The Primary Colors: Three Essays

The Primary Colors is Alexander Theroux's collection of essays on the three primary colors: blue, yellow, and red. A fascinating cultural history, these splendid essays extend to the artistic, literary, linguistic, botanical, cinematic, aesthetic, religious, scientific, culinary, climatological, and emotional dimensions of each color. Humorous, highly readable, and anecdotal, the book is virtually encyclopedic in aim. There is poetry here; there is also song, fable, opinion, literary criticism, gossip, history, and fascinating fact - a fund of curiosa, gleanings of a witty and penetrating mind. Swift is here, so is the lexicographic Dr. Johnson. The widest of readers, Theroux is raconteur, art historian, and pop culturalist, all at the same time. His book is a rich and totally captivating tour de force, a virtuoso performance of a kind that offers nothing less than a liberal education. This is a work for artist and art historian, designer and graphic artist, student and teacher, and anyone sensitive to the many and vivid nuances of color, but, best of all, it remains a complete feast for the general reader.

Red cars statistically are given more tickets than any other color car on the road. Beer in the 1840s was "a pint of yell" (so named for its yellowish color). Blue glass is used to ward off evil in Armenia. Hitler had blue eyes. Novelist Theroux's ( Darconville's Cat ) dazzling, free-form meditation explores the three primary colors through their myriad associations in art, history, music, poetry, fiction, movies, anthropology, linguistics, myth, religion, science, food, sports and everyday life. He plumbs the emotional, symbolic and spiritual resonances of each color, with examples ranging from Chekhov to Philip Larkin, from Botticelli to Kandinsky, amplified by 12 pages of color art reproductions. Though this inquiry sometimes exasperates in its random outpouring of facts, Theroux's stylistic tour de force is not only great fun but also opens one's eyes and mind to new ways of seeing.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

What a luminous idea, to devote a trio of poetic essays to the three primary colors. Too bad that Theroux, author of the overstuffed intellectual novels Darconville's Cat (1981) and An Adultery (1987), opts to dazzle with pedantry rather than to patiently set out the distinctions and contrasts that make for true illumination. Each essay is a monologue on one color, rambling associatively across not only art history, literature, history, and popular culture, but also through natural history, chemistry, and metaphysics. To convey more information about the cultural significance of blue, of yellow, and of red would seem humanly impossible. One person might particularly enjoy Theroux's occasional discussions of the derivation of paint pigments; another might be taken with his accounts of the colors of foods, or with the roles of a color in religious rituals. Yet while Theroux's interests are encyclopedic in scope, his essays suffer correspondingly from their lack of any internal organization whatsoever. He clearly aspires to compose prose poems, and he succeeds on the largest possible level: Each essay's color and color word suffuse it so thoroughly as to create an almost hypnotic visual effect. But the gimmick wears thin, and the portentous tone that comes with running together erudite facts all higgledy- piggledy becomes annoying. The book as a whole finally sinks to the level of the commonplaces that, in the absence of any index or plan, anchor its purpler passages. For all the Proustian extravagance of Theroux's paean to yellow gems, or the effective minimalism of his survey of blue in painting, what stands out are transitional remarks like ``the color blue figures powerfully in art,'' ``love is red,'' or (in reference to yellow), ``warnings attract attention, and must.'' If Theroux had not left these essays so self-indulgently unstructured, he might have produced a small classic. As it stands, the reader must stumble over random truisms- -not to mention wading through too much overwriting--to find the occasional nugget of gold. They may seem brilliant at a distance and will fascinate in some of their details. But from the still-crucial perspective of readability, Theroux's primary colors seem, sadly, a muddle. (Quality Paperback Book Club selection) -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Entrancing, challenging, maddening, and finally unsatisfying, Theroux's three essays take the primary colors and look at them from every angle, including cultural, historical, psychological, and linguistic. Thus, his evocation of blue moves from melancholy, movies, and Roman royalty to raw meat, thin milk, and hardened steel, to the whelks of Phoenicia and the "blue-black sky in Vincent van Gogh's 1980 Crows Flying over a Cornfield." And that's just a meager sampling of the first three pages. The result is a fascinating laundry list of the way blue, yellow, and red manifest themselves in daily life, but readers will soon wonder what it all means. Are we to conclude from melancholy, meat, and Van Gogh's sky that blue should always put us in a raw mood? Then how do we acknowledge that in Tibetan Buddhism wisdom is associated with blue? Not to mention Mary's robes and baby boys. Theroux gives a cursory overview of the development of pigment in art, but it is too scattershot to satisfy curious art students. The aim here is wondrously ambitious, but Theroux doesn't quite pull it off.
Barbara Hoffert, "Library Journal"
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Novelist and poet Theroux plays jazzman here, riffing off images and thoughts inspired by the three primary colors. His improvisations are unexpected and evocative, incorporating all sorts of visual cues, bits of poetry, and snippets of biography as well as an assortment of anecdotes from worlds as diverse as ancient India and Hollywood. Blue comes first, and Theroux perfectly captures the aura of this often fugitive color as he writes about sky and water, lapis lazuli, the music of Duke Ellington, and the little moue your mouth makes when you say blue. Yellow elicits an entirely different tone and type of phrasing. Breathy, sensual wonderment gives way to a boppier, more jangly beat. Yellow is sun, gold, and haze, the color of wisdom and vitality as well as discharge and illness, warning and high visibility. Red is also ambivalent in its emotive properties and symbolism: it's both festive and bloody, somehow the most primal of the primaries, full of passion and danger. Theroux is well traveled and well read, tantalized by fact and detail, and enthralled by art, culture, and our capacity for metaphor and responsiveness. A unique, dazzling performance. Donna Seaman