Inspiring Older Readers

posted on 07 May 2020

My Other Life by Paul Theroux

In the late-80s and the 1990s, Philip Roth played postmodernist games with his own life and his own fiction, writing novels using three different alter egos – including Philip Roth – in works that were often highly autobiographical in a skewed nearly-true way. Some of these novels are discussed elsewhere on Letterpress – here, here, here, here and here.

I had never previously made the connection, but in the mid-90s the novelist and travel writer Paul Theroux did very much the same thing, producing what I think is his longest novel, My Other Life. Theroux describes it as an ‘imaginary memoir’. An unkind reviewer might observe that this was bound to be Theroux’s longest novel because he is writing about a subject he loves: himself. Unkind or not, I think there is some truth in this and how sympathetic you are towards My Other Life is likely to depend on how sympathetic you feel towards Theroux.

There is no denying that it is a curious book. In a series of interlinked ‘memoirs’ or perhaps sketches or perhaps simply short stories, Theroux gives an account of the life he could have lived – perhaps the life he should have lived – had he been more adventurous, more a man-of-action rather than a writer, had he lived for experience and the fullness of life rather than in a search for ‘material’ for the next book.

We get a skewed account of his early travels in Africa in the late-60s (the Peace Corps), a spell at a leper colony in Malawi, his early years spent teaching in Singapore, the gestation of his early novels, the chance opportunity to relocate to London, his marriage and family life, and series of unlikely but lucrative opportunities that enable the purchase of a first house and an expatriate’s foothold in London life.

I found these chapters – The Lepers of Moyo; Poetry Lessons; Lady Max; and The Writer and His Reader – amongst the most entertaining and enjoyable.

In Poetry Lessons Theroux earns a living giving poetry appreciation lessons to a philistine businessman who is rich enough to buy whatever and whoever he wants. In Lady Max he recounts his entry into London literary society with the help of a predatory aristocratic woman writer who subsequently drops him when he refuses her sexual advances. The Writer and His Reader is a stage-y and anachronistic but hugely enjoyable fragment about an American bibliophile-lawyer’s obsession with Anthony Burgess. Theroux knows Burgess a little and the lawyer latches onto him, desperate for Theroux to bring him together with the famously polyglot writer, linguist, and composer, Burgess. That Theroux manages to feature two such unfashionable and forgotten figures as Anthony Burgess and the critic William Empson in this episode somehow adds to the enjoyment.

But it is at this point that the tone darkens and it becomes evident that the driving force, the real engine of this book is the collapse of Theroux’s marriage and his eventual divorce. (And this is fact: he married his first wife in 1967 and they did divorce in 1993.)

And it is this, broadly speaking, that forms the context for the second half of the book and perhaps for this reason I didn’t enjoy it nearly as much as the first half. It is still superbly well written – Theroux is a considerable prose stylist and his writing is studded with darkly glittering insights and observations that strike the reader as not just elegantly expressed but true and real – but from here onwards the book becomes increasingly sour in tone, alternately self-loathing and narcissistic.

How to sum up this curious work? On reading it a second time, its faults are more evident, I think. I still found it enjoyable and certainly entertaining but there is something about it that is unsatisfactory, off-putting. I can’t put it better than Richard Bernstein did in the New York Times when he reviewed the novel on its publication in 1996. He wrote:

"And yet there is something unsatisfactory about this self-consciously post-modern novel. In contrast to Mr. Roth’s brazen, raucous, self-revelatory ‘fictional self-legends’, Mr. Theroux’s invention of himself is like cosmetic surgery. He brings himself too much along in this imaginary memoir, cultivating his self-image rather than getting beyond its appearances."

I think that’s spot-on. Roth’s fictional reinventions of himself – his doubles and doppelgangers and alter-egos – were invariably corrosive and self-punishing; by comparison, Theroux (even the ‘imaginary’ Theroux) is still somehow rather self-regarding, even in his darkest moments rather pleased with himself. Perhaps these are the insuppressible characteristics of the man himself? Perhaps they are – as I think Theroux says somewhere in the novel – the qualities necessary to building a career, a livelihood, a household and everything in it from nothing more than pen and paper.

If you enjoy meta-fictional games and you fancy a stylishly written and provocatively entertaining novel that is steeped in the author’s influences and enthusiasms – Graham Greene, Conrad, Somerset Maugham (and who knows, perhaps Philip Roth too) – then give this a try. I enjoyed rereading it.

 

Alun Severn

May 2020