Word: theroux
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...migrations. Of London in the 1950s he says, "I had found myself at the beginning of a great movement of peoples after the war, a great shaking up of the world, a great shaking up of old cultures and old ideas." In his new novel My Secret History, Paul Theroux offers an affectionate and accurate sketch of his friend and mentor. The character's name is S. Prasad, but the facts and mannerisms are V.S. Naipaul's: "He was an unusual alien: he knew everything about England, he had an Oxford degree, owned his own house, and had published half...
...SECRET HISTORY by Paul Theroux (Putnam; $21.95). Theroux has grown famous writing both novels and travel books. Now he produces an entertaining fiction about a man who does both, a teasingly autobiographical portrait of the artist as a young stud...
This is never an easy question (autobiographies frequently contain more fancy than novels), but so far as one needs a guide to the free state of Theroux's imagination, it is this: like the author, the novel's hero, Andrew (sometimes Andre) Parent, was born and reared in Massachusetts, spent a good part of the '60s teaching and traveling in the Third World, and eventually made his mark as a London-based writer...
Beyond that, Theroux's randy adventurer has a convincing, if not necessarily reassuring, reality of his own. Parent is a droll reminder that nature adores deception. His admission that "in order to be strong I needed to have secrets" sounds no more or no less deceitful than the call of any unhousebroken creature who relies on stealth to catch a meal, a mate or juicy material for a novel...
Parent's secrets are mainly sexual, a subject that arouses an immediate interest but can be hard to sustain for 500 pages. Happily, Theroux's hero is a man of ironic intelligence and amusing self-awareness. He believes that comedy is the "highest expression of truth" and, conversely, that the funniest things are frequently the truest. This makes for considerable humor arising from grim situations. Moreover, Parent's wanderlust means a frequent change of scenery and a liberating sense that, as the playwright Tom Stoppard put it, every exit is an entrance somewhere else...