It was an extraordinary spring for fiction, as if all the established novelists, especially in this country, agreed to hand in their latest work by way of attesting to continuing vitality. Among others, Mailer, Bellow, Roth, and Pynchon—to name four senior citizens of the group—showed up at the fiction bazaar. (Only Updike decided to wait until fall.) Roth's American Pastoral seems to me major work, the premiere book of the year; Mailer has taken his lumps; and Pynchon, for reasons partly incomprehensible, spent a few weeks on the bestseller list. Whatever happened to all those symposia of dire predictions on the Future of the Novel? Vanished, along with worries about a Failure of Nerve, or Our Country and Our Culture. An occasional voice raises itself to deplore the “conservative” tenure of contemporary fiction, and for those in sympathy with the complaint they can turn again to the arty English cutup, Jeanette Winterson, whose sixth novel makes a fuss about how hard it is to tell a narrative (“That's how it was/is. The story falters, The firm surface gives way”). But most novelists at this century's end are getting on with the job, some of them in distinctly attractive ways. Here follow a few samples, in some cases commented on so briefly as scarcely to constitute a “review.” …

Paul Theroux's fifteenth novel [Kowloon Tong] (not to mention the shelf of travel books and collected stories) is about the hand-over of Hong Kong to China—the “Chinese take-away” as it's called in the novel, whose publication date couldn't of course have been more timely. Like his earlier The Family Arsenal and Picture Palace, it's an expert entertainment, in the Graham Greenish sense of that word—a suspenseful, darkish fiction (like Greene's The Ministry of Fear) whose characters don't invite or command our full sympathies the way, presumably, characters in a realistic novel do. Theroux's novel is about the gradual coming apart of Neville “Bunt” Mullard who, with a Chinese associate who dies at the outset of the book, has been running Imperial Stitching, a factory about to be taken-away by a sinister figure named Mr. Hung. Bunt is a bachelor, lives with his mother Betty, has a sex life consisting of effective and emotionless encounters with prostitutes or the occasional employee willing to render a service. The mother is jealous, spying, hatefully “English” in her ministrations to Bunt and eventually revealed to be comparably corrupt, as she and Mr. Hung collude to do Bunt out of the factory.

But plot or story isn't the main point, which, as always with Theroux, is the life of language. In Kowloon Tong, language is especially animated when it describes what and how people eat: “You're nid-nodding over your food,” says Betty to Bunt at breakfast; “you look a little peaky,” and she watches him closely as he eats “a soft-boiled egg, five rashers of streaky bacon, an oatie, half the papaya, two slices of toast to one of which she added jam, no soldiers.” In a memorably disgusting scene when Bunt against his will (he doesn't like Chinese food) has dinner with Mr. Hung, the latter goes to work on some chicken parts; “Brandy was gleaming on Mr. Hung's lips. He looked drunk, his face pinkish and raw, his eyes boiled, and he was smiling in a vicious way as he chewed with his mouth open.” No details are spared of this moveable feast:

Hung's elbows were thrust out, his blue tongue showed as he stuck his chopsticks into the dish of yellow meat and used them like pliers to grasp a fragment of chicken breast. Its white flesh was exposed when he left a bite mark on it, then he chewed and gagged and pursed his lips. Again, with a retching noise, he spat garbage onto the table.

Theroux has a pretty good time, it looks to me, with this culinary awfulness, and there's a similarly clinical disgust displayed at most Hong Kong things generally. Not a book that touches the heart, but one by a writer who knows exactly how to construct a novel, tell a story. …