Love can be a miracle… And love can be a disaster…
Darconville, the schoolmaster, always wore black. The single tree, however, that shanked out of the front yard he now crossed in long strides showed even more distinct a darkness, a simulacrum of the dread probationary tree – trapfall of all lost love – for coming upon it, gibbet-high and half leafless in the moonlight, was to feel somehow disposed to the general truth that it is a dangerous and pagan notion that beauty palliates evil.
Darconville’s Cat by Alexander Theroux is a complex, convoluted, fabulous, dark and tragic love story – the best I’ve ever read…
It has been said by some and several that Desire wishes, Love enjoys, and that the end of one is the beginning of the other. That which we love is present; that which we desire is absent. But it was not so with smitten Darconville. He felt he would never know enough of her, present or absent, so little, in fact, he knew. His love only compounded his desire. And, as he wished to enjoy, he enjoyed this wish: his love to desire.
There is a cosmic love – love that rises above anything in this world. And there is love that tortures and incarcerates… And there’s no way to escape… And nowhere to run…
He seemed as he closed his eyes to be listening to something beyond him, as if in bizarre and unhallowed colloquy with his inner self, and then he turned, moving now around the ancient relics of the room, and in the falsetto modulations of that impossible voice began to recite in a cold drawn-out prolation the queerest litany ever heard:
“– from Eve and her quinces, libera nos, Domine
– from Jael, the jakesmaid,
– from Pasiphaë, the Cretan motherlord,
– from Venus Illegitima, goddess of unnatural acts…”
Arms that chain… Eyes that lie…
If a true and only love is unrequited it turns into a lethal affliction.a-hundred-of-the-best-novels228 s Paul Bryant2,275 10.5k

I failed, I failed, I gave up, I'm sorry. It was written in English, Jim, but not as we know it, and I flipped forward and it was all that. This book has too many brains and it frightened me in the way a sufferer from dementia must be frightened when they look at a clock and realise they no longer can tell the time. It's not a novel at all, it's a cruel and unusual punishment. Using oven gloves I placed it in a plastic bag then I double-bagged it and hid the whole thing in a dark recess of my cellar, shuddering the while. I couldn't throw it in the bin because I tried that the previous week and they refused to take it. novels too-avant-for-my-garde158 s1 comment Infinite Jen89 571

Dearly beloved, we are gathered here today to slice open the chests of our sacrificial victims with razor sharp obsidian blades, spill their blood on the temple altar, and offer their still-beating hearts to Huitzilopochtli, least darkness overtake the world. But first, let us propitiate the word-drunk bastard of a caribou whose dopaminergic system has been deeply influenced by sustained usage of a thesaurus as an extemporary Fleshlight. Whose mesolimbic pathway has been eroded by antiquarian verbation so thoroughly that one might look upon it as a veritable Gehenna of archaic remains. Whose Cortico-basal ganglia-thalamo-cortical loop channels twin beams of subatomic neologisms at relativistic speeds - Alexander Theroux. And in order to do so, I must first start with a question:

Have you ever, while imbibing a psychoactive Amazonian brew which holds a central place in healing rituals and popular syncretic religions, especially in South America (i.e. Ayahuasca) in a desperate attempt to ameliorate certain existential anxieties, experienced tertiary, (the second gift bearing lexical fruit in the form of long forgotten trivia dredged up from times spent marshaling my cadre of fellow anoraks during Academic Decathlon’s through dreadful mnemonic hexadecimal beatboxing), benefit in a veritable storm of insights into your personal relationships? In which you truly understood, for the first time, that novel expressions are practically infinite due to the recursive nature of language? Did this prompt you to resolve a long standing conflict by kicking down a door and saying, “If you insist on attempting to chicane me, in your beef-wit manner, certes be you should meet ends sanguinary with a bodkin in your Callipygian breech, you cockalorum, you brabble rousing grouse. Sepulchral in the herbary with all your suitors circumjacent wondering which doxy slew the dandiprat in his very own Demesne with such esurient viciousness. His fandangle hewed from him and the exceedingly modest scruple stuffed in his scrag to forefend another fizgig from becoming a gorgonized gudgeon and breaking her feminal upon it and inflicting other ghastly immedicable lacerations upon her very soul. Savage expiry of a kind only inflicted by jilted magdalens. Parfay, Reginald! You picaroon pismire I am no one’s quockerwodger, and I will reave your ever-loving guts from your body and hang you by them as recompense if you continue to treat me as such. This wonder-wench carries 1-Diazidocarbamoyl-5-azidotetrazole in her pouncet-box!” Did he then turn, already clutching the receiver of a telecommunications device, and nervously reply, “The police are on their way.” ?

Just 2.5 cubic millimeters (approximate volume; grain of rice) of neocortical tissue in your brain contains roughly one hundred thousand neurons, five hundred million connections between neurons and kilometers of axons and dendrites. These brain cells, which, taken singularly, comprehend nothing, are, as you’re reading this, working in concert to create a model of the world based on symbols whose light is battering photosensitive cells at the back of your ocular gelatin which are powerless before my semiotic sadism but to transduce these syntactical morphologies into currents which are propagating along the twin fuses of your optic nerves detcord (i.e. Detonation Cord consisting of a high-explosive (either PETN or RDX) core wrapped in a reinforced, waterproof, olive-drab plastic coating that transmits a detonating wave at a det-velocity of no less than 5,900 m/s which makes it suitable for synchronizing multiple charges, even when placed at different distances from initiation, which dovetails nicely with the idea of parallactic displacement between concepts vaguely apprehended, and those arriving with immediate clarity, creating a kind of perceived depth, a three dimensionality to the dynamic play of concepts etched into inert substrates, which is nothing short of spiritual in its most powerful instantiations) and breaching your brain with pressure waves which deform the elastic medium of your intellect’s electro-chemical stew with the force of their decrypted abstractions stirring your mind a ladle and leaving you forever changed.

I’m brought once again to one of my favorite quotes, in which Bradbury’s fictional character says: “This book can go under the microscope. You'd find life under the glass, streaming past in infinite profusion. The more pores, the more truthfully recorded details of life per square inch you can get on a sheet of paper, the more 'literary' you are. That's my definition anyway.” As it captures the parallel I’m attempting to make between the crumpled cortical sheet which enfolds the cerebrum, with its staggering internal complexities, and the internal structure evinced not only by the sum of Theroux’s efforts here, this book - of a length which lends itself to easy weaponization, of a weight and heft which thrums with bludgeoning ideations of literary violence - but by its parts as well, with each page so saturated by imaginative inlets that the Pauli Exclusion Principle cannot but collapse in deepest humiliation as you pass through the pervious prose the ectoplasm of a mortal dissolved by unrelenting pugilistic pedantry.

What’s the book about? Read the goddamn summary! Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego!
Is *that* what you wankers are looking for here? You must know by now you’re in the wrong place. But let me say this; it’s inconsequential. This could be about anything and it would be one of the greatest novels ever written on the strength of how creative it is. This is a book for lovers of language. It is not, I must emphasize, a book for reader’s seeking to be conveyed through a story on the back of transparent writing and traditional narrative flourishes. This is dense, experimental, playful, and concerned, above all else, with expressing things in the most beautiful way possible. The prose is primary, and it is fucking sublime.90 s MJ Nicholls2,086 4,358

A stupefying triumph of superhuman eloquence. A loved-up homage to the OED and Roget’s Thesaurus. A sacrificial offering to the Gods Rabelais, Sterne & Burton. A starry-eyed drooling hymn to amour, esp. with down-at-heel bimbos. A caustic and comic whirligig of varnished-to-perfection insults and Dickensian character-assassinations. A nuclear missile launched at the Southern United States. An enormous loving hug to all literature of significance pre-1800s. A novel bursting with prose so sublime, inventive, haunting and spiteful only quackshites would let it slip out of print. A novel to induce encomiums of stut-tut-tuttering adoration and spells of sp-sp-speechless drooling. A novel that makes you beg for more, and more, that makes you scream out in literary ecstasy for another 400, 600, 800, 1200 pages—more, more, more! That’s all I have to say, except the implied READ THIS. Holy bejesusing mercy, this is the real deal.

[My contribution to the explosive outpouring of Darconville’s Cat scholarship will be an exhaustive list (with definitions) of the deliciously recondite wordage Theroux uses in the book. Watch this face].
merkins novels tortured-artists ...more77 s Scribble Orca213 382


As a matter of honour...
Against the disease of writing [meviews] one must take special precautions, since it is a dangerous and contagious disease.
--AbelardDebating in the quiet chambers of the mind many hours how to review this book. Flinging ideas at the ever-patient partner about the dialectic of why a thought is what is thought, asking to be challenged because this book is seductive by nature and intellectual by design and how can a reader resist such a potent combination? Writing many opening sentences and discarding those, concocting a structure and burying it under a dense blanket of autobiographical rhetoric consigned to the bonfire of the vanity, and considering simply silence, as the excruciating riposte. At the last, it begins and ends with a list.

Read this book if you love:

--vocabulary (any adjective here would render me asinine);
--reading for (as near as you will find) perfect sentence structure;
--sustained voice (pages upon pages);
--puns in apundance, some clever, some from the school yard;
--labyrinthine caricature, sarcasm, invective and ridiculing the stereotypical foibles and follies of those you hold in contempt;
--discourse on the nature of romantic, heterosexual love;
--the logic of hate;
--the rationale of revenge;
--plunging into the abyss of anguish as the rejected;
--virtuous death;
--puzzles that you may or may not decipher;
--lists within books;
--books within lists;
--stories within stories;
--carnevalesque description;
--innovatively phrased aphorisms;
--discovering a source for literature you have yet to read;
--observing a writer's joy in displaying her/his deep knowledge of the literary tradition to which he/she lays claim;
--clues within the text which lead you to obscure knowledge which is valuable the more because of its obscurity;
--re-reading;
--uncovering forgotten and deserving authors; and
--living authors.

Avoid this book if you would:

--define satire as:-
1. Criticism of behaviour with the intent to educate an audience and foster social change;
2. Irony, used humorously, to illuminate the behaviour criticised; and
3. Connotation, to infer the verdict against the criticised behaviour without explicit statement;--prefer writers who reject sexism in both their writing and their public persona;
--insist on finding misogyny (either vindicated or venerated);
--feel offended that the enormity of misogyny is trivialised via the creation of a character which serves not the purpose of villifying misogynistic behaviour, but to satisfy a writer's grudge; and
--expect a writer to maintain authorial distance from her/his protagonist and antagonist.

Read these :

Megha "They don't write [books] this anymore."
Garima The cause of it all - "How I loved this book!"
Nathan "N.R." "Onanism is the terrible core of creation" and other notes of interest.
Paul Bryant The Lone Ranger lost in the wilderness (it was the cat in the cellar).
Ali "lol" For the updates.
MJ Nicholls A bunch of sentences starting with A for Alex.
Stephen M Disquisition on the moral philosophy of a Cat and its Keeper.
Rob Mayhap misogyny but mystery delights.
Anthony Vacca Two sides of the same heart.
Geoff Wilt Soul saviour.
Jonfaith "...an obstinate macroce[p}hallic umbrage..."
Other

Read these links:

http://www.bookforum.com/interview/8796
http://www.bookslut.com/features/2008...
http://www.themillions.com/2010/06/li...
http://vunex.blogspot.com/2008/06/mon...
http://www.comicsreporter.com/index.p...
http://www.dalkeyarchive.com/book/?fa...defies-a-shelf66 s Nathan "N.R." Gaddis1,342 1,458 Read

Recent bloggish-review of The Cat in which some of you good goodreaders get yourselves quoted and a tip o' the hat to someone [sic] who looked up every godsdamn oversized $10 word.

“Darconville’s Cat”: The Power and Glory of Vengeance Writ Fantastically Large, by Stuart Mitchner, 21 Mar 2013: http://www.towntopics.com/wordpress/2...



________________
My review will be a bit delayed, ly until I revisit our Spellvexit story.

Meanwhile, the vocabulic efforts of MJ, Megha, Ali, and myself is available under My Writings, a not-thorough annotation of big words and Therouvian word mastery: http://www.goodreads.com/story/show/3...

If you find yourself in difficulties about locating a copy, which should not be a difficulty just yet until Ali's flaming therouvianism gets truly out of hand and dries up the entire non-collectors market, there is what should be a prime bit of therouvian word and language love forthcoming in February 2013, The Grammar of Rock: Art and Artlessness in 20th Century Pop Lyrics.

_______________
To my merriment I have not run across the word ‘masturbatory’ in any goodreads review of Darconville’s Cat, although we well know this word has popped up in of other Theroux books and books by other very smart people. To call an author of Theroux’s talents ‘self-indulgent’ or ‘masturbatory’ is the abyss of stupidity. Onanism is the terrible core of creation:

Away with a prose squeezed free of the real! The shallow jealousies he’d felt low in his soul ate through to his conscience, shot through with self-indulgence and merciless egotism where the difficulty of writing--even the attempt--had its origins. He had committed, he saw, Durtal’s sin of ‘Pygmalionism’: corruptly falling in love with his own work while bearing a grudge against anything that went against it. Onanism! Onanism and incest! It was a new sin, the exclusive crime of artists, a vice reserved for priests of art and princes of gesture, the father violating his spiritual child, deflowering his dream, and polluting it with a vanity that was only a mimicry of love.” (p157).


__________
A Theroux Primer from The Millions; an essay by Colin Marshall which covers all four Theroux novels. Highly recommended for an orientation within Therouxville.

___________
Interview with Steven Moore from
Review of Contemporary Fiction Spring 1991 regarding Darconville’s Cat and An Adultery.

_______________
Audio interview with Michael Silverblatt on Bookworm.

____________
My copy:
Purchased 03 November 2011 at Powell’s City of Books hot off the Buy Table for a mere $6.95. It is a 1st edition/ 2nd printing hardcover, not inscribed; 1st printing having p483 a dot-matrix/checkerboard rectangle, 2nd a solid black rectangle (altogether now, “The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman”). Red speckle/spray on the bottom edge apparently indicates having-been-remaindered, but dust jacket is not price-clipped. The jacket is in rather a tattered state with price tag gunk residue on the lower right corner of the front. An aborted reading by a previous possessor of this volume is indicated by underlining (in black ink) on the first few pages.

The following words are underlined:
p1 -- imperscrutable
p2 -- gulsar
p3 -- skite
p4 -- archistrateges
p5 -- mundus
-- grimoire
-- demulcents and rubefacients
p6 -- (none)
p7 -- . . .ther, though that, than on the invest. . .
-- . . .tle boy whose earliest memory was of trying to pick up pieces of moonlight that had fallen through the window onto his . . .
-- in the left margin, accompanying the above two underlinings, “?”
p8 -- (none)
p9 -- Spellvexit
fin de la lecture

The Committee for Cataloguing Underlinings and Annotations would to apologize for peremptorily entering “fin de la lecture" into the record. Further instances of Underlining and Annotating have been discovered subsequent to its prior report.

p84 -- quopped
p94 -- kaleidogyns
p100 -- dysphemism
p101 -- . . . a small batrachian in a hide. . .; in margin is written: “pompous prattle!”
p106 -- Scaurous
p108 -- below the final words of the chapter, “’I love you!’”, is written: “Boo!”
[What kind of reader would make notations “pompous prattle” or say “Boo!” to a character’s discovering his being in love?]

The Committee acknowledges that the condition of this copy of Darconville’s Cat is such that it may well have been previously read in its entirety. Our earlier judgement concerning the despair in reading of a prior reader may well have been simply mistaken. The Committee, as a preliminary finding, would recommend that, even for book buyers in the habit of buying only clean, unmarked books, consider purchasing a well marked, annotated and underlined exemplar, being as this novel lends itself well to entertaining previous readings.


______________
"Nothing exceeds excess." -- Crucifer


______________
"Anthony Burgess chose Theroux's Darconville's Cat as one of the greatest novels of the 20th century. It contains multitudes. It is a story of love, obsession and revenge -- and it is a story and celebration of the life of the English language -- all styles of writing and demotic species are incorporated in its vast body (I speak of the book at its near Proustian bulk, and of the language). And, it is as funny as anything you'll ever read in your life." - Ben Waugh.

“In his dazzling, invective-filled novel Three Wogs, Alexander Theroux noted (in an afterword of sorts) that he has ‘a very amplified prose style,’ and he spoke of ‘the leisure, the languor, necessary to art.’ It's clear that the language Mr. Theroux has employed in his own books is closer to that of such writers as Dickens, Sterne and Corvo than to the minimalist offering of his contemporaries; and [all his work] demonstrates a love of verbal pyrotechnics and an instinct for the grand. In the same essay quoted at the beginning of this review Mr. Theroux wrote, ‘Writing is life become art, not simply the random copy made out of one's dishwatery day or diary or panfurious whims. It selects, must do it beautifully.” - Michiko Kakutani.

“What's best about Darconville's Cat is the advantage Theroux takes of the tradition of The Book, the large storehouse of knowledge such as The Bible, Gargantua, or Moby-Dick. Elaboration is all. The reader who doesn't care for a chapter on college girls' late-night rap sessions or the dialogue in verse between Alaric and his beloved Isabel or a classical oration by Crucifer can skip ahead or back without losing essential continuity. There are learned disquisitions on love, hate, and the human ear; wonderful odd-lot lists; Shandyian japes such as a one-word chapter and a page of asterisks; and Swiftian renderings of small-town southern life, ranting religionists, academic foolery, and much more. The parts are all related but don't disappear into a whole, into an illusion of reality.

“Darconville's Cat is boring and brilliant, both puerile and profound, self-indulgent and often cruel. Theroux lacks Thomas Pynchon's interest in this century and the popular humor of Gilbert Sorrentino's Mulligan Stew, the novel Theroux's most closely resembles. ‘Madness,’ Darconville says of a book very the one in which he is a character. But that excessive anomaly of the 1950s, William Gaddis's The Recognitions, Darconville's Cat should find a dedicated following, readers with an appetite for ambition and literary aberration, for a prodigal art that, in Darconville's world, ‘declassifies.’” - Tom LeClair .
100-mccaffery-read after-joyce alexander-theroux-completioniziert ...more62 s Megha79 1,132


Gosh! What a book!
They don't write them this anymore.

Most of us have come across books that we adored and worshiped despite their flaws. There are those long books with some boring portions we are willing to forgive. There are books which we find more admirable than enjoyable. There are those where we have to give ourselves a pep-talk to make the difficult journey so we can eventually find the treasure.

The Cat demands none of that forgiveness and apology. A pure pleasure to read - from cover to cover. There was not a moment when I wished it to be over, not even when it really was over.

The Cat is full of riches - from comical satire to sublime emotions to abyssal darkness, all brought to life via eloquent and exquisite prose. The Cat is a tale of love and hate and of Darconville's obsession with love. Revolving more around Darconville's interior life than exterior, his consciousness and brooding thoughts slowly seep into the pages. His intensity is difficult to ignore, and at some point you find yourself living inside Darconville's mind, thus bringing him alive in your mind. All the while, you can imagine a quiet, subdued atmosphere, perhaps dimly lit by candles, with an old-timey smell. There is something haunting about it.

The narrative rises in a crescendo with the entry of the antagonist, Dr. Crucifer. Despite his brief appearance, he easily joins the ranks of the most memorable characters to be found in literature. He contributes what must be the vilest and most intense tirade against the woman kind I have (and will?) ever come across. He is the keeper of The Misogynist's Library, the catalog of which is long enough to occupy 10 pages. Not impressed? Here, take this 20 page long formal oration on the subject. Not convinced yet? Here are 20 more pages of The Unholy Litany chanting the names of women he wants his soul to be saved from. And if all of this isn't enough, he gives you 10 pages worth of never-before-heard-of ways to torture and kill a former girlfriend. This is a character fully wrapped in darkness, the kind that can make a reader uneasy. But somewhere he crosses over from serious to ridiculous, to the point of appearing comical.

Between Darconville and Crucifer, there is a satirical portrayal of the American South. There are numerous peripheral characters, often painted as hilarious caricatures. There are excerpts from literary works, prefacing each chapter. There is wit and scholarship at display everywhere. And there is that luscious prose (swoon!).

I could read this book and rate it 5+ stars, for the prose alone. It's a great celebration of the English language. Pick any adjective of your choice for the best prose you've ever read, and it will, without doubt, be fitting here. It is the kind of writing that can cause you to drool, and render you speechless, rapt in admiration. There are many a sentences that make you want to read them aloud. Sure, he uses plenty of archaic words you've never heard of before, but it certainly isn't about showing off. It see it more as being about using the perfect word. There is a certain flow to Theroux's writing and despite the presence of difficult words, nothing about his sentences sounds out of the place. One can easily read through without knowing the meanings of the arcane words and still be fully engrossed. Whether you decide to read it with or without the knowledge of the word meanings, be sure to enjoy the sound and the rhythm of Theroux's writing. Immerse yourself in his words and let them wash over you.

________________________________________

Book-jacket Trivia: The portrait of Darconville on the cover was painted by Theroux himself.

________________________________________

Vocabulary: If you are reading or planning to read Darconville's Cat, you may find the following link useful:

http://www.goodreads.com/story/show/3...in-goodreaders-we-trust kickass mj-killed-kenny ...more62 s GeorgeAuthor 17 books294



Made another dream of mine come true and met the man, the myth, the legend: Alexander Theroux. He and his wife were very kind and hospitable. We ended up talking for 2 and a half hours about many different topics, including his meetings with Jorge Luis Borges, his thoughts on Infinite Jest and his correspondence with David Foster Wallace, his time as a Trappist monk, his twin daughters, what he’s currently writing, regret, The Leftovers, and much more. He also loves the idea for my third novel.

Alex said I’m the only one who has seen and taken photos of his workspace, a dark cloister with teetering towers of books this side of Alaric Darconville (speaking of which, he still lives in the home in which he wrote Darconville’s Cat, and he greeted me with a cat under his arm, no, not Spellvexit but surely some incarnation of that literary kitty.). These photos, as well as others, including his Marilyn Monroe collection, will be available exclusively to Patreon supporters soon.

They say not to meet your idols but meeting both Alex and Joseph McElroy turned out to be significant and frankly surreal experiences that were enriching in different but overlapping ways. Two trips of a lifetime back to back. I’m very grateful.

And yes, a piece will be written about this visit but probably not until late next year as I need to put the finishing touches on Morphological Echoes.

***

“Art creates the Eden where Adam and Eve eat the serpent.”

Darconville’s Cat is literature incarnate. Half of it could be bound with human skin, the other half with the fatty stools from a cystic fibrosis tryst, glazed with lovejuice jizzum. For the book is the body and the pages are the brain, crackling with emotional intellect and intellectual emotion.

Read my full review here for free: https://thecollidescope.com/2020/03/0...

I interviewed Alex here: https://thecollidescope.com/2020/07/0...invisible-books74 s Lee Klein 830 915

Twenty years ago I worked in an antiquarian bookstore in Boston (JP), wrapping and shipping rare books and lugging mail bags to the post office for $7/hr plus side benefits learning at least the titles of so many interesting books, running the side of my hand along the signatures of so many immortal writers, being introduced to Shunga, and experiencing the sort of restlessness and depression that comes from working in a generally closed-to-the-public antiquarian bookstore located in a place where it's usually cold from October through June. I worked with an older guy (35) who spent his day at a computer describing and pricing stacks of books. He loved incunabula and fishing and dreamed of hosting a TV show in which he fished and talked books (their form, not so much their content).

One afternoon I asked this older bibliophile for suggestions on what to read. He was only ten years older than I was but already seemed more or less middle-aged -- he was graying and wore a jacket and tie to work every day and had quit drinking and found God after surviving immersion in the '80s East Village NYC poetry scene -- he occasionally mentioned some connection, possibly amorous, to Ginsberg. He suggested Elias Cannetti's Auto-da-Fé, John Kennedy Toole's A Confederacy of Dunces, Thomas à Kempis's The Imitation of Christ, and Alexander Theroux's Darconville's Cat. I acquired three of these four. Read half of the first one but wasn't into it, read all of the second one but wasn't into it, read nearly none of the third one because I didn't want to quit drinking and find God, and couldn't find the fourth one at the time.

Years later, I found an inexpensive first-edition hardcover, I'm pretty sure for $1 at a thrift store, of Darconville's Cat that included this letter from the publisher: https://ibb.co/h2V4UG -- the Cat was there on my shelves for years, always enticing, always something I stayed away from, maybe because I wasn't all that into the bookseller's other recommendations. On here of course I encountered so much love for Theroux that my eye always returned to its spine when I wondered what to read next, but not until mid-November 2017 did I finally start it -- and find myself pleasurably surprised by how much I loved it.

Oh I should have read this twenty years ago, I thought, really enjoying the ridiculously high-flung style juxtaposed with the simplest teacher/student love story set in rural Virginia spatially and doubly dated temporally in what felt the early 1970s but also a sort of Dickensian 19th century thanks to the scrim of language o'er it all. The vocabulary of course revealed delights when I looked up the words and so often found them not only not neologisms but also perfectly descriptive. The characters were finely drawn and ridiculous but memorable. The whole thing fizzed along through its first 200 pages as love bloomed and the figure of Darconville, so out of place in the place he found himself, his plight expressed in such high language, negotiated new love and old-school academia.

But then what happened? The story began to turn as the relationship with Isabel became inevitably complicated. There was a stint in Charlottesville so the author could describe Charlottesville and its inhabitants, a stint in London so the author could describe London, more of a sense of estrangement as Darconville tried to capture the feeling slipping from him via marriage, and then a stint at Harvard so the author could describe Cambridge and introduce a nefarious concoction known as Dr. Crucifer, so perfectly named, a diabolical misogynist eunuch, but ultimately for me where my attention and affection for ye olde Cat pretty much died out.

By page 450 to 500, with 200 more to go, I just couldn't stick with Crucifer's rants and I didn't really believe in or care for Darconville or Isabel or any of it. The story seemed too simple, too stereotypical, dressed up in excessive language and ideation and reference in a way that I had little patience for. I skimmed for plot points and paragraphs that didn't repel my eyes with thickets of fireworks. my reading experience of Gravity's Rainbow, the book seemed to transform into a hose of prose opened all the way and aimed right between my eyes. In moderation, revved-up language is all the rage, but over 700 pages, in this, I found my experience of the reality of the situation and the characters and their emotions undermined. I tried to commit to extended sittings and be patient with the book but I found myself falling asleep or not really caring or discovering the delights (I certainly wasn't looking up words anymore) when I did keep my eyes open. My rating therefore mostly reflects my love for the opening 200 pages and my affection up to page 400-- I ultimately failed the final 300 pages, despite Dr. Crucifer's efforts to bring me back into it.

The book is a celebration of excessiveness -- and I partied with it up to a point, after which I started to fade and wanted to switch to water (I kept eyeing a collection of Richard Yates stories) and head home. I don't think I'll get to my copy of Laura Warholic or, the Sexual Intellectual anytime soon, although I am glad to have a better sense of Mr. Theroux and can cross the Cat off from the list of well-loved masterpieces recommended to me long ago that I can't really say I unconditionally loved.50 s Garima113 1,904


As the world goes by, with actions and reactions taking place at a light speed, I grant myself few blissful moments of solitude in the lap of nature, where I’m partial towards the splendor of our empyreal sky. The playfulness of various celestial bodies fascinates me by their resplendence and teases me by their yonder charm. One of the phenomena which I long to see is that of Earthshine. The lovely sight is not only one of the few treasures I keep in my small box of happy memories, but it signifies something very special in terms of a promise of completeness, brightness and most importantly, beauty. The exquisiteness of this view is something that comes closest, metaphorically to express the beautiful writing in Darconville’s Cat.

I, for one, haven’t read anything this. It’s a rarity of rarities, of which there is a huge dearth in the world of literature. On one hand, I was completely besotted by Theroux's prose and on the other; almost jealous of his talent by repeatedly questioning myself as to how on earth such heavenly writing is even possible. If there is a thing magical pen that exists in this world, then Sir Alexander is definitely its worthy owner and the magic begins from the very first page of this book.

The simple and old school premise of the story starts with Alaric Darconville, a former student of priesthood, a writer and later a school teacher at Quinsy College for girls in Quinsyburg, a fictitious town in American South, which Darconville detest to almost hateful extent. In college, he fell in love at first sight, with one of the students, Isabel Rawsthorne, who reciprocated but later betrayed him. Darconville, all this while experienced the supreme ecstasy of being in love, the agony and pain of betrayal, bouts of depression, obsession with love, giving in to hatred and finally turning vindictive.

This unexceptional plot is elated to such an exceptional level of literary feat primarily because of Theroux's writing, that anyone should feel lucky to read it. There are times when I feel guilty of not having read many of those popular classics, stories of which many readers have on their tips. And then I read books DC, and feel a rush of almost smug pride. Recently this book has garnered some modest popularity here and many, I also want from others to make a nice, comfortable place for this cat in their library but at the same time I admit, that there is also a sense of possessiveness developed in all these days of reading it that some notorious corner of my heart suggests that let it remain obscure. As clueless I ventured into reading this presumable word beast, I found myself immersed in it, by connecting with it at both emotional and deeply personal way. The nasty games of Love, when the definition of both being in love and lost in love lies in the rhetoric question of: What else do I need in this world?

The display of myriad emotions is handled with such vividness, that the effect is almost reading a three-dimensional novel. About dynamics of love, it says:
On one hand there are temporary beings whom we love but who are ever changing, and beyond them there is the eternal object of love itself which is incorruptible, permanent, and ideal. And yet it is not only through the former that we can take cognizance of the latter, we would, without the former, actually have no idea of the latter, the imperfect relative giving us our only idea of the perfect absolute, and we advance by the dangers of delay, shipwrecked from a boat to know the sea, where mildness, glassed in the fragments of storm, must be discerned. Time is the evil, usurping the semblance of eternity. Your prayer, your disappointment, are the same.
On hate, it says:
One hates in order to rob from another a life stolen from himself, for hate not only hates what it lacks, but lacks what it loved, and in its grip—an oxbrake in which you’re completely shod of mercy by the very creature you'd swiftly gore to pieces if but freed—the only possible pleasure attains to its secret illusions and intentions of vengeance.
Agreed this is a word drunk novel but that in no way interrupts the flow of narrative. This is as erudite as erudite can get but at the same time, it’s hugely interesting and accessible. Almost half way through the book, one would experience everything from some exquisite poetry, the diary entries, exhaustive lists to social commentary on racial discrimination, religion, vernacular, etc etc.

The story reaches its artistic pinnacle with the entry of one of the most memorable character in literature, Dr. Abel Crucifer. He is Darconville’s alter-ego, a retired Professor of Harvard and dyed-in-the-wool misogynist. His misogynistic ramblings would be enough to last anyone their lifetime. He assumed Darconville as his possible heir or an accomplice because of Darconville’s lineage. This is where one can witness, what Theroux is capable of. With bewitching display of encyclopedic knowledge and use of grandiose vocabulary, in words of Steven Moore: This novel celebrates the finest example of learned wit ever produced in American literature. He justified the usage of archaic words and neologism by Theroux by commenting that No word is too arcane, too obsolete for his use and chose them because of their precision and color. Apart from all the great things, this book is extremely funny. For eg. This excerpt is from one of the books Dr. Crucifer wrote in order to verbally kill a Philosopher
Then sometime about 428 B.C. Socrates, patron saint of equivokes, fartwhooshed onto the scene with his little grab-bag of famous questions, the type of which, when, perversely became answers. I look back to Maieuticville and see a self-absolving bore, an inkle-beggar with his pockets full of Crito’s money, a farting whaw-drover with ears a question mark and more gall than bladder.
Trust Me! No one would to get insulted by Sir Alexander ever. He would take a part of your anatomy and form a detailed analysis of your personality in such a way that would even make you laugh at yourself. Through Crucifer, one can witness the extent of darkness of a human soul when that very soul is sold to Devil and through Darconville, one can observe the social and emotional anguish developed as a result of being part of a society. The way he observe and describe the girly gossips, the ways of people of Fawx Mt. and various other digressed but entertaining things are a treat to read.

The relentless misogynism can also raise question of author’s relation to this vice. In this book itself, the narrator says: Every book is about its author. This book is no different because it’s partly an autobiographical novel. Theroux suffered the same fate as that of Darconville when he fell in love with a Southern girl, who told him that he talks a book, eventually deserted him and baited Do your worst and the result was Darconville’s Cat. So, he may or may not be a misogynist, but such judgment should not be passed on the basis of this novel.

This book must be having some scope of criticism, but I don’t see myself in possession of that level of intellect to criticize it in any way. Anthony Burgess, although included it in his list of best 99 novels published in English from 1939 to 1984, raised some questions about this book in the year of its publication while hinting at the commercial and conventional aspect of novel writing.

http://books.google.co.in/books?id=_O...

As for me, this is a perfect novel which has spoiled me for all the books I will read in the future. Every alternate page has one or more quotable quotes, that one would wish to use at some point in life. With influences Rabelais, Joyce, Nabokov or a more obscure Edward Dahlberg, the voice of Theroux is very much his own. He might appear as a bit distant at first but shall soon dazzle you with his magical writing and you'd become friends with him or more aptly, his students, with a belief and grit that you won't won’t let him disappear but rather make him and his writing immortal. This is the book to read, to cherish and to treasure. The bittersweet surprises of the world and words. How I loved this book! channeling-challenge favorites funny-funsome-sarcasome ...more49 s Geoff444 1,316

Fantastic of Darconville’s Cat exist on this site, browse through and “” them all, but they are by people other than myself. I can’t bring myself to push many buttons or keys or whatever in coherent succession today, so those will have to do. This is one of the great novels, though, one of the GREAT NOVELS, kin to Lolita and Madame Bovary, that was my impression, and if you love language as this living, loving, lovely, saving, graceful, eloquent, hilarious, dark, all-creating, all-encompassing thing, one of the only things that makes us not-animals, one of the only things that lets humanity even approach divinity, one of the only things that can’t be stripped from us, turned into a commodity to use against our interests, owned by others, devalued and defamed by market forces, something that only dies when the universe dies, something that can’t be used to beat prisoners or assemble weapons, something that can be employed to cause pain but can also just as well and even better act as a shield and counterattack against those causing verbal treachery, something that is in fact yours and yours alone to do with as you please, but that at the same time allows you access into the very minds and hearts and secret worlds of everyone else around you, the only something that allows you to approach reality in any way, approach another being in any way, approach a god or a demon in any way, approach a color or a texture or a scent in any way that means anything, something that makes love and hate exist, you should read this immediately. Drop what you’re reading and read Darconville’s Cat today. Or don’t. Finish what you’re reading and read it next. You should pay attention to Alexander Theroux. You should turn off your devices and go to museums and libraries and look at dead things and go breathe outside air and touch other people. You should be okay with being still and silent. You should be okay with being overwhelmed by the immensity of your vacant interior. A chaos of thoughts are within you, you should be okay with that, to let them be and boil and rise. Human life is very funny and very tragic and very ugly and very beautiful and very calm and very terrifying. When all is said and done, it ends- so whose side are you on when the deal goes down? How have your hours gone down the drain? Read read read and think. Think think think and make. Temper your ecstatic energy into lasting works of art or acts of beneficence. There’s lots of things humans can make and actions we can undertake that aren’t destructive. Dreams say, view, create, shadow leads. You can make something beautiful out of your life or you can do the opposite, which is vanish. I direct you now to of Darconville’s Cat by Anthony Vacca, Megha, Nathan “N.R.” Gaddis, Scribble Orca, Garima, Stephen M, Rob, Jonfaith, MJ Nicholls, David Lentz, and anyone else you damn well please who doesn't happen to be my Goodreads friend but has written a review of this book. If you are one of those hucksters who is always seeking out “The Great American Novel”, thus to chain it up and show it around in a cage a freak at the fair, I give you another candidate for your pointless chase.favorites infinite-books43 s The Dazzling Stranger121 203

Darconville’s Cat is a story of Love and Hate, of revenge, memory and revelation. And Art. And a Cat(holicism).

Early on, within the high style of Darconville’s Cat —a style evoking Cervantes, Rabelais and Sterne— our protagonist Alaric Darconville, an English professor at a Virginia women's college, pores over a letter from his newfound love, Isabel. His analysis of her handwriting echoes the iconic opening sentence in Nabokov's Lolita with its obsessive, compulsive fetishisation. Through his examination of the ascenders and descenders of letter forms, flourishes and embellishments, Darconville foreshadows the author’s deep and unfathomable love of language.

Darconville’s Cat is itself a love letter to writing, language and prose style. It is scythe–shaped–grin inducing work of genius. It’s the most extravagant satirical word feast; a kaleidoscopic-verbalistic-riotous-Maximalist novel. It is disturbing, mesmerising and beautiful, divine and poetic. Every page is rich with exquisite sentences and stylings of spectacular creativity and written with verve and linguistic flair.

Within its bonkers and brilliant syntactic structure, are:
• Arcane epigraphs
• Dreams
• Essays
• Lists
• Literary allusions
• Parodies
• Poems
• Prayers
• Quotes
• Songs
• Sermons
• Speeches
• Travelogue
• Nightmares
Et al.

I am besotted with the sentence craft, but it is also the peculiar and entertaining personalities in the story that enthral. Amongst the myriad daft named characters is Dr. Crucifer. As Love's treachery scorches Darconville’s world, he meets this vampiric and repugnant eunic, Dr. Abel Crucifer, a retired Harvard Professor, who feeds on Darconville’s failure in love and relentlessly saturates him in verbalistic misogyny. He steadily erodes Darconville’s residual spirit. Darconville never loses his repugnance for Crucifer, realises he risks becoming a Crucifer himself, but slowly, after relentless onslaughts of Crucifer’s rambling rhetoric, agrees revenge against Isabel is inescapable and essential to end his suffering.

Darconville’s Cat is teeming with rich philosophical, historical and mythological references. The density of knowledge and detail is invigorating and compelling, and oftentimes lifted me up, twirled me around and spun me out in its wordilicious elliptical structure. It reads an incantation and I fear, on reading it I may have inadvertently been reciting dark sorcery and casting spellz.

'It is only when you have grazed on the lower slopes of your own ignorance, and begun to understand the great vistas of non-knowledge that you have, that you can claim to have been educated at all.' – The Hitch
37 s Edward420 428

"That night God and Satan fought long hours for his soul. And God conquered. It was only left to be determined which of the two was God. "

Thus we bear witness to the struggle for Darconville’s soul, the eternal struggle of man against his own nature. Darconville’s Cat is at once an ode to love, and its indictment and trial, its prosecution and defence. Through the promised heights of love it delicately drifts, yet it exposes with force its hidden correlates, and descends to its darkest depths. It examines the interplay between love and hate, life and death, art and suffering, and in the process exposes these antonyms as inseparable counterparts. The story is at once thrilling, tender, strange, unsettling, absurd, poignant, shocking, profound, immense, silly, pretentious, immersive, illuminating, surreal, bizarre. The writing is incredible. It is transcendent, superb, from the first word to the last. No description I can offer will do it justice. Five stars are not enough. It is nothing else I have read.2017 favorites literary-fiction35 s Chris Via469 1,614 Read

Video review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FdTHJ...2020 big-book favorites ...more35 s Stephen M137 612

Sitting there, turning the pages, Darconville nevertheless found one particular aspect of the treatise disagreeable—its misogyny. That bias rose a poison fume from almost every paragraph, and Darconville, who, even in his early teens, had been somewhat scandalized the first time he read it, was no less so now—and, possible for being in love, more. How he wondered could anyone hate women?

A Portrait of the Philosopher as a Forlorn Lover

If Joyce took the english language to extremes never thought possible, and Pynchon dissected the paranoia of a post-war world, and Wallace brought out the connection between addiction and entertainment, then Theroux’s contribution to the encyclopedic canon would be an examination of misogyny and its close relation to romantic, idealized love. Owing stylistic debts to the Victorian era novels—with its elevated prose, plot twists and melodrama—Darconville’s Cat is, if nothing else, a wonderful thing to read on the sentence level. Within the first few pages, Theroux provides a devastating critique of life in isolated areas of the south and the religiosity that permeates in the region that the book takes place.

It was a little world unpardonably misled by fundamentalist drivel, a stronghold of biblicism, and one drowned in the swamp of its execrable simplicities. Nowhere could be found anything in the way of adornment. It was a place that d its coffee black, its flapjacks dry, its adjectives few, its cheeses hard, its visits short, its melodies whistleable, and its dreams in black and white—preferably the latter.

Almost every page features this type of piercing judgement. While they make for an engaging and sometimes hilarious read, they also work with an overall conceit within the novel that concerns itself with the problematic relationship between philosophical thinking and human interaction. The free-indirect style is a function of the main character, Alaric Darconville, an intellectual of academia who falls head-over-in-heels in love with one of his students, Isabel. Darconville bears such a close resemblance to his creator, that parsing the differences between intentional and unintentional personality traits imbued in him, and their subsequent significance in the novel, would be an exercise in futility. Judgements, of the type excerpted above, are often intertwined with postulations about philosophy and direct references to famous philosophers—Plato and Kant especially. The writing is infused with analysis and critical examination as directed against those unlucky enough to fall under Darconville’s judgements. There is no doubt that philosophy, as a field of study and practice, takes as its defining characteristic to be critical thinking and a dependance on the foundations of logic. Whether intentional or not, the novel applies the practices of critical thinking and analysis to all aspects of Darconville’s relationships with paranoiac intensity. Darconville overhears a conversation where a man says that “no Quinsy girl could ever love”. Darconville’s love, Isabel, is a girl who attends Quinsy college, so Darconville spends the whole night (a whole chapter in the book) working out a sixteen step argument to try to assuage the fear that Isabel might not love him. And when not relying on strict syllogisms, Darconville bides his time analyzing everyone around him (in an negative, degrading way—as it seems sometimes the trajectory of philosophy aims). Anyone of Darconville’s temperament can relate to the discomfort of an overstimulating social situation. The presence of other human beings, causes him the extreme discomfort that all introverts struggle to overcome and Darconville automatically resorts to his defense mechanism, over-intellectualization and analysis, a mechanism which Darconville becomes acutely aware in a rare moment of honest self-reflection. But the majority of his interactions go as follows:

This particular party was characterized by that mood of horrid democracy one so loathes; disparate factions didn’t separate but actually tried to relate to each other—and while old farts, trying to dance, flapped about wounded birds, self-assured teenagers—in whom confidence is such a vile characteristic—pontificated above the noise about politics, careers, and money-schemes.

It is unclear what argument, if any, that Theroux makes against the usage of philosophy in aspects of personal relationships, but it is apparent that the majority of this book relies on such a wealth of philosophical lingo that it makes the association between Darconville’s actions and the role of philosophy that much stronger. In another move of philosophical self-defense, Darconville dissects the otology of the word “fun” when Isabel says that she never has “fun” with him.

The value assigned the abstract notion (Fun) in this rigorous proposition, while it may seem only putatively factual, actually extends itself here to a philosophical calculus of common truth-functions beyond ostensive definition. . . to the suggestion of an unsubstitutable and immutable absolute (in life) by which, had it never been uttered, the straightforwardly empirical protocol established in the pursuit of sufficient linguistic assessment might otherwise be distorted.

The book rides on the weight of western thought which, as evidenced by selections from Dr. Crucifer’s Misogynist’s Library, is absolutely male-centric and oppressive of women. It may not be the true that Theroux is decrying logical thought entirely but he makes it obvious that the type of mind that Darconville has—high-brow intellectual, logical, and ultra-sensitive—is susceptible to the erroneous, misogynistic thinking that the character Dr. Crucifer embodies. We are exposed to a painful bout of rhetoric-infused word dumping in which Dr. Crucifer propounds the virtues of hatred and the degradation of women. The entire speech bears a remarkable similarity to an essay written earlier by Darconville on Love. Thus, we see the strong connection between Love and Hate, that they are not just the flip-side of the other but so intricately tied that they become one in the same.

The heavy emphasis on misogynist rhetoric may leave many with more than a few qualms with the author and his intentions of such liberal usage of hatred towards the “other” sex. A good chunk of its usage can be subsumed into this conceit about the history of western thought and the usage of “logical” thought in trying to make sense of volatile human emotions but much of the misogyny seems in excess and lacking in the justification that our moral conscience craves. But I don’t think any book exploring misogyny would be doing its job if I wasn’t offended at some point in the narrative. That, added with the fact of the intentional fallacy should prevent anyone from completely hating the author for his aestheticization of misogyny. These qualms are bound to arise any time that someone writes a story as male-centric as Darconville’s Cat. The strengths that this book exhibits far outweighs this potential flaw and the book gives enough substance for any reasonably thoughtful person to chew on and struggle with.

Despite the thematic weight that this carries, the book remains multifaceted and finds time—in proper maximalist fashion—to explore a wealth of various topics in different writing genres. The book is stuffed with lists, poems, prayers, telephone conversations, “unholy” litanies, essays, arguments, rants, syllogisms and Shakespearean blank verse in play format.

Much of the novel celebrates the english language and excavates the OED for nearly every word imaginable. Dictionaries are required and an etymological knowledge of greek and latin roots is recommended. Some paragraphs rip through vocabulary left and right and Theroux is not shy about making up words to fit the rhythm of a sentence or compliment the sounds of the adjacent words.

Regardless of any vocabulary pretensions, Theroux has an impressive command of narrative and narrative-delivery. His sentences are often long, but they never feel run-on.

The wind was up and the pale undersides of the few leaves left on the trees were layered to windward as, frantically, Darconville set off on the run to find a recording machine—across Langdell, over to Paine Hall, into the science Center, and then cutting back through the Yard he found one upstairs on the fifth-floor of the Lamount Library where, conveniently, no one was about. The librarian pointed to a machine. Darconville tore off his coat, clicked the tape into place, and—holding his breath—pushed the button to play.

Many will be surprised by how fast they can read his chapters as they are often plot-centric and aim for suspense and excitement. The first four hundred pages could be published on its own as a quality romantic novel. And what’s so unique about Theroux’s addition to the encyclopedic novel is the straight-forward narrative and limitation of characters. Anyone familiar with the novels in the canon are well-aware of the demands it can make on the reading w/r/t character, plot threads, and shifts in style. Much of this book is flat-out fun to read.

Theroux muses on writing frequently and makes sure to sprinkle aphoristic, one-liners throughout.

The present tense, he thought, overflows categories of past, present, and future and drifts into the unreal, timeless realm of ideation.

When love isn’t proof of itself, it is suddenly impossible to prove—and words, which fit to fill the mouths of myst and mummer a, cheapen on the tongue.

In short, this novel is extraordinary in its ability to communicate and for anyone who has a love of great writing, this book will fill their heart’s content with its mellifluous prose and deft descriptions. But for anyone with commitments against the problems inherent in a male-centric society and a male-centric tradition of philosophical thought, they may find a lot of the morally questionable aspects of the novel lacking in justification and lacking in a direct refutation of its presentation in the narrative.

Regardless, Darconville’s Cat deserves a place among the literary greats that tackle the difficult issues; it ought to be argued and dissected by the fans and detractors of such literature, literature that does as it should: push its readers to think, push its readers to feel.3-cheers-4-complex-characters i-am-moving-to-the-south metafictive-madness ...more34 s Ian "Marvin" Graye897 2,378

PRAEAMBULUM:

What the Critic Says [Professor Emeritus Murray Jay Siskind]

...a masterpiece of creative irreverence...written in pedantic sentimeter...

It yields nothing of sense to those intellectual quackshites, daubers of logic, and gowned vultures and spies who...surround it in some kind of official jingbang...

[Yet] if you're a good listener, you'll find it's made of extraordinary talk that scales the heavens and ransacks the earth, talk in which memories of a curious past mingle preposterously with doctrines of art, comic mimicries, and prevaricating theories about love and hate...

[It] thoroughly deserves your full, large-hearted, open-hearted, humble attention...

What the Author Says [Alexander Theroux]

One of the things I loathe...is self-promotion and self-aggrandizement...

When I review a book, I consider it almost a mission, not a trade, to review it with all my strongest intelligence and my largest heart...You have an obligation as a reviewer and as a liver of life to seek meaning, to find the meaning, to turn over stones...

I have great respect for readers, but they very rarely live up to my dream counterpart. I think people just want to go to the beach with a beach read...

Using my novel as a benchmark, I think people just don't want anything complicated...people are just not learned...people don't want to think! They don't want to have their feet put to the fire. They don't want to look up a word! They don't want to listen to that allusion! That's why I'm basically very sympathetic to Thomas Pynchon, because I deeply appreciate the work he's done in his books...

Dostoevsky once advised someone to write short chapters, and I always was very appreciative in his novels that the chapters were short...

Why obfuscate?...I'm proud of the fact that my books can all be read...[even if you] might have to look up a word or go back a few pages to check something out...

I do have a pyrotechnic or maximalist prose style...In Darconville's Cat...there's a very serious plot...I read one critic that said I just wrote a bunch of essays and basically have no talent as a fiction writer, that this is just a compilation of essays. It's a ludicrous point, because there's an actual story from the beginning to the end of this book...[though] I will drop the story in order to make a chapter I felt I need to put in there...

http://www.3quarksdaily.com/3quarksda...




Luca Signorelli, detail from "The Damned Cast into Hell", 1499-1504, fresco, 23' wide (San Brizio chapel, Orvieto Cathedral, Orvieto, Italy)


HUMBLE, LARGE-HEARTED REVIEW:

Maximal Insufficiency

There are 100 chapters in this 700 page novel, an average of just seven pages per chapter.

It tends to be lumped into the genre of Maximalism, and Theroux even admits to its stylistic maximalism.

Nevertheless, I'm not convinced that this description is of any critical value. It doesn't communicate anything about a book other than its length, nor does it suggest any commonality with other long books (other than their length).

The qualities usually associated with Maximalism can equally be found in and applied to the style of some shorter fiction.

Ultimately, I think it's just a term that's been used by one or more generations of writer, critic, academic and reader to differentiate themselves from earlier and/or later generations
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