An Adultery: A Novel.

An Adultery, A Novel

WHEN IT COMES to writing, there's no one around like Alexander Theroux. He is that rare sort, a performer whose strenuous exhibitions one does not merely read; one collects them like the contemporary classics they are. Theroux is a challenger, a competitor; he says to the reader peremptorily, "En garde!" So one may ask more nervously than the original did, "These foils have all a length?"

Alexander Theroux's Three Wogs (1972) was a sensationally fresh and nervy toot of a book. Darconville's Cat[reviewed in NR, May 29, 1981] may perhaps be described as a tragic Harlequin romance word-processed by Herman Melville: a book to be mentioned in the same breath with Hadrian the Seventh, Ulysses, The Apes of God, At Swim-Two-Birds, Pale Fire, Gravity's Rainbow, and Mulligan Stew. And there are other ways in which Theroux himself has taught his readers how to read his books.

An Adultery recapitulates the themes of romance and revenge, of love, lust, and betrayal, of the multifoliate contradictions of life and art. But Theroux has this time narrowed his scope, simplified his language, and restricted his range. This thinning of texture, is however, an adjustment of richness. The champ still has all his moves. What does the perfect malicious postcard say? "Scenery is here. Wish you were beautiful." How should a pair of unattractive twins be described?" It was the evil of two lessers." A real drag? "Her company was to the day what a body cast is to ballet." NArcissistic pschobabble?" "Her phrases were to English, so to speak, what Bowl-O-Rama Moderne was to interior decoration." Theroux does not stint with his set pieces any more than Dale Murphy withholds home runs.

But once we arrived I remember little different about that party, except us. It was of course the usual factitious meeting of coarse-grained stupidity and default. Mr. Menageranium and Ruth Gumplowitz were arguing about the Worth of Pakistani rugs. Several of those women with three names, all shanks and banbles and slatted eyes, stood in a gather defending the making of nasturtium chutney as art. "What about single parenting?" asked someone. "Or the application of cosmetics?" Or shooting someone, I thought, as I saw "Tiny" Maxine across the room loudly barking at someone. Drink had given her the look of a flounder with migrating eyes.

An Adultery is a first-person narrative by Christian Ford, an artist who neglects an innocent beloved in favor of a married woman, Farol Colorado, who seems to be epically neurotic but is worse. Farol's name seems to anticipate the use of "feral." The innocent's name, Marina Falieri, conjures Byron's Marino Faliero and its Venetian setting and associations extending through James and Rolfe and Mann. An Adultery is an exhaustive exploration of destructive paradoxes, of a "bizarre chiasmus," of a quadrilateral triangle that becomes a polyhedron.

So this novel seems to be mostly a self-inquisition interlaced with satirical passages. The auto-analysis seems to flaunt echoes of other narrators: "Madness, do I say? It wasn't madness. I was completely rational, as clam as I was cold and as cold as camphor." That sounds like one of Poe's wonderful dingbats. I suppose that a voluble narrator who has the crust to say "I won't expatiate" on page 384 has to be thought of at least a little bit unreliable. This narrator knows that and, in effect, says so. His involvement in a disastrous love affair with a woman he calls a "jerk" and a "pain in the ass" has finally to be seen by him as--elaborately-his own fault. The price to be paid is higher than he could ever have guessed, and revealed in an ending that takes the form of self-knowledge defined by loss.

Agony can be agonizing; exhaustiveness can be exhausting. An Adultery is not itself adultered by any concessions to the reader. It is a demanding experience, a relentless exposure, a heroic exploration of the shadows of motive, meaning and language. It is also a lot of fun, when Theroux whips his cracks: "She had all the characteristics of a dog, except fideltiy." Or again: "Valor is not the only thing discretion is the better part of." Often, however, Kit Ford celebrates his own ecphrasistic paintings or limns the glory of love in an extravagance of romanticism. Or he elaborates the fury and thge keennes of his intelligence on the most unworthy of objects: Farol Colorado herself. But Chapter 11 of Part II is an undramatized essay on adultery that isn't focused on either participant, though it is the thought of one of them. The truth of the reflection doesn't arrest the folly of the man who--fictionally--knew it:

The despair at the heart of adultery is that it cannot be rescued from contingency of its origins, and any attempt at total stability is consistently undermined by the lack of commitment taught by the very means it came your way. Every rule therefore becomes an infraction, every luxury a privation, and every privilege a forfeiture.

When the narrator wonders about the man-killer--"Why . . . was there never a middle ground between the high triumphant siren and the lost embittered soul?"--he might be asking what some readers will demand of his creator. But this is a story about art and love; this novel is a self-referential Roman candle, a "turn of the screw" about a "romantic ghoul." An Adulgery is an outrageous imposition for which we volunteer because no one else addresses us just this way: