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An Adultery: A Novel

par Alexander Theroux

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1324206,732 (4.19)24
A young woman is brutally murdered at a seaside town in Devon England. She had been in a car with Fielding her older married lover. They had been drinking and making love and she had just stepped outside for a moment . Now she is gone victim of a mindless attack and Fielding must pick up the pieces - not only of his life but of his family and hers.… (plus d'informations)
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  chrisvia | Apr 29, 2021 |
I had for so long wanted to read a Theroux novel. I found this for $20 in a Wellington second hand bookshop (Ferret's - just poke your nose in).

This is a painstaking, thoroughly explicated story about the devastation wreaked upon a couple who are in adultery. If sin means "to be without", then "An Adultery" bares the void created by two people embarked upon it. Alexander Theroux has a wonderful and captivating dense style where all nuances to this tragic and dead-end story are carefully teased out and arranged.

This writing is one of the finds of my reader's life.
  ivanfranko | Mar 19, 2020 |
Alexander Theroux’s name returned to the news with the publication of Laura Worholic: or, The Sexual Intellectual. The 878-page work can be intimidating to readers, especially those unfamiliar with Theroux’s bombastic, encyclopedic, maximalist style. A gateway to his larger works would be An Adultery, written more than two decades earlier and less than half the length of Laura Worholic. The writing is as straightforward as the slip of a plot.

Painter Christian Ford loves Farol Colorado. Farol is married, and Christian is going out with Marina. Complications ensue. While the adulterous male narrator may be one of the most clichéd characters in American fiction, Theroux uses the stock characters to enter a world of deception, dissimulation, and denial. Between Ford’s introspections into the nature of relationships, he treats the reader to lengthy dissections on East Coast intellectuals, the arts scene, and New Hampshire. The residents of St. Ives, the small university town where he teaches art, “had no manners, only etiquette, and yet to emphasize correctness made every attempt whenever possible to drink port, play racquetball, sail boats, see art films, flambé food, affect ascots, collect paintings, cross their sevens, wear legible clothing, subscribe to concerts, hire help, and in general follow no fashion by which first hadn’t been established a precise – and identifiable – semiotic function.” When Theroux writes satire, it’s like reading a mad cross between François Rabelais and Evelyn Waugh.

Speaking through Christian Ford, his assessment of New Hampshire is no less scathing, vicious, and hilarious. “I saw more of the damn state than I ever thought there was of it. New Hampshire has always been cheap, mean, rural, small-minded, and reactionary. It’s one of the few states with neither a sales tax nor an income tax.” Then he takes the gloves off: “Expecting aid for the poor there is like looking for an egg under a basilisk. It places lowest nationally in what it spends on anything. The state encourages skinflints, cheapskates, shutwallets, and pinched little joykillers who move there as a tax refuge to save money.” I don’t imagine Mr. Theroux gets many calls to write copy for the New Hampshire Office of Travel and Tourism.

Nevertheless, the book contains more than snark and satire. The slow disintegration of Christian and Farol’s relationship is as nuanced as Portrait of a Lady by Henry James. While the premise is basic, Theroux still manages to create an ending filled with devastation and heartbreak. Ford faces irreplaceable loss, but whom he loses is unexpected.

http://blogcritics.org/books/article/book-review-an-adultery-1987-by/ ( )
2 voter kswolff | Aug 2, 2009 |
If you've never read any novels by Alexander Theroux, An Adultery is a good place to start and now is a good time. He surely and sorely deserves the recognition - while he's living. Ask people if they've read Theroux, and they will invariably reply - depending on their hearing and your enunciation - "You mean Walden?"

Alexander Theroux is to novelists what Adrian Monk is to detectives. He's brilliant, quirky, obsessive, unique... but, to some impatient readers, handicapped by a "maximalist" style - meaning his novels are crammed with detail, verbal pyrotechnics, and longueurs (digressions). Oh, and he has the effrontery to send readers to, God forbid, the dictionary more frequently than television has commercials. Dorp? What's a dorp?

However, one man's poison is another man's Japanese blowfish (in this instance a fish as large as a whale). But what a delicacy! When Theroux writes, the intelligence shimmers. It's as if his novels were ghostwritten by Salinger's Buddy Glass, who, the public and publishers be damned, just wants to tell every last truth about his beloved brilliant Seymour.

In An Adultery, you can sample Theroux's craft and craftiness - the insights, language, and narrative force - without his customary baroque embellishments. At a mere 396 pages, the novel is a straight forward recounting, by Christian Ford, painter/art teacher/intellectual, of his relationship with Farol Colorado, a suburban woman adrift in an uncommitted marriage. Bourgeois, she's literally a happy camper, but metaphorically anything but. Their relationship develops slowly ("No detail is too small" opines Ford the painter), from a casual affair, to a full blown romance, to a desperate addiction - for Ford. For Farol, it's an episode in the search for ...an endless husband?

The words of Ford serve to state an ironic theme of intertwined passion and detachment that also characterize the personas of the main male characters in Darconville's Cat and in Laura Warholic, The Sexual Intellectual, Theroux's longer masterpieces.

"I told Farol from the first I'd always wanted to be in love with someone who really loved me, someone whose courage allowed for the wholehearted daring love requires. I'd never once in my life been hugged to paralysis by someone totally committed to me without imponderables or conciliating doubt or lies. I've already mentioned as regards the emotion of desire having felt only the desire to purge it. I remember the charges of various classmates in my adolescent years of my being indifferent to girls, but that wasn't true. My imagination, so fixedly intent on them, actually became the more authentic intimacy and somehow rendered the reality of secondary importance."

In summation: All writers are mortal. Alexander Theroux is a writer. Alexander Theroux is mortal. Still, read this book, or better yet Darconville's Cat, or if you dare, Laura Warholic. Reality IS of secondary importance. ( )
4 voter Ganeshaka | Jan 13, 2009 |
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A young woman is brutally murdered at a seaside town in Devon England. She had been in a car with Fielding her older married lover. They had been drinking and making love and she had just stepped outside for a moment . Now she is gone victim of a mindless attack and Fielding must pick up the pieces - not only of his life but of his family and hers.

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