[In the following negative review, Curran asserts that Jilly's characterization and the narrative of Millroy the Magician are underdeveloped.]

Paul Theroux has built his reputation, in part, on his talent for creating eccentric characters whose capacity to stimulate imagination radically engages our willingness to suspend disbelief. V. S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, and Gore Vidal feel he has accomplished that in their dust-jacket “advance praise” for Millroy the Magician. But I fear a “conspiracy” similar to the one in the novel which brings down Millroy's growing chain of health-food restaurants. Like all too many contemporary novels measuring an inch and a quarter or more in thickness, Millroy suffers from downsizing in the editing industry as well as from an uncritical infatuation with the two main characters and their dialogues.

The result is an often banal and excessive banter, which keeps the reader outside the psyche of either Millroy or his “Sancho Panza,” Jilly Farina. She is the fourteen-year-old sidekick-adoptee whose masquerade as a boy waives public recognition or personal acceptance of her having entered puberty. Jilly's rejection and emotional splitting off from her trailer-camp, lower-class, alcoholic parents leads to her willing “abduction” by Millroy. He encourages her developmental arrest in order to preclude any suspicions of pedophilia, and he grooms her to be his “male” magician's assistant. Later, when his entrepreneurial spirit moves Millroy from the sideshow to the nationally famous children's TV series and from there to the mainstream of economic capitalism, Jilly becomes his girl Friday in order to protect him from intrusive journalists, cranks, and venture capitalists. In the closing chapters she briefly plays Boswell to his Johnson in her short-lived role as his immortalizer.

Ultimately, however, Jilly fails in sharing her fascination for this father-surrogate and magician extraordinaire. Her naïve awe and emotional dependence do not inspire the reader with a valuation equal to her own. Of course, any writer who pushes a new adolescent onto the stage of an American fiction takes a significant risk. The competition is fierce and the emotional perspectives omnipresent. Jilly is closer to Huck than to Holden, but a pale shadow of them both. She fails even to be much of a foil to Millroy, and her unmemorable remarks and thin characterization make her more a substitute for an omniscient narrator than a presence in her own right. She is more a device than a character.

In a way, Millroy the Magician vibrates sympathetically as part of the intertextual symphony of American fiction. Both Jilly and Millroy recall the threesome of Huck Finn, the Duke, and the Dauphin, except that Twain used his inept confidence men to mock the venal public they sometimes duped. Theroux, on the other hand, seems to be using Millroy the other way round. He appears to want the reader to be as affected as Jilly, but her respect carries little weight. (She sucks her thumb when feeling rejected.) Thus the book seems to teeter on the brink of becoming an unintentional satire in the mode of Kurt Vonnegut. But it ultimately seems more like thin realism, a kind of social criticism baptized ankle deep in the current of American naturalistic fiction: the Magician Evangelist in the Black Silk Cape.

Millroy, though, is no Elmer Gantry (a part he disclaims himself). But what exactly is he seems more to the point. Is the reader supposed to be as fascinated as Jilly over the “Jonah” story of his liberation from fatness, “how he had been imprisoned in the darkness of his body?” How he saw the light of healthy dieting, bailed himself out of failure, debt, and unemployment, then went on to national reputation and disgrace at the hands of nefarious, vengeful adversaries? The spiritual rebirth of a born loser? Or are we to be wowed (and kept interested) solely by his often gratuitous magic tricks?

The real “magic” is attempted by Theroux himself, as he turns this picaresque, rags-to-riches-Horatio-Alger-as-magician novel into a love story to rival the one by Erich Segal. Isolated on a Hawaiian island together at the novel's conclusion, Millroy and Jilly live together as reluctant fugitives from jaded justice and envious betrayals. Then (he's been holding this back all the time) Millroy tells her than he thinks of her as his “queen bee,” and she is not sure she is as “wicked grateful” as she often had been in the past for his crumbs of attention.

Slowly the conclusion suggests Nabokov's Lolita, as Millroy becomes Jilly's “James Mason” in the film version of the first American nymphette novel, and the heavy breathing begins. With little warning and less development, Millroy achieves by disappearing in the sea what Humbert Humbert never accomplished. For in the end this fourteen-year-old reluctant female “felt [her] tongue grow fatter in [her] mouth and heard a buzzing in [her] brain,” as she lets the post-middle-age (but really ageless) and bald Millroy know that she loves him. Huck could not have said it better to Jim. Millroy seems narcissistically indulgent and unaware of the authentic worlds out of which its characters came. As a result both background and character seem one-dimensional and unengaging.

Unfortunately, the novel fails to build up sufficient creative momentum to keep the reader interested and connected to a world that needs more imagination to blow life into it. Otherwise it is like the Tin Man in The Wizard of Oz. It looks and acts like a novel, but its characters echo rather than resonate with the spirit, soul, and feeling necessary to give the book a pulse. Millroy the Magician may be a uniquely spiritual cookbook, but it fails as an engaging narrative. Robertson Davies (World of Wonders) has done it much better.