Alexander Theroux
Alexander Theroux
Alexander Louis Therouxis an American novelist and poet whose best known novel is perhaps Darconville’s Catwhich 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 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. He is the brother of novelist Paul Theroux...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionNovelist
CountryUnited States of America
Will I have to use a dictionary to read your book?" asked Mrs. Dodypol. "It depends," says I, "how much you used the dictionary before you read it.
Where there is no style, there is in effect no point of view. There is, essentially, no anger, no conviction, no self. Style is opinion, hung washing, the caliber of a bullet, teething beads.
Book-publishing is all about politics. Agents, editors, which books will be puffed, which ignored, etc.
I hate injustice, I despise inequity, I condemn hypocrisy, I abhor the lack of reason.
There is no loneliness like that of a failed marriage.
To value the tradition of, and the discipline required for, the craft of fiction seems today pointless. The real Arcadia is a lonely, mountainous plateau, overbouldered and strewn with the skulls of sheep slain for vellum and old bitten pinions that tried to be quills. It's forty rough miles by mule from Athens, a city where there's a fair, a movie house, cotton candy.
Reviewing books is all about coziness. It is all of it a kind of caucus race. Women review women, Jewish writers review and praise Jewish writers, blacks review blacks, etc.
We all end up living secret lives. We create what we are willing to admire and admiring what we shouldn't confess to the secret ofour own sin, our own insufficiency, our own sadness. We all end up taking our secrets into the world and handing them over to strangers, only to realize it's often too late to claim them back. The very nature of time passing is sad beyond words. Memories mean they're gone.
Nothing is quite as bad as being without privacy and lonely at the same time.
It's true, you can never eat a pet you name. And anyway, it would be like a ventriloquist eating his dummy.