Wearing a crisp Panama hat and navy aloha shirt, Paul Theroux charged up the steps of the 1890 red-brick building on the Honolulu waterfront. Pausing for a moment to remove his sunglasses, he cut a dashing figure against the blue sky and glistening harbor before pushing open the glass door to Murphy’s Bar & Grill.
“I haven’t been in here before,” he said, taking his seat in a booth and looking around the old saloon with its polished brass, wood and mirrors and tables filled with business lunchers. It felt appropriate to meet the globe-trotting author, whose celebrated travel books include “The Great Railway Bazaar,” in the historic downtown district that has seen travelers from all lands.
The occasion for the interview was the publication of Theroux’s new novel, “Mother Land” (Houghton Mifflin, $28), about a family of late-middle-aged siblings dominated by their wily matriarch in Cape Cod, Mass. Rather than promoting his book, however, the author seemed more interested in talking about his life and 50-year literary career and the changes he’s witnessed during his 27 years in Hawaii.
There are several points of resemblance between the author and Jay, the narrator of “Mother Land”: Both are grandfathers and well-known writers who have publicly feuded with a writer brother (in real life, Alexander Theroux); both have two grown sons who live in England; and both have written scathing portraits of V.S. Naipaul, the Nobel Prize-winning Trinidadian writer of Indian descent who was a close friend to Theroux for 30 years.
Theroux, 76, denied “Mother Land” was an autobiographical novel. Unlike the manipulative, controlling matriarch portrayed in the book, “My mother was a very nice person,” he said. As for Jay, “That’s a fictional character. Where does he live? On the Cape all year in a rented house, not six months in Hawaii the way I do.”
Unlike Jay, Theroux owns his Cape Cod home, where he lives the other six months of the year.
Born and raised in Medford, Mass., a suburb of Boston, he speaks with a slight British accent from living in London for 17 years. He also has lived in Africa, where he went as a Peace Corps volunteer in 1962. His son Marcel was born in Uganda and his second son Louis in Singapore, where Theroux taught English literature at Singapore University from 1968 to 1971.
A gritty, unsentimental sense of place is a distinguishing element in all of Theroux’s books, from “The Mosquito Coast,” his novel about an American missionary family in a Central American jungle that was made into a 1986 film starring Harrison Ford, to “Deep South,” a 2016 memoir of his road trip through the contemporary American South.
Like his other travel books, which could be called the prototypical rough guides, “Deep South” is funny, scary and alive with vivid people and spontaneous talk. It takes you off the beaten path of assumption and cliche: Theroux is known for his blunt honesty and avoidance of touristic stereotypes. This has not made him friends in Hawaii, he said.
“One must not criticize, make distinctions, or engage in any subtleties when writing about Hawaii. Mention only the delightful weather and the sunshine and the spirit of aloha,” he said.
His 2001 novel “Hotel Honolulu,” about the fractious denizens of a Waikiki hotel with “eighty rooms nibbled by rats,” wasn’t popular here but is now in development for a TV series. In 2012, an article he wrote about his experiences in a rapidly urbanizing Hawaii filled with ethnic tensions appeared in Smithsonian magazine.
The article chronicled his ongoing and frequently rebuffed efforts to understand Hawaii.
“Local people say you don’t understand unless you live here. And I believe that,” he said. “If you’re not Hawaiian, you’re constantly reminded of it the way Hawaiians used to be reminded they weren’t haoles.
“To me, the kanaka maoli are the true aristocrats of Hawaii, not just the alii but all with koko (blood).”
While those who come here to live don’t always feel welcome, he agrees with that attitude “because (the Native Hawaiians) got to know who strangers are and realized no one has a good motive.”
An avid sea kayaker for many years, he wrote about paddling through the South Pacific and Hawaii in his 1992 travel book “The Happy Isles of Oceania,” where he found that westernization had taken its toll on natural resources and cultures.
In Hawaii, Theroux has run up against a local reluctance to share one’s own stories with anyone who might want to write or repeat them.
“This makes it hard for a writer like me, who is always felt to be ‘niele’ (nosy),” he said with deadpan delivery and a glint of irony in his watchful, dark eyes.
Theroux believes a writer should represent a place as it is and not as he or she wants it to be. And in this era of rapid redevelopment, one had better hurry up.
At times, conversation with Theroux felt like a combination of an undergraduate literature seminar and a first-year law class. Like a professor, he peppered his dialogue with questions.
“Do you know what an ahupuaa is? What’s two or more ahupuaa?”
He paused, then answered his own question: “Mokupuni.” A mokupuni, he said, is also an island.
“An island is a cluster of moku. Oahu is many separate islands.”
He gave some examples.
“Waipahu. I go there every couple weeks. I shoot at the rifle range.” He also shoots once a week at a gun range in Kakaako.
Another moku he visits is Waianae. Most recently, he took stand-up paddleboard lessons there for his birthday in April.
“I’ll bet there are people who live in Kahala who never go to Kailua, who live in Waimanalo and have never been to Waianae,” he said. “My point is that most communities, faiths, colleges and schools on Oahu are like islands, self-contained and self-interested.”
Rebuffing outsiders is one way locals try to guard themselves against the self-interest of newcomers, he said.
“People come to an island and want to take something away, enrich themselves.” For proof, he pointed to the newly built, multimillion-dollar condominiums in Kakaako and Ala Moana marketed to rich foreigners.
“Hawaii needs affordable housing, not luxury apartments,” he said.
Even worse, the skyscrapers block views of the mountains and the sea.
Theroux said he admires Kauai for the way its residents have resisted development.
“They don’t resist here. It depresses me, the overdevelopment. And there’s no leadership.”
Happily, even on Oahu, some places have been spared. After lunch, Theroux took a stroll up Nuuanu Avenue to King Street and, waiting for the traffic light, drank in the atmosphere of the bustling neighborhood and former red-light district.
“By some miracle, Chinatown, one of the oldest sections of Honolulu, still retains its architecture. It still looks like something sort of disreputable and artistic,” he said with a smile.
He pointed mauka to the 1901 Joseph Mendoza Building with the curved roof lines of its white, red-trimmed facade.
“A developer would say, ‘Rip it up.’ They think nothing of antiquity. If you showed a developer a heiau they’d say, ‘Condos.’”
He stopped to look in the window of Fook Sau Tong Chinese Medicine Co.
“They’d say, ‘Hey, let’s put a Starbucks here.’”
Crossing King Street to Oahu Market, its red awnings lowered against the afternoon sun, he studied the mangoes in the outdoor stalls.
“I often come here to buy fruit.”
If Somerset Maugham, who set his story “Rain’” in Honolulu, came back from the dead, he’d recognize Chinatown.
“It’s what Henry James called ‘the visitable past.’”
Thinking of Maugham and James, he grew reflective.
In London, Theroux said, he had liked “living in a place where there were so many serious readers and there was interaction between readers and writers.”
In Hawaii, his experience has been quite different.
“No one here has ever shown any interest in my experience as a writer,” he said. Apart from his wife, the publicist Sheila Donnelly, and a half-dozen literary friends, “People in Hawaii don’t read.”
When his companion disagreed, the writer’s voice turned professorial as he asked, “Have you read ‘Madame Bovary’? Have you read Conrad?”
He seemed disappointed when the answer was yes.
“Be positive,” he muttered, as if to himself, and began to talk about what he liked about Hawaii.
“I like the fact that the indigenous culture is active and vital here,” he said. “The reclaiming of the language, the language bouncing back from years of suppression.”
A people who cannot speak their language, he said, “have nothing, no real culture, only a sentimental view of their past that is full of inaccuracies.” He knows this firsthand because his grandmother was a Menominee, a Native American people who came to what is now Wisconsin 6,000 years ago and got similarly “bamboozled and cheated by the U.S. government.” He regrets that he does not know that language.
He likes his friends and his home on the North Shore, where he raises chickens for eggs “and geese who eat the grass and attack strangers.”
Although he’s hurt by what he believes to be a lack of interest in him locally as a writer, he likes that “I can have my anonymity here,” he said.
“If I lived in a city where people read books, it might be a drain. ”
Still, he seemed wistful about not being included in some of the other Oahu mokupuni, visit them though he might, beyond his moku on the North Shore.
He had much to offer, he said, as the author of articles, literary essays and movie scripts, four of them produced, as well as fiction and travel books. He has known leading writers, from William Styron to James Baldwin.
“This is not a boast, just a suggestion of my manao, or guiding knowledge,” he said.
In terms of age, “I am a kupuna — an elder. In terms of experience I am a kahuna — sometimes defined as a priest but also someone expert in a specific craft. But in fact I have no status at all, except as an anonymous haole, one of the many, grateful to live here.”
By the way, he added, he and V.S. Naipaul are friendly now.
As his novel “Mother Land” shows, no matter how horrific a situation and how alienated the members of a family — or community — there is hope for reconciliation and change.
“I love it here,” he said. “I’ve lived in Hawaii longer than anywhere else in my life.”
With that exit line, in the hopes of beating rush-hour traffic, he set off to pick up a bag of chicken feed at a South Beretania Street shop before heading home.
