Word: theroux
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This fascination has infected writers, too, prompting them to produce works of fiction in which the unsavory and licentious invades the lives of outwardly respectable people. Noted travel writer and novelist Paul Theroux uses a variation on this theme of a double life as a launching pad for the two novellas that make up Half Moon Street. What follows, however, can by no means be called a smooth flight...
...least a glimpse of the motives behind the deviant behavior. Those interested in a fictional handling of this cultural schizophrenia would do better to turn back to an earlier work, Judith Rossner's sensitive, albeit sensational, Looking for Mr. Goodbar--or else wait for a treatment more skilled than Theroux...
...sort of healthy open-minded girl that people used to call nymphomaniac," says Lauren Slaughter, the whimsical heroine of the first novella, "Dr. Slaughter". It doesn't exactly have the ring to it that "Call me Ishmael" does; but our these lines Theroux hangs his tale. Lauren has recently arrived in London from the States to work for a global think tank. After a few months at the institute, she receives a videotape from some unknown sender designed to recruit young women for an escort service. Bored at her research post and eager for some excitement, she decides to give...
...pages, 99 too many, describing the seamier side of Lauren's double life. Her work after hours takes her into the nighttime dens of London's healthy Arabs and the hotel rooms of travelling businessmen, some of whom are merely looking for companionship others for an erotic toy. Theroux details her daily outline, a seven mile run around Hyde Park in the morning, seminars and papers at the institute, and Karim or Salim at night, while the reader can't help but wonder when this girl is going to get some sleep...
...client, an English lord who carries some diplomatic post. But the sense of imminent doom that hovers over the narrative is finally realized when it turns out that the people who set Lauren up with Lord Bullbeck wanted to use her as bait to trap the man. Theroux concludes the story with a rush of abductions, escapes, and assassinations more confusing than exciting...