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Alexander Theroux, who hasn't put out a novel in nearly 20 years, follows his hiatus with the sort of book that seems like it took 20 years to compose. It's packed with ideas, exuberance and spite, as if you crossed the manic shiftiness of Pynchon with the uncomfortable squalor of R. Crumb. While he would likely laugh at the notion that less could ever be more, do not mistake the heft of this tome for a dense plot. More accurately, it's a flagrant mess that would be ripe for a stern editing -- that is, if it weren't so completely captivating in its total lack of restraint.

The story centers on the pity-based relationship between Eugene Eyestones, a hyper-intellectual sex-columnist for a small Boston rag, and Laura Warholic, the despised ex-wife of Eyestones's boss, a woman whose repulsiveness Theroux never seems to tire of detailing. She's clearly the worst sort of person he can imagine: uninspired and talentless, indifferent to all forms of culture, small-minded and petty, junkie-ugly and pathologically needy. She smells bad and listens to crappy music.

She's so loathsome, in fact, we have to wonder: Why does Eyestones keep seeing Laura; why does Theroux keep writing about Laura; and why do we keep reading about Laura? For Theroux and Eyestones alike, it is a sort of mad therapy in which everything abhorrent about Laura provides a relief-map in negative of everything that they hold valuable. She is the perfect manifestation of American "monoculture," which provides both fictional and real writers with endless material to dissect, deconstruct and condemn.

We keep reading because of Theroux's riveting gift for language and information-dense, relentlessly off-kilter analysis. His gears spin wildly from ruminations on democracy and religion to strange underground sexual aberrations, from golden-age cinema and early blues recordings to a kangaroo's forked penis. Be sure to keep the most multi-volumed dictionary you can find on hand. Otherwise you wouldn't believe that such preposterous words -- "deblaterated," "splurched," "moxibusted" -- could possibly be real. Theroux's brilliant satire of love, be it blind, hopeless or exalted, is definitely not for the faint of literary heart. It will chew you to pieces if you're not careful.