I’m not a danger freak. I’m actually sort of a timid person,” says author and travel writer Paul Theroux.
This, coming from a man who says casually, “I’ve been shot at a few times.”
The last time was just two months ago, traveling across the African continent — by land — from Cairo to Cape Town, South Africa.
Motoring along near the Ethiopian border in an open-air cattle truck, he and his entourage encountered a group of camel-riding highwaymen — hungry, desperate bandits. When the lead started flying, the 60-year-old Theroux dove into the truck bed, flopping onto the mooing cattle.
“The driver just gunned the engines and one of [our party] shot back at them,” Theroux says, now safely walking along Michigan Avenue. “When we blew a tire sometime later, I jumped down again, thinking we’d been shot at. I was the only gringo on the truck.”
A prolific writer gripped by intense periods of writing followed by intense periods of travel, the author of “The Mosquito Coast” and “The Great Railway Bazaar” is at the end of a travel spurt. In Chicago, promoting his new novel, “Hotel Honolulu,”
Theroux is between books, researching one and promoting another.
Often described by interviewers as “arrogant,” “distant” and “difficult,” today Theroux is anything but. He’s pleasant, polite and smiling. He’s heading home after this to Oahu, where he lives in an identical pair of houses — one to write in, one to live in, with a little covered walkway connecting the two — with his second wife, Sheila.
Tanned and relaxed, Theroux talks easily and at length about African politics, his two grown children, HBO’s “The Sopranos” (“Don’t tell me anything,” he says, having missed the third season while in Africa). He even does a pretty good impression of a New Jersey gangster, although he has long ago lost most of his East Coast accent to the influence of living for years in London and other places abroad. There is talk of what his gangster name would be: “Pauly Pineapples”? “Pauly Macadamia Nuts”? Theroux seems awfully cheerful for someone who was just recently dodging bullets on the Dark Continent.
“What I felt, strangely enough, wasn’t fear, because I felt like I had some choice,” Theroux says of his experience with bandits. “For instance, I hate being crammed in a bus with 50 people. You know the headline `Bus Plunge Horror’? I don’t want to be in a bus plunge horror.”
But, as he gets older, does being shot at make him rethink his adventurous treks to the Earth’s darkest corners?
It’s hit or miss
“Well, I’m 60, so there’s a limit . . . I don’t want to be a silly old fool,” Theroux says. “But if you’re going to write a book like this, you have to take the hit or it won’t work.”
The book Theroux is referring to doesn’t have a title yet, as he’s just finishing research on the non-fiction opus about cultural deterioration in Africa. Theroux even revisited the school where he taught 37 years ago in Malawi, Africa as a Peace Corps volunteer fresh out of college.
“I’ve paid visits twice before, and everything seemed to be sort of on the edge. This time I went back, it was horrendous,” Theroux says. “Students have stolen all the books, the windows are broken. There were no lightbulbs. Fixtures, but no bulbs,” Theroux says.
The problem, the author says, is “kleptomania on the part of politicians.” That, and the fact that there has been a mass exodus of the younger generation from Africa as it seeks to find its fortune elsewhere. It’s typical small-town syndrome, compounded by a mix of extreme poverty, misuse of funds and an ineffective government, he says.
Game park mentality
“You learn a lot as a volunteer in Africa, but there is something wrong there,” Theroux says. “There are game parks, but then there are people dealing with the general populace with game park mentality. They are going to villages feeding people . . . they are keeping a very large population alive artificially.”
While Theroux has always been passionate about African life and politics, his recent project marks a shift in his focus. For the past decade, since his divorce from his first wife of 23 years, Theroux has been doing the literary equivalent of self-portraits.
Novels like “My Other Life” and “My Secret History” allowed him tomix pieces of his own biography with pure fiction. Theroux was able to explore alternate realities with questions like, “What if I had married another woman?” and “What if I hadn’t gone to Africa?” The death of his father (whose wedding ring Theroux wears on his watchband) in 1995 was further cause for introspection.
“Writers write about writers for all sorts of reasons, but the reason behind [my doing it] was: I left my family, left England, left my wife, and went to Hawaii,” Theroux says. “If you look at the work of a painter in a time of crisis, they are constantly doing self-portraits . . . Rembrandt, Van Gogh . . . but I think I’m out of it. I think I’m cured. I’ve medicated myself out of that.”
“Hotel Honolulu,” Theroux’s 25th novel, ends what he calls his “Being John Malkovich” period. The book centers on a thinly veiled version of himself, a writer who has burned all his bridges and finds himself managing a boutique hotel in Honolulu.
Described by Theroux as a cross between “Seinfeld” and “The Canterbury Tales,” “Hotel Honolulu” is a funny, poignant walk through the inter-woven lives (80 stories for 80 hotel rooms) of patrons in a corrupted paradise. Characters who haunt the hotel include the narrator’s wife, Sweetie, the illegitimate daughter of John F. Kennedy (“That’s a story based on hearsay,” Theroux says, “but reliable hearsay.”); Benno Nevermann, a detective collecting the biographies of his high school classmates; and Buddy, the jolly proprietor who writes love letters to his dead wife.
Home is where the heart is
“Hotel Honolulu” was also a chance for Theroux to write about the islands he calls home.
“Hawaii is a non-written about place. Hawaii has been characterized, I think inaccurately, as a place of hula dancers, Don Ho, mai tais and sunsets,” Theroux says. “I’ve lived for 11 years in a place which needed, I felt, to be given someplace in fiction.”
The publication of “Hotel Honolulu” also serves as a watershed moment in Theroux’s writing career. Although he’s best known for his dozen travelogues, Theroux considers himself a novelist first.
“I always think of travel writing and traveling as something I’ve done with my left hand,” Theroux says. “When you’ve written 24 fictional works, as I have, to write the 25th — it’s not like you’re baking another batch of cookies. I don’t want to repeat myself. I want to think that I’ve done something.”
