An ``imaginary memoir'' in which its author and other real people become the protagonists of fictional stories, from the prolific novelist and travel writer (Millroy the Magician, 1994; The Pillars of Hercules, 1995, etc.). It's an episodic recounting of particulars we know to be similar to the facts of Theroux's life: Peace Corps service in Africa, teaching in Singapore, longtime residence in London, and continuing critical and popular literary success. The contents are decidedly mixed. For example, a reminiscence of ``Paulie's'' eccentric Uncle Hal introduces us to a fly-by-night character too much like a male Auntie Mame to be either real or convincingly fictional; one chapter would seem to be an outtake from the author's British Isles travel book The Kingdom by the Sea (1983); and a farcical recurrence of coitus interruptus scenes appears designed to correct impressions created by Theroux's My Secret History (1989), a novel generally taken to be a confessional erotic autobiography. But there are several splendid chapters, including a keenly self-mocking account of ``Paul Theroux's'' tenure as an English teacher in a ``leper village'' in Malawi; descriptions of strained relations with a ``rapacious'' English socialite who collects and exploits young writers and with an older, enigmatic German writer; and amusingly delineated encounters with Anthony Burgess (``I never knew any writer who worked harder or was more generous''), and with Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip at a memorable London dinner party. If Theroux reaches no satisfactory conclusion about this passion for travel and impulse toward the condition of exile, he nevertheless writes lucidly about the process of writing—its unaccountable stops and starts, the unpredictable forms inspiration takes—and writing's influence on personality. Not one of its author's best books, but frequent infusions of wit and inventiveness rescue it from becoming (what it might otherwise have been) the Cliff's Notes version of the life and career of Paul Theroux. (First serial to the New Yorker & Granta; Book-of-the-Month Club selection; author tour)
Pub Date: Sept. 23, 1996
ISBN: 0-395-82527-X
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 1996
A quick-witted and ultimately hopeful look at what it takes to make a marriage last.
A couple decides to save their relationship by attempting an open marriage.
Jessica and Mitch Butler have a happy marriage. Well, happy enough. Married for years with two children, it’s inevitable that they won’t feel the swells of passion every day, right? But when their three best couple friends get divorced around the same time, Jessica and Mitch start to reevaluate things. They thought their friends’ marriages were fine, but something tore them all apart. And, naturally, Jessica and Mitch start to wonder if the same thing could happen to them. So, to stave off the divorce that now seems inevitable, they try something dramatic: an open marriage. More specifically, an “evolved” marriage, one that allows each of them to have sex with other people, with several rules in place (no repeats, no one they know, etc.). Jessica immediately hits it off with a young, sexy bartender who sweeps her off her feet, but Mitch has more trouble connecting with women. And both of them realize, with help from their divorced friends, that dating is a lot different now that apps are on the scene. Although Jessica and Mitch’s plan may be a bit out of the box, their relationship and feelings are believable. Norman (We’re All Damaged, 2016, etc.) also creates a plethora of rounded, quirky side characters, including Jessica’s teenage therapy patient Scarlett and Mitch’s nerdy student Luke. When all of those characters come together in the story’s climax, the result is a scene worthy of a Shakespearean comedy.
A quick-witted and ultimately hopeful look at what it takes to make a marriage last.Pub Date: March 17, 2020
ISBN: 978-1-984821-06-5
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Ballantine
Review Posted Online: Dec. 22, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A pleasingly dystopian exercise in building a world without social media—and without social graces, for that matter.
The past isn’t even past—but the one postmodern fictionalist Levin imagines is stranger than most.
Levin turns in a big, futuristic shaggy dog tale, except that the dog isn’t so shaggy. In fact, it’s a rather tidy, lovable little critter called a Curio, or “cure,” a sort of emotional support animal that lends itself to all kinds of bad treatment. In Levin’s future—or past, that is, since most of the action ranges between the early 1980s and the early 2010s—the technological advances we’ve become used to are absent: There are no iPhones, no internet, no Facebook. You’d think that such lacunae would make people feel happy, but instead strange forms of life have been concocted, with inanimate objects capable of feeling and voicing discontent and pain as well as acquiring some of the traits the humans around them possess. Levin’s hero in this overlong but amusing story is an alienated memoirist with the science-fictional name of Belt Magnet. But then, everyone in this story has an unusual moniker: Lotta Hogg, Jonboat Pellmore-Jason, Blackie Buxman, and so forth. His cure has the name Blank, “short for Kablankey, the name I’d given it, at my mother’s suggestion, for the sound of its sneeze.” By the end of the story, even though Blank is a mass-produced laboratory thing, the reader will care for him/it just as much as Belt does—and will certainly be shocked by the horrible things some of the characters do to the inanimate and lab-born things among them. Says a guy named Triple-J, brightly, “Let’s use those Band-Aids to Band-Aid a cure to the slide at the playground, throw some rocks at it from a distance, and see if something revolutionary develops—some new kind of Curio interaction that doesn’t end in overload, and that we never would have expected to enjoy.” If Levin’s point is that humans are rotten no matter what tools you put in their hands, he proves it again and again.
A pleasingly dystopian exercise in building a world without social media—and without social graces, for that matter.Pub Date: April 14, 2020
ISBN: 978-0-385-54496-2
Page Count: 784
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Jan. 12, 2020
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 1, 2020
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2025 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
