Ulysses, Midnight Cowboy, and Lenny Bruce’s comedy were all labeled obscene until enough time had passed that wider audiences began to see the works as brilliant. I wonder if the same will hold true of Alexander Theroux’s new novel. It is a pissed-off book, and reading its six hundred pages is as much fun as a hot August road trip with Don Imus, Ann Coulter, and Andrew Dice Clay. Yet it is also a remarkable achievement, a bombastic, squirm-inducing, and belief-rattling satire on political correctness shown through the lens of a sexless love story between two of the most unlovable (if not repulsive) characters in recent American letters. It takes an author like Theroux, who is as established as he is antiestablishment, to pull off a novel that for many other authors would be career suicide.

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—Richard Melo