A character in one of Paul Theroux's 16 novels says, “People don't know they're awful. They think they're nice.” This statement could almost stand as an epigraph to everything Theroux has written—with the exception of the protagonist of his new novel, Millroy the Magician, just out from Random House, whose eponymous hero is a present-day messiah of low-fat food and clean living. And even Theroux thinks he's nice.

Millroy, a sort of metaphysical Mr. Rogers, crosses America magically transforming, without benefit of kitchen, “big brown spuds into mashed potatoes, flour into bread, and milk into yogurt and then into fat-free ice cream,” and preaching Vegetarianism on TV the way certain televangelists push family values. In the past, reviewers have compared Theroux's novels to Graham Greene's; Millroy the Magician may remind some readers of the Frugal Gourmet.

What, we ask, lightened Theroux's dark vision, taking him from sinners in quest of redemption (as in Chicago Loop, 1990) to a protagonist launching a chain of diners that specialize in foods mentioned in the Bible? “It has something to do with middle age,” says the author, who, like Millroy, is a vegetarian. Theroux, briefly in New York, divides his time between homes on Cape Cod and Oahu. “Millroy the Magician is about an obsession with food, diet and American culture. It's my own life, in a sense, writ large and embroidered upon.”

Theroux, 52, is owlishly handsome. His accent combines the vowels of Massachusetts, where he grew up, with those of London, where he lived for many years. “I used to write about people who drank, smoked opium and the like,” he says, sounding alternately like JFK and Cary Grant. “Then, while writing The Mosquito Coast [1982], I got interested in health. Allie Fox, the protagonist, has plenty of censorious things to say about the American diet. I gave up smoking when I finished the book.”

Theroux, as well-known for his travel books as for his novels, doesn't rhapsodize over exotic foods as some travel writers do. On the contrary, he's more likely to emphasize the squeamish detail, as in this vignette from Riding the Iron Rooster: By Train through China (1988): “There had been a bucket of dead eels next to the hopper in the toilet cubicle. I had glimpsed the creatures in the middle of the night. That was memorable—and a good thing, too, because the next morning I went to the dining car and asked what was on the menu, and the chef said, ‘Eels!’”

This kind of bilious comedy is typical of Theroux's travel writing. Never lyrical, he has been accused of starting out in a bad mood and staying in it for the duration of a trip. “You could say the same about almost any comic writer,” he counters. “In the very essence of comedy is a kind of grumpiness, where irony sounds like sarcasm and sarcasm like aggression. Sometimes my irony is taken literally by a literal-minded public.

“For example, in a crowded bus in Germany, I once said to a large man who was elbowing an old lady, ‘Why don't you knock her over while you're at it?’ He said indignantly, ‘What! You think I'm trying to knock her over? Of course I won't.’ The man thought I was being a brute. Germans, of course, tend not to have a sense of irony, but sometimes neither do readers—or reviewers—of my books. So, when I travel, I don't look for trouble, but I don't want to make things seem better than they are.”

Jan Morris, Theroux's friend and fellow travel writer, recently said (at a dinner in Honolulu attended by Theroux and others): “None of us wants Paul to be cheerier than he is. If he's rude in writing about a place, that's why we read him.” Morris, of course, recognizes the journalistic purpose behind this “rudeness.”

Theroux explains, “It's amazing how prophetic you can be in travel writing if you describe a place as it is. For example, I was in China for 12 months—mid-1986 to mid-1987—for Riding the Iron Rooster. I saw manifestations of the student democracy movement: demonstrations, clashes with police. I wrote about this in my book, and when it was published some people cried out, ‘He's too hard on the Chinese, doesn't seem to like them, great trading partner, reforms …’ Two years later students were shot down in Tiananmen Square. If I had presented the Chinese as I wanted them to be, and not as I saw them, I would have looked like a fool.”

While Theroux's fiction speaks in many voices from various points of view, the “I” of his travel writing is Theroux himself and not that of a literary persona. “I'm just reporting on the trip,” he says. “A travel book is like a series of letters home.”

If he wrote just a few letters from abroad to each member of his family he would have the makings of a fair-sized travel book, for Theroux is one of seven children and the father of two grown sons. Almost half the Theroux clan are writers. Besides Paul, there are older brother Alexander, a novelist, and younger brother Peter, a travel writer. Paul's son Louis is a staff writer for Spy magazine. (The writer Phyllis Theroux is Paul's former sister-in-law.)

Born in Medford, Mass., a Boston suburb, Theroux attended the University of Massachusetts. Shortly after graduation in 1963, he joined the Peace Corps and made his first long journey: to Malawi in East Africa, where he taught English for two years. Then, in late in 1965, he was arrested for spying and convicted within hours. His sentence was relatively light: he was escorted to the airport and put on the only plane leaving Malawi that day. (Theroux tells his side of the story in an essay included in his 1985 book, Sunrise with Seamonsters: Travels and Discoveries 1964–1984.)

He returned to the U.S. for a brief visit, during which he was questioned by the State Department and expelled from the Peace Corps. But Theroux bears no ill will. “The Peace Corps was the best thing that ever happened to me,” he says. And the unfortunate African contretemps was not entirely his fault. Though politically naive, he was also double-crossed when articles he had written in good faith for African periodicals were discovered to have been actually commissioned by the West German equivalent of the CIA. Caught between the displeasure of his host country and that of the U.S. State Department, Theroux was a convenient scapegoat. His was an uncomfortable, untenable position: an American citizen being used as a tool of a former European colonial power on the African continent.

Immediately after his expulsion from the Peace Corps, Theroux returned to Africa, this time to Uganda, where he became a lecturer in English at Makerere University in Kampala. While there, he met and married Anne Castle, another teacher, from whom he is now divorced.

In 1968 Theroux left Africa and went to Singapore, where he again taught English (at the University of Singapore) for three years. In the meantime, he maintained a flourishing second career as novelist, having published five novels between 1967 and 1971. Deciding that he couldn't continue in both professions, Theroux resigned from his teaching job to pursue writing full-time. Since then he has averaged one book a year, as well as hundreds of stories, essays and reviews.

Theroux first gained widespread attention with Saint Jack (1972), a novel that director Peter Bogdanovich turned into a movie in 1979 based on a screenplay that Theroux helped write.

His next novel, The Black House (1974), was a gothic tale set in England, where Theroux had taken up residence. This novel has gained a certain para-literary fame in Britain as the manuscript that Theroux dropped off at the office of his publisher, Hamish Hamilton, on his way to Victoria Station to catch the train for his now-famous transcontinental journey through the Soviet Union and the Far East—in other words, The Great Railway Bazaar: By Train through Asia. Theroux gives the date of manuscript delivery, and the start of his travel-writing career, as September 19, 1973.

Though travelogues are not considered hot commercial properties, The Great Railway Bazaar was a bestseller in the U.S. and in Britain. A typical review praised Theroux for having transformed “what was clearly a long, ultimately tedious journey by train … into a singularly entertaining book.” Since then, a new travel book by Theroux has come to be something of an event. The biggest of these events have been The Old Patagonian Express: By Train through the Americas (1979); The Kingdom By the Sea: A Journey Around Great Britain (1983); Riding the Iron Rooster (1988); and The Happy Isles at Oceania: Paddling the Pacific (1992).

Meanwhile, such novels as The Family Arsenal (1976) and Picture Palace (1978) had helped to turn Theroux into a literary industry, with headquarters at Houghton Mifflin. “They published my books for nearly 20 years,” he says, “from Waldo, my first novel (1967), through the mid 1980s.” Asked why he left, Theroux says, “I wanted to see what the rest of the publishing world was like. I also decided to have different publishers for fiction and nonfiction.”

He decided on Putnam for nonfiction (though they initially published one of his novels, the 1986 O-Zone), and Random House for fiction.

Theroux says that he and Houghton Mifflin parted on good terms, “at least as much as you can.” When he decided to leave, he recalls emphasizing to his longtime publisher that “I have been a good and faithful employee of this firm, and I've generated a lot of revenue in which we've all shared. I haven't driven as hard a bargain as many authors.” As an example, Theroux cites the “very healthy cut” that Houghton Mifflin received from his reprint sales—“up to 50٪.”

One of Theroux's warmest memories of his years with Houghton Mifflin is editor Joyce Hartman. “She cared about me and my career,” he says, “and she also replied to letters. She wrote interesting ones and she inspired the same. I believe the best editors have been letter writers and not telephoners.”

In addition to two publishers, Theroux has two agents: Andrew Wylie, who handles fiction and backlist; and for nonfiction, the author's brother Eugene Theroux, a lawyer in Washington who is an expert in Sino-American trade.

Asked to compare sales of his various books in the U.S. and Britain, Theroux says, “in Britain my hardcovers have good to modest sales, while my paperbacks—brought out there by Penguin—sell enormously. At virtually any bookseller's in the U.K., if you look on the Penguin shelf you'll find anywhere from 10 to 20 of my books, going all the way back to the 1960s. It's the same wherever English paperbacks are sold—Australia, New Zealand, Canada, South Africa. But not in the United States.”

In this country, according to Theroux, “there seems to be a total lack of interest in the backlist. Several of my books are in print in hardcover, a few in paperback, but not many. In Britain, on the other hand, virtually all of my books are in print either in hardcover or in Penguin paperbacks. It seems to me that an innovative American publisher would look at my backlist and decide, ‘We're not going to let these go; we'll do a uniform edition, have Theroux write new introductions, and make money from them.’ The fact that publishers don't do this, with my books and those of many other writers, indicates philistinism, laziness, and lack of entrepreneurship.”

In addition to novels, travel books and screenplays, Theroux has written criticism (V. S. Naipaul: An Introduction to His Works, 1972), plays and poetry. But some of his best work appears in his four short-story collections: Sinning with Annie and Other Stories (1972); The Consul's File (1977); World's End and Other Stories (1980); and The London Embassy (1982). Even his briefest stories represent intense emotional journeys, as he crosses the border from comedy to tragedy, from innocence to awareness to satire, with a magician's ease. It's in this form that Theroux's many fictional voices are in perfect harmony. His short stories are arias, his novels recitative.