The Mosquito Coast (by Paul Theroux) and
Darconville's Cat (by Alexander Theroux) are next to each other in the
99 Novels book and next to each other on their shelf at the library. They are not alike at all, except that they are both about ill-adjusted men whose intelligence is no consolation.
Darconville's Cat is a big, noisy, goofy, Renaissance-inflected 3D labyrinth about a sweaty, loathing-lit young litterateur with trad-Catholic inclinations, who is also lithe and attractive to women, like Ignatius J. Reilly's most secret self-insert. While working on his own large grimoire of a novel, he realizes he needs money for food and whatnot, so he takes a job teaching English at an academically negligible women's college in Virginia. The descriptions of the American South and its culture are wonderfully, indulgently mean and musical. They are like someone read Nabokov On America and thought, "The problem with this guy is twofold: not enough adjectives and not enough contempt." This kind of thing is not going to be everyone's cup of tea, and it probably reflects well on you if it's not yours, but I enjoy a little mean music from time to time.
Darconville falls in love with a student, Isabel; she reciprocates, but the idyll is spotty, like most idylls, and doesn't last. When Darconville gets a surprise appointment to Harvard, she gets cold feet and doesn't join him as planned.
At Harvard, he meets an insane misogynist eunuch who lives in an attic, Dr. Crucifer, who
may be a figment of his imagination/his doubts about Isabel made manifest. There's actually nothing to strongly support this interpretation as far as I can tell, but I thought it anyway just because he's so weird and shrill, and because that's the role he plays. Dr. Crucifer yells at Darconville about the sterility of love and the perfidity of women for about a million pages, with plenty of pungent inventiveness (and many a reference to Elizabeth I of England, the patron monster of the book, her bald head and spurious virginity). Isabel breaks up with him in an inconsiderate and embarrassing way; Crucifer tries to get him to kill her (one of the chapters is just a long, LONG list of gruesome murder methods, shrieked by Crucifer at the top of his lungs); he goes to Venice instead and dies of sadness and/or pneumonia. The summary doesn't do it justice, because it's not really a novel about a guy who has an ill-fated affair with his student, but a very long, deliberately fantastic, many-fingered jam session on the theme of The Girl I'll Never Understand. This is a deeply eccentric book by a guy who clearly doesn't mind you thinking he loves language better than people.
The Mosquito Coast is spare and lean and more or less contemporary, rather than early-modern, alchemical, and gouty. Allie Fox is an inventor who has always been on the outside of things, but it's not because he's a failure, it's SOCIETY that's the failure. He picks fights with hardware store employees about carrying imported goods - where's their Made In America tubes and hoses? He picks fights with every single retailer about their ridiculous prices, and prefers to shop at the local dump. He's convinced that America is going to be destroyed any minute and he, the last true man in America and possibly the last on earth - is going to have to start the whole world over again, his way this time. One day he buys a load of mosquito netting and some baseball caps (since the better hats are too expensive), and moves the family to Honduras, to a shabby port city and then upriver, where he bullies a few families into joining his icemaking scheme in the middle of nowhere. He declares to his family that anyway, America is destroyed now, there was a huge war just as they left, so now the wasteland is literal and there's no back to go. (Spoiler: America has not been destroyed in this book). For a little while, things are almost ok, in spite of the craziness of the plan. Then they aren't anymore.
Allie is a brilliantly compelling family-size monster who burns up all the oxygen in the book, so that the other characters in his orbit - Charlie, the wary and confused young narrator, his siblings, and their mother - barely have the chance to exist, and barely manage to do or feel anything except in reaction to him. This is both effective and a little frustrating. I found myself wishing that the mother in particular could have been more of a character - I wanted to know something about how she came to hitch her wagon to this dangerous and eternally disappointing star. But even if she'd wanted to talk about it to her kids, there was no opportunity. Mad Dad is always watching. There's a scene where they're on one of their duct-taped river boats, miles from anywhere they've ever been, and he dives under to fetch a boat part out of the mud. He's gone for so long that the family starts to panic, and so long after that that they start to talk about what to do next if he's dead. They'll have to find a town - they'll have to go home. Relief sneaks over each of them. Then he bursts out of the water, shouting, "Traitors!"
There are now
only two books left of the
99 Novels -
The Rebel Angels by Robertson Davies, which looks to be some kind of breezy campus thing, and my main man Norman Mailer's Egyptian shitstravaganza,
Ancient Evenings.
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