Word: theroux
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Patience is recommended because it will be handsomely rewarded. My Other Life is Theroux's best and most entertaining book to date, a bold claim, perhaps, since there are so many of them; in addition to his volumes of fiction, Theroux has written 10 highly regarded and popular travel books. He has, in other words, moved consistently and successfully between the realms of fact and fiction. This time he roams the strange and, in his telling, enchanting territory in between...
...character named Paul Theroux moves chronologically, chapter by chapter, through a life that is identical in all external details to the biographical sketches familiar to author Paul Theroux's readers. First comes his stint as a Peace Corps volunteer in Africa in the mid-1960s, followed by a period in Singapore, where he teaches English and begins attracting attention as a promising young novelist. Then comes the long sojourn in London, where, as an American expatriate and the happily married father of two sons, he writes novels (The Family Arsenal, The Mosquito Coast) that firm up his reputation and livelihood...
...receives a phone call inviting him to a dinner party in London being given by a wealthy American for Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip. Theroux accepts and then, on the day of the occasion, conceives the idea that the Queen can somehow cure his malaise. At the party he hears and reports on royal conversations, including the Queen's comment on the Prime Minister of Papua New Guinea, whom she had recently met: "He had splendid hair. Fuzzy wuzzy hair!" As she is leaving, the Queen looks at Theroux and says, "You're in a frightful muddle, aren...
When this chapter of the novel appeared in the New Yorker last March, transatlantic eyebrows were raised, particularly after it became known that the real Paul Theroux had once actually attended a dinner given for the Queen. As a stand-alone piece in the New Yorker appearing under the rather puzzling rubric "Fact and Fiction," Theroux's account provoked justifiable confusion. In the context of My Other Life, though, the episode seems entirely consistent with the mildly plausible and cumulatively bizarre contents of the rest of the novel...
There are, for example, the character Paul Theroux's comic misadventures with women. Visiting a leper colony in Malawi, he meets a nurse who is not a nun but who dresses in a nun's habit. "This stuff's cooler," she says, when he asks her why. "I mean, I'm naked underneath." Their attempt at a tryst--she has a room in the nuns' quarters--is not a success...