[In the following review, Johnston offers a negative assessment of My Secret History.]

Until Salman Rushdie came along, Paul Theroux was the literary establishment's most prosperous Third World junkie. Although he had published a number of novels, it was the accounts of his masochistic train rides through Asia and South America that brought him a wide reading public.

What is it about the Third World that attracts so many literary lions? There is the local color, of course; and for some a Marxist dictatorship set amid palm trees is irresistible. But the list of living writers who find refreshment in tropical squalor—Graham Greene, V. S. Naipaul, Rushdie, Theroux—suggests a deeper motive. Rushdie talks about “the hole inside me where God used to be.” This is a valuable piece of real estate for a certain kind of modern writer; and “leaving friends and order for strangers and disorder” (as Theroux once put it) is an effective way to expand the cavity.

Theroux does not give away much of himself in his travel books. He sticks to the landscape and people and is quite charming. But in his fiction we get a great deal of reportage from inside the cavity, and the charm gives way to bitterness. Instead of the raconteur of exotic modes of travel, we get a garden-variety nihilist who wants to show how empty the world is now that (for him) God has retired from the scene.

Andrew Parent, the narrator of Theroux's new novel, My Secret History, is a bleak creation indeed. We first meet him as an altar boy in suburban Massachusetts. But religion does not hold him for long, and we follow him through a career of joyless hedonism and cynical detachment which ends with literary prosperity in middle age. Although the book begins with the obligatory disclaimer that this is fiction, one suspects that the hero is indeed Theroux. The biographical data are similar, and there is a lack of imagination behind the writing that suggests the author is flogging his memory.

Andrew Parent reminds me of a proposal Evelyn Waugh once made for a contest to determine who was the biggest bore among his set in London. Waugh's idea was to have the contestants sit around a table and start talking; the winner would be the person who went on the longest. (Waugh thought his friend Randolph Churchill would crush the competition.) Parent goes on for more than five hundred pages about his fornications and resentments. He is a scoundrel; but he is neither an amusing scoundrel, like the heroes of Henry Miller (whom Theroux admires), nor a particularly original one. And his amorous affairs are as banal as anything on television.

Parent begins his sexual career trying to score off the girls in and around Boston. He gets one pregnant and spends fifty or so pages searching for an abortionist. Then he becomes headmaster of a small learning institute in Africa, which turns out to be a pig heaven where he can indulge in unlimited, guiltless sex with the native girls. For the reader, the great advantage of the African chapters is that the women there do not insist on a lot of talk first. But even in Africa, his love life is excruciatingly silly. While being treated for gonorrhea, for example, he meets a woman who is in the same situation: “This aroused me—not the disease, but the fact she was being cured. So was I! As far as I knew, we were the only two people in the country who were being treated for the clap. It made me amorous.”

Reading through My Secret History made me envious of drama critics, who at a dull performance can occupy themselves making paper cutouts of their programs. The book critic has no such outlet. The most surprising aspect of this novel is the flaccid writing, for Theroux has shown himself capable of taut, vivid prose, especially in his shorter fiction. The book is an object lesson of Henry James's warning that first-person narration “puts a premium on the loose.” Even Theroux's descriptions of exotic locales read like outtakes from his travel books.

It is a sure sign that a middlebrow novelist is floundering, moreover, when he keeps referring to the work of his betters. We hear about Conrad and Kipling, and one of Parent's girlfriends—or is it his wife? they're all alike—compares herself to Mrs. Moore in Forster's Passage to India. But Mrs. Moore, in whom Forster renders a peculiarly modern sort of despair without a trace of banality, is beyond Theroux's powers of invention.

Theroux is trying to tell us something about spiritual malaise in the modern world. But in order to have something to say on the subject, a writer has to show signs of resistance to that malaise; he cannot simply go flopping along and assume that the resulting boredom and disgust have significance. Even so black a writer as Samuel Beckett possesses a kind of stoical resolution that allows him to rise above his material and give it form. Beckett is also funny. But there is no sign in My Secret History of a moral universe larger than the puny one inhabited by the hero. And Mr. Theroux is not funny. The only humour in this book takes the form of sophomoric double entendres. There is also a preoccupation with excrement and the bodily functions that makes the reader feel as if he is in a bus-station latrine. Mr. Theroux is in need of a long train ride to clear his mind.