[In the following review, Stewart offers an unfavorable assessment of Fresh Air Fiend.]

Fresh Air Fiend, a collection of pieces written between 1985 and 2000, is an odd, disjointed book, some parts of which reveal Paul Theroux to be a more sympathetic and vulnerable character than might previously have been supposed. Generally, he is an immensely competent writer and often better than competent. He is also extremely prolific: he has written twenty-two novels, eleven books of non-fiction (all of these, except for Sir Vidia's Shadow, travel) and one critical monograph on V. S. Naipaul. But his novels often leave a sour taste in the mouth of the reader, his travel writing can seem mean-spirited; his memoir of his friendship with V. S. Naipaul makes one doubt that he has ever known the meaning of the word “friendship.” In his introduction to Fresh Air Fiend, “Being A Stranger,” Theroux writes, “I was an outsider before I was a traveler; I was a traveler before I was a writer,” and, on the last page of the book, in the bibliography, he quotes a line from Graham Greene, “Travel is the saddest of the pleasures.” His literary heroes, it is clear, are Greene and Naipaul, and sections of the book (notably the introduction, the first part, “Time Travel,” and a section on his own travel books) owe much to Greene's A Sort of Life and Ways of Escape, and to Naipaul's Finding the Centre.

Although Theroux is the equal neither of Greene nor of Naipaul, these passages show him at his most thoughtful. His insights—the need for single-mindedness in a writer, that single-mindedness can be bolstered by literally being out of touch (he boasts of spending a decade without a telephone)—are not particularly original, but they are expressed convincingly. He quotes—and clearly identifies with—V. S. Pritchett's definition of a writer as “a man living on the other side of a frontier.” He himself has always made a point of living on the other side of a number of frontiers. His tendency, you could almost say compulsion, to blur fact and fiction has been merely a frontier which he has crossed.

The “Object of Desire,” in which he describes being “almost asthmatic with lust” at the sight of a friend's “barefoot mother standing in her shorts and bra” (he was “nine or ten” at the time and “so small I saw her long legs rising into her loose shorts”), recalls Greene's description (in A Sort of Life) of being taken, at the age of twelve, to a revival of The Admirable Crichton. There the heroine, who was dressed in animal skins on the desert island, “disturbed me for many nights, and she is one of my earliest sexual memories.” It is hard to imagine that Theroux was not familiar with Greene's memory when he recollected his own, and it is equally tempting to suspect that he was motivated at least in part by a desire to go one better than the older writer, possibly by being even younger than him at the moment when “the hammer was cocked” on his libido.

Towards the end of the book, there is a section entitled “Escapees and Exiles,” which includes an essay on Greene and one on Bruce Chatwin. Under the headline “Bruce's Funeral,” Theroux begins with a description of Chatwin boasting about his mountaineering exploits. Theroux writes, at the end of the first, very short paragraph, “And this struck me as very odd, because I knew he had never been much of a mountaineer.” The two men, we learn, were attending a dinner at the Royal Geographical Society where Chatwin was seated between Chris Bonington and Lord Hunt, leader of the first successful expedition to the summit of Everest.

A page later, Theroux makes the startling observation (perhaps to offset his previously astonishingly bitchy tone) that “Chatwin's funeral remains for me the single most significant literary event I knew as a writer in London.” It is hard to know how to interpret this remark: does he mean “event” as in “gathering,” or even “party”? Another comment, “Judging from the congregation, Bruce had known everyone—the aristocracy, the gentry, the editors, the art crowd, the auction people, and the riffraff to which most of us as writers belonged,” suggests that he does. In this portrait Chatwin comes across as boastful, snobbish, wholly self-centred and much given to name-dropping and exaggeration, characteristics for which he is almost as famous as for his boyish good looks, wit, charm and talent. Theroux, though, comes across as envious, competitive and not above speaking ill of the dead, though I suspect that he does not always know that he is doing it. He writes, “Bruce was a fairly bad listener. If you told him something he would quickly say that he knew it already, and he would go on talking.” Then he adds quickly, as if to cancel out the previous remark, “Usually he was such a good talker that you didn't care that he alone bounced the conversational ball.” Clearly, though, Theroux cared a great deal.

Greene, on the whole, gets off rather more lightly, though his admirer cannot resist the odd dig. Greene's letters to his then future wife, Vivien, which have been sold to and “solemnly catalogued” by the University of Texas, contain, Theroux informs us, “many lengthy and gushing passages (showing a tender and romantic and vulnerable side to the novelist most people regard as a cold fish).” Here again Theroux demonstrates his mastery of the rapid scattergun approach to invective, devised, it would appear, specifically for the purpose of cramming as many insults as possible into the shortest possible space. But the main target of “Graham Greene as Otis P. Driftwood” is the novelist's biographer, Norman Sherry, whom Theroux has it in for in the kind of detail that only real envy can produce.

The least enjoyable (though comparatively benign) part of the book is that devoted to short travel pieces, reprinted, one suspects, from glossy magazines and written without much care and attention. This section, from which the book takes its title, is particularly heavy going, partly because unless one is a kayaking enthusiast (and because each piece reads, as one might expect, not unlike the previous one), a kayak is a kayak. The entire travel section is flat: whether Theroux is “paddling to Plymouth,” “trespassing in Florida” or “tasting the Pacific,” it is hard to enthuse over the enterprise. Nor is it much more interesting when he is going down the Zambezi or the Yangtze.

Successful writers are encouraged to publish collections when they have got nothing else to hand. This one does Theroux no favours. As with his memoir of Naipaul, Theroux shows himself in a far worse light than that in which he depicts his subjects. The encounters, unfortunately, are the memorable parts of the book.