How does Paul Theroux write the way he does?

March 22, 2008 4:27 PM

I like the prose style of Paul Theroux's travel writing. How's he do it? It seems very distinctive, but I can't quite put my finger on it. Anyone have any nuts-and-bolts insights into how he achieves those effects, both in terms of his prose mechanics and his "voice"?
posted by decoherence to media & arts (5 comments total)

Interesting question. I don't have a direct answer to it, but I can offer up an interview with Theroux in Michael Shapiro's A Sense of Place: Great Travel Writers Talk About Their Craft, Lives, and Inspiration. Here are a few of the questions he asks him:

"Can you discuss how you recall dialogue and translate it to the page?"

"...would you describe how you've applied the novelist's techniques to your travel writing and why you feel that's a more interesting approach?"

"How do you prepare for an assignment -- how much do you research a destination?"

"You don't travel with a camera or tape recorder -- why not?"

"How much is your travel writing colored by your mood?"

... and so on.
posted by nitsuj at 4:36 PM on March 22, 2008

In theory I should have a great answer to this question, since I taught Theroux to a first-year college creative writing class, but that was almost 15 years ago and my highly marked-up copy of The Mosquito Coast is in a box I haven't unpacked.

But here's the famous closing passage of that novel:

"The world was all right, no better or worse than we had left it -- though after what Father had told us, what we saw was like splendor. It was glorious even here, in this old taxicab with the radio playing."

which does give us a little bit of what makes PT so great. He's a very matter of fact writer -- few flourishes. A lot of one-syllable words. This gives him the opportunity to use the words "splendor" and "glorious" -- not easy words to write with a straight face! But in this passage, I think they succeed, because a) they stand out from the words around them, so feel a little earned; and b) by being embedded in a long section of simpler words (the world "no better," not "unimproved," the radio "playing," not "blaring"), the big abstractions are more tightly yoked to the real situation of the narrator -- it really does come off as glorious, this final, exhausted scene of this exhausting book. But glorious in an old and all right way.
posted by escabeche at 5:30 PM on March 22, 2008 [3 favorites]

He has a really strong sense of irony - about himself and everyone else. I'm not sure if this is true about The Mosquito Coast, but I feel like in a lot of his other books, he doesn't really take himself or the world too seriously - even when he is indignant or mad about something. His tone always sounds pretty detached to me, even though he is usually observing something in great detail.
posted by gt2 at 10:04 PM on March 22, 2008

In Dark Star Safari, he mentions a "dark star" at least every three pages.
posted by bluenausea at 4:56 AM on March 23, 2008

You may be interested in this article from yesterday's Guardian.
posted by gene_machine at 5:01 AM on March 23, 2008