kamilah

This could be a great first draft of a book if it wasn't about 500 pages too long, with about 15 more characters than it needs. Here repetition (sometimes almost entire sentences) isn't used for effect; it's the just one of several signs that the book wasn't proofread, let alone edited. Moreover, its most promising attribute, the author's fondness for puns, neologisms, and other bits of dazzling word play, not only grew old after a couple of hundred pages, but I began fantasizing of algorithms that could produce better ones (add -oidal here, convert con- to non-, etc.). It's supposed to be a satire of Generation X, but having been published in 2007, it's so late to the party that even those not invited have forgotten the snub. But, one thing I did realize from slogging through this overwrought book is the difficulty of making a successful satire, in which one character represents an entire generation. Even if one gets the details right, which Theroux doesn't, combining such an assemblage of quirks makes the individual seem beyond mentally unstable. I certainly don't expect the character not to have internal contradictions, but he or she still has to make some sense and not feel like hundreds of cultural references thrown into a blender, then onto the page. There is a good book in here, a functioning satire even, radically truncated and perhaps written entirely backward, from the perspective of Laura Warholic and not about her.