An Adultery

Be prepared, this is not easy reading. Theroux's writing style is packed full of convoluted and fantastically created sentences that require close attention and rereading. That being said, Theroux is a truly literary writer who dwells in the realm of introspection. His main character, tortured by love and full of misgiving, is led on a not-so merry chase by one of the most devious and conflicted females of literature. A truly remarkable depiction of a pathological love affair gone horribly awry.

This is a fascinating book. The narrator spends 400 pages dissecting in the most minute detail the progess, over several years, of an adulterous affair he is engaged in, an affair, he comes to realize, that was doomed from the start. The narrator, Christian Ford, is a talented painter of some renown. Interestingly, the very skills that contribute to his success as an artist, an intense appreciation of physical beauty, a hatred of the ugly and the sham, and an extreme intellection, are also the causes of his downfall. Dazzled by his mistress' beauty, he sees only intermittently and incompletely the poverty of her mind and soul. Repulsed by the appearance and manners of her sexless co-workers and her rather awful family, he alienates the very people who could have, had he courted their good opinion, enlightened him earlier to Farol's shortcomings. The book has an almost mathematical construction. The meetings of the two couples, John/Farol and Kit/Marina, deceiver and deceived, approach and retreat, pair and unpair, in the precise, measured steps of a minuet. Structurally, the novel recalls The Good Soldier. The characterizations, dialogue, psychological realism, and biting satire (the party scenes are unforgettable) all contributed to my enjoyment of this novel. I recommend it highly.

'Art is a way of responding to a world we are basically dissatisfied with.'So says the narrator of Theroux's third and final novel: An Adultery. It would seem to be the author's own view also,as anyone who has read Darconville's Cat will testify; nobody is spared the cruel, seemingly pathological tirades of this writer, with the exception, maybe, of vacant young women who sow beanbags and don't grumble. But, I love the style Theroux brings to his work - the wit and the lucidity - so I can forgive him his harshness, most of the time. An Adultery is a brilliantly involving novel, with so many observations and memorable lines that I can't begin to summarise it properly.But,if you come across this book, you should definitely read it.

A wonderfully excoriating novel from one of America's greatest authors. Ever. Though not as rich and encyclopedic as the better and better known Darconville's Cat, it is honed and tightly written, and at home among the several great American novels written in the last 30 years. Written in three parts, Adultery is constructed like a logical syllogism. This is the framework of its humor: the attempt of an overly intellectual and emotionally hermetic character to work out of the randomness of passion and persona an ornately mad logic. When he is happy (alone), he can paint (how he tells us so!) and he can deride (particularly when his talents are affronted with indifference). But what he cannot do is function in a properly human manner. As to be expected, the quality of the language and the vituperation in which it is often adorned is for its own sake worth the effort (and yes, effort is required) and worthy of the cited Frederick Rolfe. Who? "Do you read?"

I wonder why this was not a best-seller. As usual with this author you need to work at it staying with him. It is sometime repititious - or it seems so to the unenlightened like me