2007.11.11: November 11, 2007: Headlines: COS - India: Figures: COS - Malawi: Writing - Malawi: New York Times: Walter Kirn writes: Paul Theroux is the thinking person’s James Michener, a globe-hopping chronicler of distant lands whose stories, some reported, some invented, aim to inform and broaden, not merely engage, and permit the armchair voyager to stamp new visas in his intellectual passport

Peace Corps Online: Directory: Malawi: Special Report: RPCV Paul Theroux: Paul Theroux: Newest Stories: 2007.11.11: November 11, 2007: Headlines: COS - India: Figures: COS - Malawi: Writing - Malawi: New York Times: Walter Kirn writes: Paul Theroux is the thinking person’s James Michener, a globe-hopping chronicler of distant lands whose stories, some reported, some invented, aim to inform and broaden, not merely engage, and permit the armchair voyager to stamp new visas in his intellectual passport

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Walter Kirn writes: Paul Theroux is the thinking person’s James Michener, a globe-hopping chronicler of distant lands whose stories, some reported, some invented, aim to inform and broaden, not merely engage, and permit the armchair voyager to stamp new visas in his intellectual passport

Walter Kirn writes: Paul Theroux is the thinking person’s James Michener, a globe-hopping chronicler of distant lands whose stories, some reported, some invented, aim to inform and broaden, not merely engage, and permit the armchair voyager to stamp new visas in his intellectual passport

"Theroux’s new book of three novellas, “The Elephanta Suite,” is his attempt — brought off with mixed results but distinguished by worthy intentions and sturdy tradecraft — to display and explain contemporary India in all its swarming, seductive, anachronistic, disorienting dynamism. India’s contradictions seem to interest him most, especially its peculiar combination of ancient ascetic spirituality and information-age commercialism. Over here an ashram or a temple devoted to the quest for inner enlightenment or the veneration of Hindu gods, across the way a modern call center that fields complaints from Home Depot customers. Theroux hints in the book that India’s native novelists — or at least those who’ve won wide acceptance in America — have failed in some way to convey their country’s complexities, perhaps by emphasizing its picturesque folkways and exotic domestic customs as a way of enchanting Western readers. Theroux presumes to correct this situation by stripping some romance from the place." Author Paul Theroux served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in Malawi in the 1960's.

Walter Kirn writes: Paul Theroux is the thinking person’s James Michener, a globe-hopping chronicler of distant lands whose stories, some reported, some invented, aim to inform and broaden, not merely engage, and permit the armchair voyager to stamp new visas in his intellectual passport

Subcontinental Drift

By WALTER KIRN

Published: November 11, 2007

Paul Theroux is the thinking person’s James Michener, a globe-hopping chronicler of distant lands whose stories, some reported, some invented, aim to inform and broaden, not merely engage, and permit the armchair voyager to stamp new visas in his intellectual passport. Theroux delivers richer prose than Michener, subtler insights and slyer dilemmas, but he resembles the late mass-market master of narrative geography by treating societies as his true protagonists while giving his characters (in his novels, at least) the auxiliary role of inciting, observing or acting out the conflicts latent in their surrounding cultures. Art for art’s sake isn’t Theroux’s bag, and it needn’t be, of course. He likes to lecture a little between the lines, to show off the artifacts gathered during his travels and speculate on their significance.

Theroux’s new book of three novellas, “The Elephanta Suite,” is his attempt — brought off with mixed results but distinguished by worthy intentions and sturdy tradecraft — to display and explain contemporary India in all its swarming, seductive, anachronistic, disorienting dynamism. India’s contradictions seem to interest him most, especially its peculiar combination of ancient ascetic spirituality and information-age commercialism. Over here an ashram or a temple devoted to the quest for inner enlightenment or the veneration of Hindu gods, across the way a modern call center that fields complaints from Home Depot customers. Theroux hints in the book that India’s native novelists — or at least those who’ve won wide acceptance in America — have failed in some way to convey their country’s complexities, perhaps by emphasizing its picturesque folkways and exotic domestic customs as a way of enchanting Western readers. Theroux presumes to correct this situation by stripping some romance from the place.

The first novella, “Monkey Hill,” belongs to that genre of ominous travel stories typified by Paul Bowles’s “Sheltering Sky.” Take two decadent Yankees, goes the recipe, send them abroad in search of kicks and watch with mounting trepidation as their blindness to cultural nuances, their first-world illusions of invulnerability and their reckless sensuality lure them into dark and fatal corners where their traveler’s checks and consulates can’t save them. The blithe, doomed hedonists in this case are Beth and Audie Blunden, a rich couple who’ve come to India to recharge their depleted Type-A metabolisms at an Ayurvedic spa. This serene little Xanadu of holistic healing stands, securely walled off, atop a hill below which lies a hard-luck village racked by political and religious turmoil involving a shrine to Hanuman, the Hindu monkey god, that has displaced a Muslim mosque.

The Blundens are oblivious to this strife. They’re too busy being purged of toxins and having their chakras unclogged by submissive Indian therapists. The novella’s action is oddly passive in that it largely consists of yoga sessions and massages during which the Blundens meditate about the essence of their erotic natures and the vagaries of their complicated marriage. Soon enough, they grow infatuated with two of the spa’s attractive young Indian staff members. Furtive liaisons are arranged and, step by apprehensive step, the blundering Blundens descend the hill from their sanitary sanctuary into the grimy alleys of the village.

In Kipling’s time East was East and West was West, and never the twain should meet, but in Theroux’s new India, where jumbo-jetloads of Americans arrive every day to do business and do the guru-tour, such meetings happen all the time. Inevitably, some of them don’t end well. When the Blundens are lulled by their rubdowns at the spa into believing that deeper contacts can be experienced (at bargain prices) in the slums beyond its gates, their destruction is certain and comes as no surprise. When a writer immerses two standard Ugly Americans in a mob of central-casting hungry natives, he may as well be boiling an egg. Just set the timer and wait three minutes. The problem with “Monkey Hill,” though, is that the heat is set too low and the cooking takes too long. The Blundens’ interludes on the massage table and in the yoga room have the effect of slowing time even further. By the time the author finally serves up his pampered baby boomers to the starving native masses — the way of all flesh in such morality tales of Western arrogance — our hunger for their destruction has turned to surliness. Die already, you pampered brats. Go, cannibals! What’s most frustrating of all, though, is Theroux’s decision to halt the story just as the longed-for violence begins, a breach of narrative dramatic law. Shorter massages and a longer riot, please.

The most satisfying novella of the collection, “The Gateway of India,” adheres to a storytelling formula almost as familiar as the one in “Monkey Hill”: an identity swap between a pair of opposites, each of whom comes to covet the other’s traits and tire of his own. Theroux’s skills as a researcher and amateur anthropologist are put to good effect here as he traces a shy, germaphobic young Boston lawyer’s introduction to Indian business practices, Indian sexual morality and, over time, after many misadventures, the principles of Jainism, an ancient religious sect devoted to vegetarianism, austerity and radical gentleness toward other creatures, including insects and even microbes.
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THE ELEPHANTA SUITE

By Paul Theroux.

274 pp. Houghton Mifflin Company. $25.
Related
First Chapter: ‘The Elephanta Suite’ (November 11, 2007)

Dwight Huntsinger’s shift from global capitalist to solitary seeker, from tool to disciple, commences in Mumbai, where he’s nailing down outsourcing deals for his firm’s clients. He’s scared to eat the funny-looking food, he’s frustrated by the Indian lawyers’ obsession with contractual minutiae and he’s overwhelmed by the sight of the great throngs visible from the windows of tall, air-conditioned buildings. Mumbai, to a man of Dwight’s temperament, is hell. “He had dreaded it, and it had exceeded even his fearful expectations — dirtier, smellier, more chaotic and unforgiving than anywhere he’d ever been. ‘Hideous’ did not describe it; there were no words for it. It was like an experience of grief, leaving you mute and small.”

When his firm forces Dwight to make a second trip, the teeming city grabs him by the sleeve and drags him down into its reeking depths. It culturally rapes him, in a sense, and, astonishingly, he enjoys it, particularly after taking as a mistress a street-smart young waif who frees his blocked libido in return for money he’s glad to pay and ethical compromises he’s happy to make. One of Theroux’s running theses about India is that it punishes those who stand apart from it but transfigures those who fully submit to it. What looks like a cesspool of concentrated misery can be, for those who bravely bathe in it, an existential baptismal font. India doesn’t cleanse people of their sins so much as revive their elemental humanity. For inhibited, neurotic Dwight, this means enabling him to sin and, later on, when his vices attract the notice of his strict Jainist colleague, Shah, to acknowledge the pain they’ve caused him and seek serenity. That Shah sets Dwight on the straight path just as he’s straying from it himself (having returned from his first trip to America, Shah is wearing a tie in Harvard colors and brimming with ambition and greedy schemes) is a twist that Michener might have envied but probably couldn’t have brought off so naturally. It’s also Theroux’s retort to Kipling, who didn’t foresee that free trade and easy travel would help the East and West not only to meet but, in some ways, to exchange their essences.

Walter Kirn is a regular contributor to the Book Review. His latest novel is “The Unbinding.”




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Story Source: New York Times

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