Figures in a Landscape

December 1, 2017

Care to visit Ecuador and Zimbabwe? Ride in a helicopter with Elizabeth Taylor and go surfing with Oliver Sacks? Bone up on works by Henry David Thoreau and Hunter Thompson? You can do it all with this essay collection from the shape-shifting author probably still best known for The Great Railway Bazaar.

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Starred review from March 5, 2018
Novelist and travel writer Theroux (Mother Land) is at the top of his game with his third collection of essays, a magisterial grouping of intimate remembrances, globe-trotting adventures, and incisive literary critiques. The 30 essays are culled from national publications and book introductions over a 15-year period, melding vivid narratives with shaded renderings of Theroux’s inner life. The deeply personal “Dear Old Dad: Memories of My Father,” reminisces about a loving yet remote parent who never read any of his son’s work. “My Life as a Reader” explores Theroux’s love affair with reading as a bookish child, and, later, as a teacher in Africa. “Trespassing in Africa” is his frightening tale of sex and recklessness during a booze-driven bender one Christmas in Zambia. His travels take him to Asia, Africa, Hawaii (now his home), and Morocco. Paul Bowles Michael Jackson, Oliver Sacks, Muriel Spark, Elizabeth Taylor, and Robin Williams are profiled, as well as a dominatrix whose vulnerability comes through amid the salacious details of her work in “Nurse Wolf, the Hurter.” A highly versatile, appealing writer, Theroux casts a wide net with pleasing and entertaining results.

March 15, 2018
A retrospective of the prolific writer's essays, travel stories, and reflections.In his latest work of nonfiction, Theroux (Mother Land, 2017, etc.) intersperses feature-length articles, essays, and celebrity portraits with miscellaneous shorter pieces on writing, love, and life, including one unforgettable character sketch of his enigmatic father. His many self-assigned subjects during this 15-year span include several complex and contradictory personalities, such as his close friend Hunter S. Thompson, "a boisterous recluse who also needed to be seen and heard," and a professional dominatrix, "Nurse Wolf," whom the author admires for her levelheadedness and her striking degree of empathy. When traveling abroad, Theroux prefers to be "humble, patient, solitary, anonymous, and alert," and he downplays his own moderate celebrity, preferring public transit to state-sponsored tourism. Whether recounting a "drug tour" of the Amazon or describing the many guises of corruption and exploitation that he witnessed during the 1960s in Africa--he served in the Peace Corps in what is now Malawi--his stories are less travelogues than well-curated meditations on some of the places, people, and moments he has experienced in a lifetime of rambles. Although Theroux claims to avoid all contemporary novels, lest their voices intrude on his creative process, he portrays himself as the last in a long tradition of travel-writing novelists, among them Somerset Maugham and Joseph Conrad, whose work he enjoyed discussing with Michael Jackson. Theroux manages an easygoing, self-effacing presence in his essays, as though his ego were spent somewhere around his 15th novel, and he locates his often witless or mystified self squarely within the frame of each encounter. His spare, unhurried prose style, which is rarely long-winded, betrays a novelist's relish for illuminating details and devastating turns of phrase. Yet despite his long and prolific career, Theroux still finds himself gobsmacked by wonder at what life has shown him, whether traipsing through the Neverland ranch with Elizabeth Taylor or trying to interview Robin Williams while caught up in the cloud of his obsessive, frenetic improvising.A masterfully simple and satisfying collection.

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