The Enigma of Al Capp (1999)
• Estonia: A Ramble Through the Periphery (2011)

Critical studies

• Steven Moore, "Alexander Theroux's Darconville's Cat and the Tradition of Learned Wit." Contemporary Literature 27.2 (Summer 1986): 233-45.
• "Alexander Theroux/Paul West Number", The Review of Contemporary Fiction, Spring 1991

References:

External links

• Short Biography
• Interview in LA CityBeat
• Audio of Theroux reading from Laura Warholic
• Radio Interview with Michael Silverblatt, KCRW's Bookworm
• An interview with Alexander Theroux on The Marketplace of Ideas
• Checklist of Theroux's Writings

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