Word: millroy
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...gifted and versatile tale spinner. He usually writes about outsiders: artists, adventurers and dreamers on the run from conformity. This partly explains the years Theroux lived abroad. Now an ex-expatriate, he is apparently still edgy enough about the U.S. to live near the exits, in Massachusetts and Hawaii. Millroy the Magician (Random House; 437 pages; $24) gives us a good idea...
...Twain to Salman Rushdie, Theroux updates the story of the prophet without honor in his own country. For prophet one could read writer, although the plot of this allusive entertainment gallops on its own. The style is picaresque, the message is salvation through health food, and the medium is Millroy, a road-show magician. Part Jesus, part Prospero, part yogi, he alone would make this a novel to conjure with. But Theroux adds another delight, Jilly Farina, a plucky adolescent with an artless narrative voice that, like Huckleberry Finn's, grabs and holds the reader's attention from the first...
That contemporary version of a river raft belongs to Millroy, who enlists Jilly in his mission to purify America's digestive system. It's a sewer, he says, clogged with grease, sugar and the flesh of slaughtered mammals. The wizard preaches the loaves-and-fishes diet. His nutritional guide is the Bible: "The book of life. The book of food. The book of meals and miracles." % In its pages he finds the secrets of longevity and regularity. From Ezekiel come the ingredients for bread. Daniel serves lentils, and Nahum offers figs. Millet, barley, honeycombs and melons tumble from holy writ...
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