Word: theroux
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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...
...like the characters in a play, Theroux's people are most moving when they see most clearly that dead end which is merely a line on the map. For Lady Arrow, the revelation slips in for only a second when her idyllic picture of Hood's quaintly shabby neighborhood is shattered by the dusty characterlessness of the place. For Gawber, the perception of the true nature of modern decline is more annihilating than his imagined House-of-Usher-like holocausts could ever be. Catastrophe, Gawber realizes, is not "fancy's need for theater...
...sees the house Hood has bombed as "a low cloud touched by fire" against the night sky. The explosion is distant, unrecognizable, a theatrical spectacular for the eyes. Gawber knows the explosion itself doesn't matter since the life is already dead. "He put his hands to his eyes," Theroux writes, "and tried to stop the tears with his fingers...
...explosion is the most dramatic, violent gesture, but one which also bares its own death. In the end, theater reveals as much as it conceals so Hood turns to inaction which, he concludes, is the only "sure assault," a "celebration of security in itself." Within the claustrophobic confines of Theroux's terrifically written novel, Hood is left no choice but to take Lorna and her child and his by now much trusted companion, Murf...
...city is a deciever. In its depths anonymity is enjoyed. But Hood, running to the country, tells Murf that when the new family gets there they will only, "Smoke and tell lies." People cannot live without theater, Theroux's novel teaches. The fault lies not in our cities, but in ourselves...