Word: theroux
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...Paul Theroux...
Maude Coffin Pratt, focal point of Paul Theroux's latest novel, is a septuagenarian who has taken pictures ever since "a friend of Mama's bought me a camera because she thought I wasn't getting enough fresh air." Maude's picture taking became a career; she herself eventually became a legend to the millions who work and play in the form that is a billion-dollar synapse between technology...
...Maude Pratt is that she is more convincing as a metaphor than as a character. She is full of biting, often cranky opinions about fame and the effects of patronage on artists. This contrasts with her humid, romantic maunderings on art and incest. It is almost as if Author Theroux were suggesting that Maude's lust for her brother was indistinguishable from her aloof and aristocratic aesthetic...
Vladimir Nabokov embraced a similar theme to some wondrous effects in his novel Ada. But the author is no Nabokov, though he shares the master's taste for drollery and erudition. Like Nabokov, he is also something of an outsider. Born in Massachusetts, Theroux has lived abroad most of his adult life. His present home is London. Picture Palace is his tenth novel; The Great Railway Bazaar, an account of the author's international train travels, was a bestseller in 1975, and his reviews and critieism appear with regularity in the U.S. and England...
Through his "moderate and dependable" narrator, Theroux produces a complex batik of exotic impressions and cool, clear perceptions. If his book is an appropriate souvenir rather than an imposing artifact, it is perhaps because the author no longer shares those beliefs and urgencies that once dramatized the expatriate novel. Theroux would probably agree with a character in John le Carre's forthcoming thriller The Honourable Schoolboy-a literary agent who observes that "nobody's brought off the Eastern novel recently, my view. Greene managed it, if you can take Greene, which I can't - too much popery...