Word: theroux
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...THERE IS A FLAW in The Family Arsenal, it is that Theroux's map of London is too well marked. As in theater, nothing is what it appears to be. The apparent innocence of children becomes cruelty. Men are unmasked as women and women, men. Because Theroux insists on our acceptance of his nightmarish conventions from the beginning, nothing come as a real surprise. The connections, like the streets of the city, lead from one to the next...
...extraordinary new novel, The Family Arsenal, Paul Theroux's characters often are lost like this somewhere in the heart of the city. In fact, stumbling through England's dark, damp, declining metropolis becomes for Theroux like reading that dark, damp, declining novelistic form of sharp turns and blind alleys, the thriller. As in T.S. Eliot's The Wasteland, to which The Family Arsenal seems to invite comparison, the characters emerge at first as anonymous voices: a crook prowling a seedy riverside district; an accountant who refuses to yield his house to a rapidly deteriorating neighborhood, an aristocratic woman who collects...
...that important. The reporter's niggling question--Would Eliot have gotten in? Would Lowell?--is a ridiculous one. Lowell was refused by the Advocate when he comped many years ago; nothing aborts relentless talent. The option's selection committee includes Robert Fitzgerald, Monroe Engel, William Alfred, Alexander Theroux, John Batki and Jane Shore--and if you agree with Schorr's insinuation that they are incapable of responding to all types of writing, take a minute to check their remarkable and diverse credentials--and they do not judge a writer against another writer, but rather against the writer's own theories...
...this, though, the novel wanders in search of a missing profundity. Outside of their mock family ties, the characters have neither significant pasts nor coherent motives. The ranks of terrorists may indeed be filled with such hollow, existential punks, but a novelist can hardly let it go at that. Theroux himself cannot seem to decide whether their emptiness is contemptible or piteous. And since they contemplate violence as an end rather than a means, they lack the framework of a political cause that might define them...
...success of The Great Railway Bazaar (1915), Theroux's engaging travelogue by train, should create a wider audience for this novel than the author has enjoyed in the past. He deserves it. At 35, Theroux is that rarest of beasts, a young writer who is getting better with each book. Paul Gray