[John Gregory] Brown is not the only male writer these days to adopt a female narrator; William Boyd in Brazzaville Beach and Norman Rush in Mating have provided influential examples, and now Paul Theroux has done it too. He impersonates a fourteen-year-old girl in his latest novel [Millroy the Magician], and more than gets away with it. She is a scruffy undersized kid named Jilly Farina, living in poverty with a drunken father. Along comes Millroy the Magician, a middle-aged carnival veteran whose magic is really magic, to Jilly, and her innocence is just what his faltering ego needs. He virtually steals her away, but Jilly is glad to become whatever he likes—acolyte, best audience, alter ego, even (in a disguise) his “son.” As Millroy's ambitions escalate—television magician in Boston, then TV evangelist and food fanatic, then vegetarian restaurant entrepreneur and national cult figure—Jilly evades the question of what Millroy really is to her: not her lover, but just as emotionally intimate as a lover might be; not her father, but just as protective and dominating as a father might be. Seen by Jilly, Millroy is a convincingly fabulous and problematic figure. When she holds him up against her dismal background—Buzzard's Bay trailer parks, dirty gas stations, all the dreary backwaters of Cape Cod that Theroux knows so well—the novel works wonderfully.

But Theroux is too much of a performer to be content with that. He allows Jilly to become, for long stretches of the novel, only passive, a mirror for the magician's show. Millroy is like the father in The Mosquito Coast, using his son for admiration and overpowering him. Millroy has a unique reading of the Bible which decodes all of its references to food as guides to perfect health. He has mystical theories about pleasurable digestion, internal purification, and sensuous evacuation. He becomes the archenemy of America's rampant carnivorosity, its cholesterol-loaded diets, its capitalism of gluttony. He wants to be a Messiah for troubled urban youth, whom he converts into Moonies of a sort, promising them lifespans of 200 years. He reads people's faces for the heart failures and cancers that bad diets will cause, and he investigates their bathrooms and toilets for evidence of moral character. While all this may be satiric and funny, Theroux does not know when to stop. He cannot resist calling attention to his sub-text, the novelist as magician and performer, himself as protagonist. There are still fine moments when Jilly brings the real world back into perspective. When she escapes from Millroy's spell for a time and goes home to discover a death in the family, she realizes how much he has displaced her humanity. He would have explained the death as “bad food and congested bowels.” Now she recognizes what is wrong: “Millroy logic explained life and death, and this explanation took the place of grief.” But there are too few such moments; the novel never fully recovers from the author's fatal impulse to dominate his narrator.