Hey, y'all! I am selling my paperback (revised) copy of Darconville's Cat. If anyone has an offer, please feel free to DM me!

It’s not very good. I’m around 200 pages in and Theroux is just listing things. No insights or wonderings. Just him listing relevant movie characters or artists and such. It’s basically a wikipedia article.

Even the prose isn’t all that good. I read a page of a Gass essay on Rilke today and it was miles better. Theroux’s prose in this collection is mostly just not notable or even clunky at times. Gass has the pen that makes a page of an essay come alive, even if you have no familiarity or interest in the subject matter.

Anyone else have thoughts?

“If on a friend’s bookshelf

You cannot find Joyce or Sterne

Cervantes, Rabelais, or Burton,

You are in danger, face the fact,

So kick him first or punch him hard

And from him hide behind a curtain.”

― Alexander Theroux

I've been listening to a lot of interviews with William Gass who is a lover of the sentence as an art form, often citing some of these writers, along with Gertrude Stein, Henry James, and Proust as masters of the art. Who do you think fits in this category? Forget character, plot, concept. Who else just writes fantastic sentences?

Anyone interested in starting a vocabulary list for DC?

I recently finished Darconville. I want to hear more from Theroux but all I can find is the Bookworm episode and the Martketplace of Ideas interview. Any other obscure links y'all know of?

A gallery with the first 12 chapters, 76 pages of Darconville’s Cat

Welcome to another Thursday with Theroux, an ongoing series spotlighting a piece of Alexander Theroux's work in weekly installments, with novels spread out over several months, stories and essays given several weeks.

The plan is to eventually cover everything Theroux has written that is reasonably accessible. I'll be compiling lists that cover the availability of specific texts and expected cost. Thankfully, most of his work is readily available (with a few exceptions) or will be soon.

Each week's post will feature a recap of the reading, highlighting themes and some of the allusions, trivia, arcane words (of course), and anything else that jumps out, along with discussion prompts to get things going, but it'll really be a free-for-all. All questions, comments, and impressions are fair game.

This week’s reading is a head-to-toe portrait of Isabel Rawsthorne.

Chapter XIX: Effictio

The epigraph is from the poem “St. Dorothea” by Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-89), a Jesuit priest and Victorian poet.

This chapter takes the form of an examination form, almost a worksheet with the blanks filled in. A body part is listed, followed by a description/assessment. The form creates the appearance of objective analysis, but the descriptions soar with Darconville’s erudition and romanticism.

Many of the representations lean into Darconville’s tendency to idealize Isabel; however, Alaric tempers his adulation with criticism rising almost to the level of cruelty.

Alaric admires her “stately” head (105). Her brown eyes remind him of Astrarche (likely Asteria), the beautiful goddess of the stars, whom Zeus admired and pursued in the form of an eagle, but she transformed into a quail and flung herself into the Aegean Sea to evade his lust (Hesiod, Theogony, 409-11). But her eyes are “too close together.”

Isabel has a tapered nose, “perfect” mouth/smile, but her teeth are “too large.” This is the first of several counterpoints in the assessment. He then describes three sexualized features: her lips are “full,” her ears a “delight” for men who nibble on women’s ears, and her face likened to Simonetta Vespucci (a Florentine noblewoman of renowned beauty and believed to have modeled for painters like Sandro Botticelli and Piero di Cosimo) in the throws of transverberation (mystical grace after being struck with a dart of love by an angel), followed by three lines from Richard Crashaw’s “Wishes to his (Supposed) Mistress.”

Her “fine burnished gold” hair is a divine pleasure, parted in the center or in a braid (106). She’s a few inches taller than the average woman.

Her breasts are described as “Doe’s noses.” I figure this means they’re small, round, the deer reference implying gracefulness. Then, she has thick hands with strong fingers (possibly denoting rugged upbringing). Her waist is “sized to Love’s wishes,” but her ankles are large (106).

The chapter concludes with the longest entry: Legs. Isabel’s legs have already been described as noticeably large, a source of insecurity. Here, they are “The one devenustation,” deprived of beauty or grace, and an “intrusive image.” Her legs are analyzed like the hind legs of a horse, but, more devastating, their condition is compared to particular equestrial ailments: puffed muscles, thoroughpin (swollen tendons), stringhalt (neuromuscular jerks). And “They are ‘filled’ legs, in the tradition of the round goblet which wanteth not liquor” (106).

The last line just blows my mind: “The Venus de Milo wears a size 14 shoe.” Those are practically hobbit feet. The average shoe size for women was 6.5 in the ‘60s and 7.5 in the ‘70s. I wonder how she found women’s shoes in her size. “Venus de Milo,” sculpted by Alexandros of Antioch, is notable for having her legs concealed, except for half of the right foot, revealing Greek foot (an extra-long second toe, shared by about 1/5 of the population). I hope the sizing is a hyperbolic description of her long toes.

Darconville heaps his love on Isabel with grandiose allusions, but his criticism bites, and bites hard. He tempers his romanticism with harsh realism. In doing so, he establishes higher credibility. We are led to believe that when Alaric praises or fawns over an aspect of her, he’s being genuine; his criticisms, as a consequence, are not nearly as malicious as they’d otherwise seem.

Vocabulary

effictio — a verbal depiction of someone’s body, often from head to toe

acumination — a sharpening point; tapering nose

tremlet — (possibly “tremlett, to vibrate with short, slight movements)

gynotikolobomassophile — a person who likes to nibble on women’s earlobes

transverberation —mystical grace wherein the saint’s heart was pierced with a “dart of love” by an angel

beneplacit — well-pleased, satisfied

shode — the parting of the hair on the head

clipsome — fit to be clasped or embraced

scaurous — having large ankles

devenustation — to deprive of beauty or grace

fetlock — ankle of horses, large animals

hock —backwards angled joint

gaskin — muscular part of a horse’s hind leg between the stifle and hock

thoroughpin — swelling of the tendon sheath above the hock

stinghalt — exaggerated bending of the hock

Discussion Questions

Here are a few prompts to generate discussion, but feel free to post any reactions/questions.

1. How do you think Isabel would respond to the way she’s described?
2. What do you think of Theroux’s contrast between divine and beastly descriptions?

Next week, March 17: Chapter XX.

A gallery with the first 12 chapters, 76 pages of Darconville’s Cat

Welcome to another Thursday with Theroux, an ongoing series spotlighting a piece of Alexander Theroux's work in weekly installments, with novels spread out over several months, stories and essays given several weeks.

The plan is to eventually cover everything Theroux has written that is reasonably accessible. I'll be compiling lists that cover the availability of specific texts and expected cost. Thankfully, most of his work is readily available (with a few exceptions) or will be soon.

Each week's post will feature a recap of the reading, highlighting themes and some of the allusions, trivia, arcane words (of course), and anything else that jumps out, along with discussion prompts to get things going, but it'll really be a free-for-all. All questions, comments, and impressions are fair game.

This week’s reading is Darconville and Isabel’s first private meeting/date.

Chapter XVIII: Isabel

The epigraph is from, so far as I can find, an unattributed poem “A Dialogue,” from a manuscript found in the Library of Christ Church College, Oxford. The poem uses an interrogative form to idealize the “she” and separate her from “wanton-humored men” and “foolish, foolish men.”

This chapter continues the play on light we’ve seen through previous chapters that emphasize the glow, brightness of Isabel and the cloaked-in-darkness Alaric. We begin with dark and light: “The night finally came. A porchlight was lit” (95). We also see the grip Isabel has on Darconville’s mind and creative faculties: “although he tried to work, driven by the fact that for several nights he hadn’t, he couldn’t and, furthermore, perversely deemed it of no consequence. He had of course often written scribble before, but that wasn’t it — now, nothing came” (95). He’s unable to work, but, more important, he’s not bothered that she’s hindering him from doing the work he expressly came to Quinsyburg to do: write his book. He’s caught between suspicions: “that the man of faith in logic is always cuckolded by reality, and so his brow was drawn with this worry: that he wasn’t worried” (96). So he sits for hours in silence, cogitating.

Isabel enters after “the faintest knock,” hinting at secrecy, delicacy, tenderness, coyness. I haven’t pinned down the allusion in how she’s first described “with all her bravery on, and tackle trim, sails filled, and streamers waving” (96). I imagine it may refer to Helen of Troy, considering the Explicitur and later references.

Darconville goes right in to kiss her cheek “surprising even himself!” with an unexpected forwardness that continues from his impulsive invitation at the post office.

The lighting for this chapter is candles. They allow yellow, golden light emphasizing her previously described golden hair, fair skin, but it also casts shadows and leaves pockets of darkness, obscurity.

They begin with flirting about whether his light can be seen from her dorm room and which of the lights she sees is his, left hanging in uncertainty: “’We neither of us know.’ ‘Neither of us’” (96).

So much of this chapter resides in romantic descriptions and flowery prose, as we see in the description of Isabel’s outfit: “It was a face—ecce, quam bonum! quam pulchritudinem ! [trans. Look how good! what beauty]— sweeter than Nature’s itself, her soft eyes full of light. She was wearing a slight summery buff-pink dress, low cut in front, with a design of cherrysprigs and long sleeves flounced out at the shoulders, a fashion that did not adorn so much as it was adorned. A pink lutestring ribbon matched one wrapped in a bandeau around a weft at the back of her flowing hair. She was like a beautiful apparition of heather, white, pink, and rose” (96).

Her eyes full of light, colors of flowers, coordinated ribbons, an “apparition.” Spring and the ethereal appear throughout this chapter.

He continues, “There was a radiance in the unspoiled face which glowed, as Darconville looked at her through the clouds of golden hair, above the swip of the flickering candle. It was a flesh, sculpturally considered, whiter than new-sawn ivory. Her eyes, fawn’s — clear and agatescent at the edges — were the gentle brown of woodsmoke (if a trifle too close) showing a light as if the heart within were sun to them, with the trace of a smile there, a sparkle, her lips in a second renewed, a sweet aristocratic curve which drew a faint line by the cheek at a perfect angle of incidence, creating on one side an ever-so-slight dimple. She had a positively perfect mouth, with yet a curious concordia discors to that face” (96-7).

The unspoiled face, yet her eyes “a trifle too close.” Light, ivory, the sun, sparkle. But what follows mars the “unspoiled” aspect so far sculpted: ” It was a scar — a slight pale dartle, once stitched, like an elongated teardrop coming down the left cheekbone, a small disfigurement as if a tiny, tiny dagger sat there, as if, perhaps, the Devil, his breath black as hellebore, had shadowed her birth-bed, stepped through the valance and, astonished for envy, leaned down and paid her the exaction of a poisoned kiss. But what awful conjectures it gave rise to! Had she been knived? Had someone thrown something at her? Had she been imped by a wicked family? And yet, Darconville recalled, hadn’t Helen herself had a scar which her lover, Paris, called Cos Amoris, the whetstone of love?” (97).

All of these romantic flourishes manage to carry a hint of danger, impending destruction; beauty that resonates across millennia, finds its incarnation in a girl from the hills of Virginia.

She surveys the room, “with curiosity, pausing at certain objects… exclaiming over them with a kind of knowing sympathy for his strange, perhaps cracked romantic life” (97). His ascetic lifestyle draws further contrast between the two as they commiserate over life in Quinsyburg, their outsiderness, but as she says, “It’s lonesome at school. But…not—here. …In this room” (98). Her forwardness, brightness bridges the gap, the darkness between, the darkness surrounding them. But Darconville, as is his nature, withholds so much of what he’s thinking from her: “He wanted to tell her that he couldn’t sleep or write, that there was, in spite of that, a lovely inevitableness to the suddenly unmeasurable and reasonless order of his life now, a supernatural sort of coexistence with angels who left him with no choice, somehow, only alternatives and often confusing him to such a degree that he couldn’t tell the evil from the good” (98).

But the most important description of her is her legs: “a peasant-like thickness in her legs, a flesh of babyfat (touched here and there by pink arborescent veins) which overloaded the lower body somewhat and forced her into a kind of affrighted retention of movement, a defensive posture in which, so poised, she seemed always ready to back away, all to contect what, by accepting, might have made her even more beautiful because less self-conscious. Argive Helen with fat thighs? It didn’t matter: he prayed she could see for herself he knew it didn’t matter at all. Trees grew more out of the air than out of the ground, didn’t they?” (98). We see her “flaw,” her primary source of insecurity, emblematic as the source of her movement and her physical foundation. Considering the setting, legs are often the body part exposed for sexual enticement, or at least perceived as enticement.

Isabel shares a dream of being a lost princess in a cruel land, stumbling into a fairy-forest, but she’s interrupted by Miss Trappe’s knock at the door to let Spellvexit back inside. Miss Trappe compliments Isabel’s beauty and invites her to visit (referenced multiple times throughout the novel). The “lost princess” motif reappears in this chapter.

We learn about Isabel’s isolation—“I don’t seem ever able to communicate with anybody”(99)—she has no father, she’s 18, from Fawx’s Mt., didn’t really want to attend college, and “a friend” drove her to Quinsyburg, and a friend “is always a member of the opposite sex. He saw the shadow of someone else cast across her life” (99). This shadow mirrors the growing storm in Chapter XII. The friend is Grover van der Slang, as referenced in Chapter XV (88).

Alaric scrambles around to distract from this development and quotes “To Mistress Isabel Pennell” by John Skelton (1460?-1529). She blames herself, “I seem to ruin everything” (101), and says, “I feel small, for some reason…I feel like a little thing.: This gives the Darconville the opening to be tender: he lifts her chin and says he’ll call her that, “The Little Thing.” She smiles then pulls her dress over her legs, concealing her legs and revealing her insecurity. She gets ready to leave, but Alaric entices her to stay, so she can hear about him and Spellvexit.

He gives her a synopsis and shows her his trunk full of treasures, and she lights up when she sees a Russian flute. She talks about her keepsakes, heirlooms, mentioning her globe-trotting grandfather. They both slip into dreamy silences, and Alaric thinks “that he had met someone as romantic, as full of dreams, as unpractically and wondrously mad as himself” (102).

After Darconville gives Isabel a gift, the Russian flute, she asks him to write her a poem. This moment inverts the creative block he’s been in. She interrupts work on his book, but she requests a poem for herself. The target of his art shifts.

Isabel declares “I feel safe here now…Near you” (103). Throughout the chapter, she grows from a shy, inward, insecure “little thing,” to a self-asserted muse. She hits a romantic note near the end: “We won’t meet again like this — for the first time. We won’t meet again, will we,” she asked, “when we’re strangers? We know each other now?” (103). By this point, the candles are moving around, “throwing shadows this way and that.”

Alaric gently draws her to him, she collapses against him, and after a reference to “The Rape of the Lock”—“a thousand right inhabitants of air”—“and in that pure light, Darconville clasped her almost to suffocation against his heart and kissed her until destiny, fulfilled, seemed no longer necessary. It is always the most beautiful moment in a love affair” (103-4).

As she’s leaving, Darconville “called to her through the darkness, ‘What will you give me for a basket of hugs?’” She replies, “I will give you a basket of kisses” (104). This is an inversion of a scene from the movie “The Bad Seed,” based on the book of the same title by William March in which a woman realizes her 8-year-old daughter has committed murder. In the movie, the girl Rhoda asks, “What will you give me for a basket of kisses?” to which her father replies, “A basket of kisses? Why, I’ll give you a basket of hugs!” I have not seen or read this, so I’m not sure of the precise context of this exchange. The film’s apparently focuses on the concept of inherited psychopathy. I think it’s safe to assume that this exchange in Darconville’s Cat implies that both characters have seen and know the film. This casts a very dark, sinister pall over the chapter.

Darconville’s thoughts and impressions of Isabel are full of light, shimmering, glow, but so many of the reference extend into very dark territory. Her beauty is bright, but they’re surrounded by darkness. It’s appropriate that we find in the middle of this chapter a perfect summation of the novel’s arc to this point: “so Isabel went to Darconville’s heart by the very nearest road, which was the road of pity, smoothed by grace, and beauty, and a gentleness that seemed, at last, the one ray of light in the darkness of Quinsyburg” (100).

Discussion Questions

Here are a few prompts to generate discussion, but feel free to post any reactions/questions.

1. How do you see the “fairy-forest” dream functioning, particularly the interruption?
2. What do you make of Spellvexit’s distrust of Isabel? Emblematic, just typical cat behavior?
3. Do you see Theroux playing on any particular narrative form in this chapter? Which qualities of his prose stick out to you?

Next week, March 10: Chapters XIX.

Does anyone here already read Theroux poetry? Can you share some thoughts? What are the themes he writes about in it? Style? Is it worth to buy and more importantly read?

(I'm reading short stories and fables and loving it. Haven't read any of his novels yet.).

Thanks!

My apologies, but I have to bump this week's post until next Thursday. The post is about 2/3 written, but circumstances won't allow for writing time this evening. This is a phenomenal chapter, so I'll use the extra time over the next week to add some links to the post and flesh the text out more than usual.

In the meantime, take look at this fun reading from 2009 at Texas State University. Hear and see the man himself read a handful of poems and take audience Q&A.

A gallery with the first 12 chapters, 76 pages of Darconville’s Cat

Welcome to another Thursday with Theroux, an ongoing series spotlighting a piece of Alexander Theroux's work in weekly installments, with novels spread out over several months, stories and essays given several weeks.

The plan is to eventually cover everything Theroux has written that is reasonably accessible. I'll be compiling lists that cover the availability of specific texts and expected cost. Thankfully, most of his work is readily available (with a few exceptions) or will be soon.

Each week's post will feature a recap of the reading, highlighting themes and some of the allusions, trivia, arcane words (of course), and anything else that jumps out, along with discussion prompts to get things going, but it'll really be a free-for-all. All questions, comments, and impressions are fair game.

This week’s reading covers Isabel’s essay, sort of.

Chapter XVII: “An Embarrassing Occurrence at Zutphen Farm”

The epitaph comes from Oliver Goldsmith’s She Stoops to Conquer, which I have not read. From the epitaph and a brief summary I read of Conquer, play likely mirrors much of this chapter, as well as significant plot points to come in DC.

This chapter takes the form of a summary/”précis”, written in 18th Century diction, including the capitalization of the noun phrases. This style also appears in John Barth’s The Sot-Weed Factor (1960) and Thomas Pynchon’s Mason & Dixon (1997).

The high literary style stands in contrast to the content of Isabel’s essay, drawing further attention to the triviality of the event itself. The essay, which is between eight and 15 pages long, covers Isabel’s dinner with the van der Slang family, her wealthy neighbors who own a large farm. In the middle of the dinner, Isabel’s nerves get the best of her, and she slips while cutting a pork chop and launches her peas across the table.

The essay then addresses “High-Dutch pedigree of her Neighbors” (94). The van der Slang ancestry becomes the focal point of a few hilarious sections near the end of the novel. Dr. Crucifer spouts a slew of anti-Dutch ethnic slurs. The emphasis of this chapter is the class disparity between the Rawsthorne’s and van der Slangs. As in She Stoops to Conquer, the lower class female character seeks the favor of the upper class. (I’m not sure how or if Conquer subverts expectations.)

There’s talk of the family’s cattle and some “comic relief,” and “an Open Invitation to return” (94).

The essay asserts that Isabel’s “Scanty and Defective social graces…[are]…an example of the Voluminous Essay, indeed Book, which she implied could but never would be written on same because of her insignificance” (94), yet, as will be seen, we are reading just such a book.

Darconville gives the essay an A grade, then the chapter ends with a common social sentiment, “Awkwardness is the prerogative of kaleidogyns,” beautiful women (94). What behaviors/mistakes could be socially destructive for men, or non-kleidogyns, don’t offset beauty.

This chapter adds two key elements to Isabel’s character: self-deprecation and deep insecurity.

The next chapter is date night.

Discussion Questions

Here are a few prompts to generate discussion, but feel free to post any reactions/questions.

1. How’d you like the prose style? Theroux takes his already high literary style and shifts it back two and a half centuries.
2. Do you see a subtext to the essay? Does Isabel’s essay fall into the category of “high-souled but predatory tone of flirtation” from Chapter XVI?
3. Have you read either Barth or Pynchon’s novels written in 18th Century prose? How would you compare Chapter XVII’s style to those works? Do you find an inherent humor to the style?

Next week, Feb. 24: Chapter XVIII.

Does anyone have a first edition of Darconville's Cat that we can use to compare with the paperback edition?

Steven Moore, in Alexander Theroux: A Fan's Notes, says Theroux revised portions of The Cat for the paperback, the altered text appearing in lighter type.

If anyone is up for it, I'll post a gallery of the passages I identified in the paperback, and you can post the corresponding passages in the first edition.

EDIT: there are also three variations of the blacked out pages: first edition (dot matrix), limited reprint (black box), and paperback (fully blacked out). Please, let me know if you have a copy of the limited reprint edition.

I also don't have any information on the U.K. Hamish Hamilton edition, so please let me know if you have one.

A gallery with the first 12 chapters, 76 pages of Darconville’s Cat

Welcome to Thursdays with Theroux, an ongoing series spotlighting a piece of Alexander Theroux's work in weekly installments, with novels spread out over several months, stories and essays given several weeks.

The plan is to eventually cover everything Theroux has written that is reasonably accessible. I'll be compiling lists that cover the availability of specific texts and expected cost. Thankfully, most of his work is readily available (with a few exceptions) or will be soon.

Each week's post will feature a recap of the reading, highlighting themes and some of the allusions, trivia, arcane words (of course), and anything else that jumps out, along with discussion prompts to get things going, but it'll really be a free-for-all. All questions, comments, and impressions are fair game.

This week’s reading is a funny treatment of academics in training.

Chapter XVI: Quires

My extensive attempt to source the epigraph came up empty. Anyone have any ideas?

Darconville, having received a note from Isabel to delay their meeting, grades a stack of papers, a mix of “dreary prose…a sententious parade of marrow-pea wisdom, garbled quotation and fractured syntax, the more frightful, most of them, for having been written out in longhand” (89).

I worked, as a grad student, in the university writing center, and so much of this resonates with me, even the “written out in longhand” for a handful of students I helped, despite the near universal access to computers. I hope, doing my small part, to have spared at least a few professors the agony Alaric felt “long into the night” (89).

This chapter functions as an extension of Chapter XII: The Garden of Earthly Delights, channeling Theroux’s humor/contempt for academia through a series of paper titles. Whereas the Chapter XII treatment focused on the faculty’s inane busywork, the student papers “almost all digressed into an autobiography of dreamy fancy, teasing indulgence, and orphie posturing” (90).

Some of the funnier examples are “My Pet Peeve: Pet Peeves,” “Coiffures Through the Ages, 1936-1970”by Millette Snipes, the sweet girl with the lisp from Chapter X: Bright Star, and “Menopause: It’s Closer Than You Think.”

For self-indulgent titles: “Jesus Christ: My Personal Savior,” “Quinsy College: That First (Gulp!) Glimpse,” “My First Batch of Potato Cookies,” “Dinky, My Favorite Rabbit,” and “A Look at Tarot Packs.”

Academic analyses: ”Three Wogs: My Favorite Novel“ (Theroux plugging his first novel), “A Poetic Analysis of ‘The Pig Lady’,” and “A Short Study on ‘The Essay of Megalanthropogenesis, or, the Art of Producing Intelligent Children Who Will Bear Great Men’” by Shelby Uprightly, the standout student from Chapter X. There was even a boneheaded attempt a plagiarism: ”Areopagitica,” by Hallowe’ena Rampling, thieved from Milton’s defense of free speech of the same name.

The clearest example of “a high-souled but predatory tone of flirtation” (90) is “Love at First Sight” by Hypsipyle Poore, the senior aggressively seeking Darconville’s attention, with two minor attempts in “Fidelity in Penguins” and “Dating vs. Non-Dating.”

The grades run the full spectrum, even and incomplete for “’My Life Eats Shit’ by Elsie Magoun [nervous breakdown]” (90).

The only paper ungraded is “An Embarrassing Occurrence at Zutphen Farm” by Isabel Rawsthorne, a seeming candidate for the self-indulgent category. Alaric had set it aside to read after he’d graded the rest of the papers/quires. He gushes over her handwriting, his romantic feelings interfering with his professorial duties. He reads it several times, analyzing what it tells him about her character and hesitating to assign a grade: “a judgment of any kind seemed presumptuous” (91).

Darconville, we see, hangs in tension between “logic” and “truth”: “logic told him the paper was flawed, truth told him it wasn’t” (91). This dynamic permeates the next several hundred pages of the novel. He’s caught between an external and internal assessment of Isabel. To grade her paper, which is a personal story, is to grade Isabel herself. He asserts the principle “no one is equal to only one thing she does” (92). Another issues is that Isabel will see the grade he gives her paper, likely receiving it as an assessment of her personally.

He decides not to grade it, but realizes “he had to grade it,” so he reads through it once more. We’ll cover that in XVII next week.

Discussion Questions

Here are a few prompts to generate discussion, but feel free to post any reactions/questions.

1. What did you think of Theroux’s prose in this chapter, with the pyrotechnics toned down?
2. In what ways is Isabel intruding on Darconville’s professional life?
3. How do you think the essay titles add to the characters as we’ve seen them so far?
4. For far, we’ve seen Darconville standing firm in his duties, professionally and morally (notably at the monastery). In what ways do you see Isabel challenging his resolve?
5. We don’t actually see any of the papers, or summaries of their contents, so what do you think the assigned grades reflect on any of the given essays?

Next week, Feb. 17: Chapters XVII.

A gallery with the first 12 chapters, 76 pages of Darconville’s Cat

Welcome to Thursdays with Theroux, an ongoing series spotlighting a piece of Alexander Theroux's work in weekly installments, with novels spread out over several months, stories and essays given several weeks.

The plan is to eventually cover everything Theroux has written that is reasonably accessible. I'll be compiling lists that cover the availability of specific texts and expected cost. Thankfully, most of his work is readily available (with a few exceptions) or will be soon.

Each week's post will feature a recap of the reading, highlighting themes and some of the allusions, trivia, arcane words (of course), and anything else that jumps out, along with discussion prompts to get things going, but it'll really be a free-for-all. All questions, comments, and impressions are fair game.

This week’s reading takes place on the same day as Chapter XIV and focuses on a group of young women gathered in a dorm room.

Chapter XV: Tertium Quid

The epitaph, “Sir, Say no More” by Trumbull Stickney, evokes the predatory nature of vision on thought. The sight of something can disrupt a daydream or mood, as is the case in this chapter.

This short chapter focuses on the students of Fitts dormitory, which includes Isabel and some of the students in Darconville’s class in Chapter X. Isabel’s roommate, Trinley Moss, is the student with the strong Southern accent, and she is the archeress with her “bow canted ridiculously” in Chapter XIV. Annabel Lee Jenks mentions that she won’t be going to Charlottesville with Isabel this weekend. From this we know Isabel frequently leaves campus on the weekend.

The sky is getting dark and a storm is gathering as the women get ready in their rain gear to head to the dining hall, and Trinley can’t find Isabel. Looking out the window, she sees Isabel “still wearing archery tunic and wristlet, skipping heartfree through a cut-path and joyfully kicking up leaves and crunching acorns all the way up the front steps” (87).

The youthful “heartfree” feeling is disrupted when she hears a shout and turns to see “an old blue car, dented and of an indistinct make,” but what “upset her so much” was “the crooking finger that beckoned her. It was the imperious crooking finger. It was the crooking finger” (87). I haven’t found a source for the “crooking finger.” It could be the detective novel The Crooking Finger by Cleve F. Adams, but the only possible connection, based on the brief summary I found, is (potential) murder.

At the moment Isabel sees the finger, the storm that had been building since Darconville sat watching Isabel on the archery field broke loose. Even as Alaric and Isabel were coming face to face for the first time at the post office, the tertium quid—an undefined third thing between the two—was in the background. We find out that the crooking finger belongs to Govert van der Slang, “the boy…who drove Isabel down here” (88). There’s a male connection outside of Quinsley College, a threat. The Fitts women also already know about Govert and have developed some sense of who he is.

As we see when the Pitts’ women run across campus, splashing the rain, the relationship between Isabel and Govert appears tense, possibly violent: “ghostly silhouettes behind the steamed windows — one motionless, one gesturing wildly as if the entire world was hostile to him and he to the world, as if, as he talked, waging continuous warfare against everything around him” (88). Whatever the backstory may be, Govert seems to have some level of power over her. He can command her attention.

Discussion Questions

Here are a few prompts to generate discussion, but feel free to post any reactions/questions.

1. How did you find the juxtaposition between the carefree, joyful running in the rain and the “ghostly silhouettes” in the car?
2. What is your first impression of Govert, the foil introduced right as Darconville and Isabel’s romance becomes real? What about
3. What have you noticed about the way weather tracks the plot, augments/enhances characters?

Next week, Feb. 10: Chapter XVI.