London, Paris, Germany, Africa, provincial Holland,
the worlds of Corsica and Puerto Rico. There are as
many moods represented, from the good host and
careerist in “Algebra” to the haunted heroes and
heroines in “Zombies” and “World’s End.”
Most of the people are transplanted or have tried
to graft themselves onto a new culture, and they
struggle against the odds to maintain their humor,
to write, to fall in love or keep their marriages
intact. Michael Insole, in “Algebra,” wants to cook
meals for famous people; Professor Bloodworth, in
“The Odd-Job Man,” is making a raid, for the
purposes of scholarship, on a distinguished poet. In
“Words Are Deeds,” Sheldrick glimpses a pretty woman
in a restaurant and sets out to marry her; Mr. Hand,
in “The Imperial Icehouse,” wants nothing more than
to transport a shipment of ice from one side of a
West Indian Island to the other.
The novella-length “Greenest Island” is the story
of two young castaways discovering adulthood and the
delusions of romance on a tropical island,
“Acknowledgments” and “Yard Sale” are short comic
sketches and yet offer variations on Theroux’s
theme: the undoing of innocents abroad, as farce, as
tragedy, and -- in the frightener, “White Lies” --
as a ghost story.
John Haase in the Los Angeles Times speaks of
Theroux as having “the eye of A. J. Liebling, the
nose of Durrell, and almost the literary scope of
Edmund Wilson. His metaphors and similes are like
rare-cut diamonds.” |
