Word: theroux
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CHICAGO LOOP by Paul Theroux (Random House; 196 pages; $20). With a lot more gore and a lot less talent, this novel could have shared some of the uproar that has descended on Bret Easton Ellis' American Psycho. Here is a wealthy, morally rudderless white male stalking through a city, in this case Chicago, looking for trouble. Parker Jagoda, a successful real estate developer, has a child in the northern suburb of Evanston and a sleek, sophisticated wife who works as a professional model and periodically arranges to meet him in hotels for ritualized bouts of fantasy sex. Still, Parker...
...headlines and TV bulletins about a "Wolfman" on the prowl eventually force Parker to face what he has committed. There is some macabre humor in this recognition; understanding that he is in fact a carnivore, the former health-food addict starts gorging on junk. But somewhere around this point, Theroux begins a tour de force portrait of character disintegration, meticulously detailed and utterly convincing. A clearer sense of who Parker was before he fell apart might have made Chicago Loop a clearer, more uplifting admonitory tale; the scariest possibility is that the anti-hero was no one at all until...
...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...
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...