Word: theroux
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...MOSQUITO COAST by Paul Theroux; Houghton Mifflin; 374pages...
Rendering such a loudmouth tolerable would tax many a novelist. Author Paul Theroux, 40, manages to make Allie pleasant, if exhausting company. Seeing him through a child's eyes helps. Charlie does not look on his father as an itinerant handyman. "He's a genius," he assures strangers. And indeed, Allie does more than talk. On a whim, he bundles his wife, Charlie, a younger son and twin daughters off the Massachusetts farm he has been working and takes them to Honduras. He explains: "I once ate a banana from Honduras. That tasted mighty good, so I figured...
This move puts Theroux, the author of eight earlier novels and three collections of stories, on the kind of ground he has successfully worked before: a primitive backwater populated by eccentrics and obsessives. Allie pays $400 for an abandoned jungle settlement called Jeronimo. "It's about as unimportant as a place can possibly be," he says happily. "You talk about starting from scratch. Well, Jeronimo is scratch." Within weeks, Allie's manic energy transforms a rank, overgrown clearing into a neat, well-ordered community. As he keeps improving his creation he boasts, "The Iron Age comes ... A month...
...earlier fiction, Theroux sometimes revealed a curious streak of misanthropy. It was not that he disliked certain characters, but that he did not care enough about them one way or another to justify their presence on the page. That is not true of The Mosquito Coast. Charlie, the author's mouthpiece, is too young to be cynical or blase. Fate, in the form of his outrageous father, has handed him an amazing series of experiences, and he recounts them with enthusiasm and love...
...Patagonian Express, Theroux...