The Mosquito Coast has already been greeted in England as a denunciation of America's failures, and it may well be so greeted here. Paul Theroux, who lives in England but knows his native America, has surely decried, through his central figure Allie Fox, some of what is said to ail us…. (p. 1)

While indicting our aerosol cheese goop and excessive imports (Allic hates decaying America from both left-and-right-wing viewpoints) what he really hates is the world's imperfections. Maddened, in the jungle, he will cry: "It's savage and superstitious to accept the world as it is. Fiddle around and find a use for it." What a fine articulation of Americanness from this anti-American character.

And what an excellent way of calling America a Frankenstein's monster, and Allie something of a Frankenstein. For, yes, this surely is a gothic novel…. It is possible that some readers have forgotten, that many haven't read, The Black House and The Family Arsenal. I mention these because each is an exercise in aspects of the gothic—buried sexuality, frightening eruptive violence, labyrinthine settings (Arsenal is brilliant on "cockney" London). Theroux has an affinity for the gothic, which is often available to us as a metaphor for the forbidden—whether in terms of forbidden sexual urges, or lustings after forbidden powers.

And in The Mosquito Coast, where sex is mentioned only with regard to the narrator's hesitant stepping into adolescence—Charlie, the son of Allie Fox, a psychically-battered boy in love with a selfish father, turns 14 in the course of the novel—the gothic elements are very much about power. Instead of a Creature or Mad Scientist pursuing a virginal woman through dark halls, we have a father terrorizing his innocent son with dares, danger, and tests of loyalty.

Allie Fox, handyman and inventor in Massachusetts, usually called Father, takes Mother, Charlie, his younger son Jerry and two even younger twins, and makes his escape from an America he says is disintegrating. In Honduras, wonderfully described—Theroux can describe the feathers off a bird, the leaves off a tree—Allie settles his family in a soggy, itchy Eden. He is going to fail, and we know it. His mission is to carry ice, made in one of his inventions to this hot iceless world. He and Charlie name his machine "Fat Boy." The bomb that destroyed Hiroshima was called "Little Boy"; the bomb that destroyed Nagasaki was called "Fat Man." Put them all together, and they spell gothic comeuppance.

Early in the novel, Allie's death is also foreshadowed. Charlie dreams of his father's death in a crucifixion, the man later revealed to be a scarecrow. Sure enough, at the novel's end, after Jerry and Charlie have plotted to kill their father, just as Freud told in Moses and Monotheism the primitive Jews plotted to kill their endangerment, father-figure and Oedipal adversary, Allie is by accident killed. As he dies, he cries, "Christ is a scarecrow!" Which is all too well-plotted, symmetrical, and plain neat for a shaggy reader such as I. While I complain, let me add that Mother, who is once or twice an active figure, remains essentially what Theroux wants in a tale of people returning to primitive, idyllic patterns: she is pedagogue, soother, obedient though sometimes caustic helpmate, currently sexless and almost never persuasive as a person in the book.

But The Mosquito Coast is an interesting working-out of gothic patterns. In Father, we have the philosopher-scientist who, since Dr. Faustus (1593), and surely since Frankenstein (1818), has been our character-of-choice for gothic fiction. He wishes to rival God, whose creation he sees as imperfect, or of whose realm he wants too large a share. (pp. 1-2)

The problem with Allie Fox is that he's hypnotic to Mother and Charlie, and the brilliant Dickensian minor characters of this novel (they are its supreme achievements), only because Theroux says he is. He commands no loyalty in us; we cannot see why he does so in the narrator, Charlie. To us he remains a bully, a cruel parent, a mouthpiece who speaks not to the other characters, much of the time, but over their shoulders at us. When his downfall is guiltily mourned by Charlie, we are not saddened. He doesn't serve to remind us of the perils of unlimited ambition. He is not a cautionary figure.

He is a literary invention, and you can smell the furnaces working to cook him up. He is surrounded by fragments of several Graham Greene figures. He is part Herzog in his declarations of middle-aged angst, he is part Henderson the Rain King in his journeying exuberance; he is part Mr. Kurtz of Heart of Darkness; he is a shadow of Lewis Moon in Peter Matthiessen's At Play in the Fields of the Lord; he strives for the magic of One Hundred Years of Solitude. In a way, he reminds me of the mad Americans at the frontier whom Dickens invented for Martin Chuzzlewit—all the secondary cultural characteristics were got right, and yet they weren't living people: they were abstractions.

Surrounding this abstraction are some first-rate writing, a true professional's ability to move an entire family from New England to Honduran jungles convincingly, and marvelous descriptions of the people and conditions with which the Fox family meets. Discomfort is brilliantly evoked; a child's terror of the father he loves is often moving (the book's best drama, I think). Theroux can write nearly anything smoothly and smartly. Many readers will appreciate Allie's sometimes-funny causticisms about America, and his entanglements in a plot that overwhelms, for me, the unfinished character of Allie himself….

Gothic fiction ought to be tragic fiction. This tragedy is not sufficiently faced by Theroux, who prefers surface, here, to interior exploration. He adopts the form, but not enough substance, of the gothic. When Father is making plans to drag ice through the jungles of Honduras, a lightning bolt actually flashes upon his face as he actually declaims, "You feel a little like God." Theroux might perhaps have trusted us more. (p. 2)