Darconville’s Cat

Alaric Darconville is a young professor at a southern women’s college. He falls in love with one of his students, is deserted, and the consequences are almost beyond the telling. But not quite. This novel is an astonishing wire-walking exhibition of wit, knowledge, and linguistic mastery.

Darconville’s Cat is a novel about love and hate. Among other matters, it deals with delicate tensions between Life and Art, the Ideal and the Real, God and Satan, and, above all, with the crises and conflicts between Man and Woman, the tragic implications of which reach all the way back to the Primal Fall.

Its chapters embody a multiplicity of narrative forms, including a diary, a formal oration, an abecedarium, a sermon, a litany, a blank-verse play, poems, essays, parodies, and fables. It is an explosion of vocabulary, rich with comic invention and dark with infernal imagination.

Alexander Theroux restores words to life, invents others, liberates a language too long polluted by mutters and mumbles, anti-logic, and the inexact lunacies of the modern world where the possibility of communication itself is in question. An elegantly executed jailbreak from the ordinary, Darconville’s Cat is excessive; funny; uncompromising; a powerful epic, coming out of a tradition, yet contempo- rary, of both the sacred and the profane.