The picture of author Paul Theroux on a Hawaiian beach, reading a comic literary noir by Muriel Spark, is one of many vivid vignettes in “Figures in a Landscape: People & Places,” his new book of essays written from 2001 to 2016.
Out next month from Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, it’s filled with acerbic, funny and insightful accounts of travel, reading and people.
The title comes from a Francis Bacon painting of a person huddled in long grass, evoking the solitude and discomfort Theroux seeks on the road.
“FIGURES IN A LANDSCAPE: PEOPLE AND PLACES”
By Paul Theroux (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $28
“That I am a well-off, fairly old, semi-well-known writer who can afford to fly first class and rent nice cars and stay in good hotels makes it all the more important that I travel in old clothes, on a small budget, on a bus or train or cattle truck.”
He enjoys chance meetings with common folk and avoids fact-finding junkets with “duck-butted legislators.”
Habitually a solo traveler, when Theroux joins a tour to the Amazon to try a psychotropic drug William Burroughs wrote about, he ends up fleeing a ruined jungle and the neediness of his fellow eco-tourists.
On his own, the author goes to Zimbabwe after white farmers were evicted and before Mugabe crushed the opposition. And he remembers some scary days he spent in Zambia 40 years ago as a household captive and sex slave.
“Figures” also includes literary essays on Somerset Maugham, Graham Greene, Paul Bowles and others, and profiles of a dominatrix, “street neurologist” Oliver Sacks, Robin Williams, Elizabeth Taylor and Hunter S. Thompson, who “loved Hawaii for its fine weather and its air of tolerance and its remoteness.”
A telephone interview with Michael Jackson reveals, among other things, a fellow reader of Maugham. There is an essay about E. B. White raising geese, which Theroux does at his North Shore home. There is tea in Manhattan with Dame Muriel Spark.
In short, there is something for everyone.
Several of these essays have been previously published; “Hawaii: Islands upon Islands” first appeared in Smithsonian magazine. In it, Theroux, a Hawaii resident six months out of the year, describes feeling snubbed by local people but concludes, “I wouldn’t mind dying in Hawaii, which means I like living here.”
While he describes writing fiction as a hard slog in the dark, the author of 31 books of fiction and 19 of nonfiction has no patience for writers who complain.
“Compared with a real job, like coal mining or harvesting pineapples or putting out wildfires or waiting on tables, writing is heaven.”
His talky, big-hearted book will make a heavenly companion at the beach.
