The Secondary Colors: Three Essays

Rating:
Summary: Uncle Hal
Review: My favorite (...)is back with yet another book (I was used to his novelistic gems Three Wogs and Darconville's Cat appearing perhaps once a frugal decade), but now Alexander Theroux comes out with a book of essays two years in a row. I see that he has a predilection for new colors and using pictures of himself from thirty years ago. You may say "How vain!" But I say give the flanneur some slack. For it's possible that only myself, John Updike, Nick Baker, and maybe his brother, Paul, own the exhorbitant extent of this frilly savant's oeurve which spans maybe a few decades of sunny beach's readings. Nothing about anaesthetic Bill Clinton this time, or the fat hirsute ankles of Clinton's wife, but essays which are a celebration of colors rarely remarked upon: orange, purple, and green. I look at the first page and see something disgustingly familiar: I realize that the quote of Goethe reminds me of a writer who was as intelligent as myself. Any reader of Theroux's The Primary Colors should be comfortable with this rolodex of references to colors in the arts, literature, film, nature. I am surprised at Theroux's facility with pop music, but am dismayed at several typos and a reference to Jeff Noon's Vurt as the first cyberpunk novel. I am surprised also of the omission of Gilbert Sorrentino's The Orangery, a book of poems with the word "orange," as well as Edward Dahlberg's obscure essay "The Purple Statue in Green light" which is an anti-technology conpendium. Theroux's achievement may hasten the approaching Armageddon.

Rating:
Summary: A Whitmanesque catalogue on speed.
Review: This is an amazing book, which contains everything you'd ever want to know about the three secondary colors, their history and associations. How could anyone have written it? How could anyone know, have found and collected so much? Is there a literary allusion to any one of the colors Theroux has missed? I doubt it. My only explanation: Alexander Theroux must be God. The stylistic brilliance supports that answer.

Rating:
Summary: A Whitmanesque catalogue on speed.
Review: This is an amazing book, which contains everything you'd ever want to know about the three secondary colors, their history and associations. How could anyone have written it? How could anyone know, have found and collected so much? Is there a literary allusion to any one of the colors Theroux has missed? I doubt it. My only explanation: Alexander Theroux must be God. The stylistic brilliance supports that answer.