Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #4078 in Books
• Published on: 2006-07-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 256 pages

Times
'The original guru of American psychosis.'

Synopsis
For ten years Louis Theroux has been making programmes about off-beat characters on the fringes of US society. Now he revisits America and the people who have most fascinated him to try to discover what motivates them, why they believe the things they believe, and to find out what has happened to them since he last saw them. Along the way Louis thinks about what drives him to spend so much time among weird people, and considers whether he's learned anything about himself in the course of ten years working with them. Has he manipulated the people he's interviewed, or have they manipulated him? From his Las Vegas base, Louis revisits the assorted dreamers and outlaws who have been his TV feeding ground. Attempting to understand a little about himself and the workings of his own mind, Louis considers questions such as: What is the difference between pathology and 'normal' weirdness? Is there something particularly weird about Americans? What does it mean to be weird, or 'to be yourself'? And do we choose our beliefs or do our beliefs choose us?

Excerpted from The Call of the Weird by Louis Theroux. Copyright © 2005. Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
EXCERPTS FROM PROLOGUE

We drove up a rough driveway, through a pine forest, past a sign saying ‘Whites Only’, into a clearing with a church and a guard tower and scattered mobile homes. The walls of the pastor’s office were lined with racist leaflets in metal holders. Cold and cluttered, it was like the office of an underfunded charitable organization, albeit one dedicated to the eradication of world Jewry. A pair of German shepherds called Hans and Fritz prowled around. There was a stack of flyers with Adolf Hitler wearing a Santa Claus hat.
Butler wanted a moment to open the morning mail, so Jerry offered to take me on a tour of the rest of the compound. Icicles hung from the eaves. A sign said, ‘God has a plan for homosexuals. AIDS is the beginning.’ The church itself was a perfect combination of mildness and menace, like a village chapel, with pews and a piano and stained glass, but with swastikas on the altar and the wall. ‘There’s no armed guards or anything,’ Jerry said, as though I should be able to see for myself how normal this all was. ‘Anybody who’s white is welcome.’
We went up a ladder into the guard tower, our feet clomping on the wooden boards. And there, as we stood looking out on miles of white wilderness, me feeling as though I was at the far end of the earth, a strange moral antipodes where Hitler stood in for Father Christmas and the halls were decked with swastikas, Jerry announced his great fondness for the TV programme, Are You Being Served?. This struck me as surprising on many levels – that an American neo-Nazi should have heard of a relatively obscure British sitcom from the seventies, that he should have enjoyed its broad sexual innuendo-based comedy, that he should have thought it important enough to mention at just that moment, in the Aryan Nations’ guard tower, on the heels of a particularly nasty racist rant.
For a few minutes, we talked about some of the characters. Jerry mentioned liking Mrs Slocombe, the bawdy old saleswoman in the lingerie department who made frequent references to her pussy. I asked him what he thought of Mr. Humphries, an effeminate sales assistant whose catchphrase ‘I’m free’ relied for its humour on the implication that he might be available for gay sex. Perhaps sensing this didn’t sit well with the official Aryan Nations policy on homosexuality, Jerry looked confused for a moment, then said he thought he was ‘disgusting’. In a playful mood, I asked Jerry to say Mr. Humphries’ catchphrase, and the conversation ended where it started, with Jerry saying, ‘But I’m not free! Because this country’s in bondage to the Jews!’……

One morning in April, I packed my last few things into the loft as a taxi waited to take me to the airport. I had a bag with a few clothes and a list of names and not much else. My plan, such as it was, was to buy a second-hand car in Las Vegas, and work outwards from there; and it was several hours later, somewhere up above the American Mid-West, that two thoughts formed in my mind. The first had to do with the nature of weirdness. I realized that the main quality uniting my subjects, be they porn performers, neo-Nazis, or UFO believers, was their alienness to me specifically; and that my long years of interest in their beliefs was evidence that I – in however small a way – must share those beliefs. I wondered whether taken together the weird mores of the people I’d been covering all these years might represent a negative version of myself – a shadowmap of my own most secret nature.
The second thought was about the Weirdness Map I’d made in London. In my rush to get the last things into storage, I’d left it tacked up on the wall of my study; and I imagined it there, the sole item left in that empty house, a rendering in miniature of the landscape I was flying into…

Customer Reviews

Insight or voyeurism?
There are some great features to Amazon: competitive prices, the chance to browse for a vast selection of books at any hour of the day, generally good service. Here is a bad thing: judging a book by its cover (or the reputation of the author). I bought this because I have enjoyed some of Theroux's TV programmes and it sounded a bit different.

Theroux's plan is to revisit subjects he had met during the making of a TV series on weird Americans and see how they have changed in the intervening few years. The problem is that it doesn't quite work and I think Theroux realises that quite quickly. The writing is engaging and honest but it's partly a story of tracking the people down and partly a story about what they said when he found them. Neither story is terribly interesting.

The story of finding the subjects again is fairly tedious, to be honest. Theroux tracks them through the internet, phone calls and visits to likely hangouts but there's no great detective work or suspense, just description. And this is ok - Theroux comes across as likeable and decent, you'd actually like to meet him, but there are limits to how interesting the story of him tracking people down can be.

Then there's the times when he finds his subject and draws them out. Again, it's hard to get very involved. Another reviewer calls the interviewees dreary and some of them are. Some are sad, as well, and neither feature makes for very gripping reading. You could wander into your local psychiatric out-patient clinic and have the same sort of chat, I suspect.

Louis Theroux is a talented journalist and author and his best work is ahead of him. You wish his weird subjects would grow up and get on with their lives (some of them have) and you wish Theroux would stop hanging around with them and get on to something that really matters. The Victorians used to visit asylums to gawp at the lunatics and this feels a bit like the same voyeuristic serving up of human frailty.

Hit and miss
Louis Theroux's television persona and subject matter are always engaging, warm and interesting. He comes across as a thoroughly nice chap and treats his weird and wonderful subjects with dignity and respect. His book, a contituation of the meetings he had continues in this vein and very readable it is. However he doesn't really delve as well as you had hoped and and you are left wondering "Is that all I get".
Probably best as an introduction to Louis' weird world. If you have seen the TV shows you may end up disappointed.

Brilliant read!
This book is undeniably fun and VERY entertaining! There is very little else to say. Definetly worth a read!