Paul Theroux's latest excursion, The Happy Isles of Oceania: Paddling the Pacific, reads like Gulliver's Travels—if Lemuel Gulliver had packed a portable kayak and a failed marriage on his journeys.

Just as Jonathan Swift propelled his protagonist on trips whose ulterior purpose was to reveal the flawed human condition, so too Theroux paddles the Pacific surveying life on its numerous islands only to discover how culturally bankrupt this cherished paradise of the Western imagination has become.

Unlike Theroux, of course, Gulliver was a fiction. Yet to an appreciable degree in this book, Theroux the writer has concocted Theroux the preoccupied, dour, recently separated traveler—a character who could have stepped out of one of his novels like The Mosquito Coast or Half Moon Street.

The personal sadness of Theroux the traveler drenches The Happy Isles of Oceania like a tropical downpour. One senses that the tale's bleakness and its literary ending owe as much to the prevailing winds of the author-character's perspective as to the defiled landscape.

Paddling around 51 Pacific worlds apart (such as Tonga and the Trobriands), as he did in 1991, Theroux expected to find an assortment of earthly utopias, and a measure of succor to boot. Instead, the scenery loomed as a grim metaphor for personal and planetary decline.

Everywhere lagoons were littered with trash, beaches blemished with raw sewage, and villages so dependent on foreign aid that they have largely forgone foraging and gardening for the dubious pleasure of consuming canned luncheon meat and pea soup. No habitat was too isolated not to have an electric generator devoted solely to playing Rambo videos.

Only in Hawaii, when the sky darkened during an eclipse, did the gloom on Theroux's psyche lighten. Given that more indigenous species of birds and plants have been driven to extinction in the 50th state than in any other place on earth, one is confounded by its potential for such epiphanies.