What, No Drawings?

Bearing the jacket blurb from a dead man ("Brilliantly written," Norman Mailer), an 888-page novel mainly inspires dread from a potential book reviewer. Yet Alexander Theroux's Laura Warholic: or, The Sexual Intellectual (Fantagraphics, $29.95) just snagged a feature review in last Sunday's New York Times, which made the unread tome sit just a little bit heavier on my shelf. (For the record, it weighs four lbs.)

Alexander is one of the, ahem, less famous Theroux brothers, but kinship to Paul can't be the only reason the book got so much ink in a very skinny NYT holiday book section. Nor would that connection be enough, you'd think, for Fantagraphics to publish its very first novel--as opposed to graphic novel--at a size and density far removed from the comics world.

Theroux's last novel came out in 1987, and he's not what you'd call a widely published figure. ("Plot doesn't interest me in the least," he said in one interview.) Pushing 70, the Massachusetts-based author isn't in the McSweeney's demo, notwithstanding the dashing, out-of-date jacket photo.

(Fantagraphics/American Photographers)

Yet Theroux has previously written monographs for the Lake City publisher on cartoonists Edward Gorey and Al Capp. And, according to Fantagraphics publicist Eric Reynolds, "I think Gary [Groth, the company co-founder] admired his earlier novels. He and Gary became pals. I guess Theroux had been working on Laura Warholic for a while...and had just become fed up with New York publishers."

Theroux has no agent, which tells you something, and the editing process took some two years, explains Reynolds. "It's a big book, it's a big deal. We're a little out of our element in marketing a book like this." Yet the company expects to sell its print run of under 10,000 copies, hoping to reach some new readers in addition to Theroux's fans from the '70s and '80s.

Does this entry into literary fiction mark a new direction for Fanta? "Gary definitely wants to publish more novels," says Reynolds, who sees a certain consonance between Theroux's prolixity and Fanta tradition: "Weirdly, Theroux's prose has an almost cartoony quality to it that isn't wildly out of place." And the company has lately been republishing old novels (in paperback) by Jules Feiffer.

Which also suggests a different kind of lineage: Feiffer got rapped for misogyny in his script for the movie Carnal Knowledge. The comics world has often been criticized for its treatment of women. And the NYT's review of Theroux's new book reminds us how Theroux's last two novels were also essentially about an angry old white guy obsessing over a relationship gone sour with a younger woman. (If not an outright misogynist, he certainly comes across as a misanthrope in a fascinating recent interview in L.A. City Beat.)

But that, I'm sure, is a tradition Fantagraphics would rather not follow.