[In the following review, Kennedy offers a positive assessment of Millroy the Magician.]

“My name is Millroy and I am a messenger. I was once so fat I was imprisoned in the darkness of my body—trapped in my own fatness. Every day was living hell, and I suffered just like you. But the Lord spoke to me saying, ‘Change your ways, fatso!’ I was reborn and assumed the shape of this body you see before you.”

To anyone familiar with the bizarre frontiers of born-again American Christianity, this “testimonial” from Paul Theroux's terrific new novel, Millroy the Magician, probably sounds like some absurd parody of televangelistic hard-sell. After all, though the Jimmy Swaggerts and Jim Bakkers promised anyone two box seats in heaven in exchange for cold cash, they surely didn't offer their flock divine intervention when it came to shedding a few pounds from their torso?

Well, actually … they did. Because many a televangelist peddled Son-of-Man SlimFast programmes, where putting your faith in the love of Jesus would undoubtedly stop you from eating three Big Macs and five Mars Bars at lunchtime. And when I toured the American south in the summer of 1988, researching my book about the Christian fundamentalist movement (In God's Country), I did spend a day observing a Christian weight-watching clinic on the campus of Oral Roberts University in Tulsa. A quintet of exceptionally corpulent souls joined hands and asked God for the strength to resist wolfing down that pint of Haagen-Dazs-and-cream before bedtime.

So there's absolutely nothing far-fetched about Millroy—Theroux's latest evangelical madman on a mission to debunk the gimcrackery of American life—when he announces to his vast small-screen audience that he has the spiritual/dietary answer to constipation. He can ensure that all citizens open their bowels: “I can make America regular again.”

Millroy is no mere advocate of spiritual high-fibre. He's also a professional conjurer who graduates from food-oriented sleights-of-hand in a New England carnival to national prominence as a diet-obsessed televangelical cult leader with his very own set of acolytes (The Sons and Daughters), his hour-of-power television show (The Day One Programme) and even his very own chain of spiritually correct restaurants (The Day One Diners). And Millroy assures his flock that if they follow his regime, not only will their bowels open with startling regularity, but they will also live for 200 years.

“His bowels got into the newspapers,” says Jilly, the waif-like young girl whom Millroy adopts as a side-kick and then transforms into his long-lost son (an intriguing bit of evangelical cross-dressing). “His bowels got into magazines, people called the diner asking about his bowels, photographers showed up asking about Millroy's picture. Even though he would not talk to the press and refused to pose for pictures, the programme racked up more viewers. He knew they were people who hoped he would talk about his bowels again, which he did …”

Millroy, however, is no outlandish cult monster, no graduate of the Jim Jones/David Koresh school of pious kamikaze pilot, even though he is eventually exposed as a first-class fraud. Rather, he puts one in mind of Charlie Fox, the misguided visionary “hero” of Theroux's best novel to date, The Mosquito Coast. Fox flees the fast-food ethos of 1980s America and attempts to build his own little new-fangled promised land in the Central American bush.

Millroy is yet another utopia merchant: someone who preaches a doctrine of organic rebirth in a society gorging itself to death on synthetic crap. But Theroux is canny enough to avoid turning this companion-piece to his earlier novel into a blatant satire on the grotesqueness of American consumerism and religious charlatanism. Rather, Millroy the Magician is a tautly crafted exploration of that most dangerous of American pastimes: personal reinvention.

Theroux—a New Englander, born in the state where the doctrine of social and spiritual perfectibility tested in the New World—has written yet another bleaky funny allegory about a society desperately in search of a panacea that will cure its multiple ills. Life, liberty and the pursuit of unblocked colon: what more do you want from a country?