Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Theroux, Alexander (Louis) - Diane Johnson

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DIANE JOHNSON

"Wogs" are what English bigots call dark-skinned non-Englishmen. [Alexander Theroux's first novel Three Wogs] is a book in which types of English bigot—old ladies, aristocrats, working men—encounter three Wogs—a Chinese, an Indian, and an African. It is not a novel but three long stories, successful in varying degrees, given the initial romantic proposition that all Wogs are good, because they are uncorrupted by civilization. And all Englishmen, supposedly civilized, are bad, premises one doesn't really bother to challenge in a comic and highly stylized work like this. Because English bigots are uncomfortably like American ones, it is alarming enough without trying to be believable.

In the first story, Mrs. Proby, American Alexander Theroux's first target, "gets hers": a fatal blow-dart from Mr. Yunnum Fun, her grocer, to whom she has been systematically rude for years. This seems to me at least partly to justify her apprehensions...

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1. Introduction
2. Diane Johnson
3. The Times Literary Supplement
4. Miles Donald
5. Jack Beatty
6. Eve Ottenberg
7. BENJAMIN DeMOTT
8. John Leonard
9. J. O. Tate
10. Copyright