Old man & the road

Lead review

Paul Theroux is in a suspiciously good mood in Deep South, his 10th travel book. You begin to wonder if, in his relative old age — Theroux is 74 — this inimitably caustic novelist and non-fiction writer is mellowing.

Deep South recounts road trips taken in Mississippi, South Carolina, Arkansas and elsewhere below the Mason-Dixon Line. Theroux is happy to be in the comfortable front seat of his own car, as opposed to the crowded and rickety buses and trains he’s used in other parts of the world.

He makes many friends. “That seemed to be the theme in the Deep South: kindness, generosity, a welcome,” he writes.

Point the urbane and skeptical Theroux, who lives on Cape Cod and in Hawaii, in the direction of churches and gun shows and you might expect sulfurous ironies. Not in this book.

At one gun show, amid the ammo, the camo and the casual racism, he remarks: “I was a stranger here, I didn’t know a soul, and so it was a relief to step inside this building and be welcomed by so many people.”

What’s going on here?

Deep South is Theroux’s 51st book and his first travel narrative about a piece of America. On his drives in the South, he avoids big cities and Magnolia-filled estates. “I kept to the Lowcountry,” he writes, “the Black Belt, the Delta, the backwoods, the flyspeck towns.”

Early on, you notice a certain defanged quality. More alarming are the slack passages, the repetitions, the lack of anything truly fresh to say. Theroux interviews so many people and shapelessly spills their words onto the page that I’d guess nearly a third of the talk is not his own.

You don’t embark on a Paul Theroux adventure to listen to other people speak. He has a penetrating mind and a puma-like style; he’s among the most consistently interesting writers of the last half-century. You want unfiltered Theroux, which is a kind of drug, a form of black tar heroin. There’s not enough of it here.

On his travels in Deep South, Theroux wants an eyeful of America’s underclass, what he calls “the submerged twenty percent,” and this he gets. He has travelled widely in Africa. One of this book’s refrains is how the South’s poorest towns, to his dismay, resemble those in the Third World.

He wonders why non-governmental organisations and philanthropists like Bill Gates and Bill Clinton speak so much about poverty elsewhere when there is so much of it right here. “Much of the South still hurts,” he writes, speaking of the still-resonant presence of the Civil War, “because a great part of the South is still poor.”

The good news about this book is that Theroux’s analytical mind does emerge, if in flashes, his intellect rotating like a lighthouse on a cliff.

He reads deeply in Southern literature and finds something “odd and evasive” in it, a lingering on the grotesque while avoiding “the bald facts of Southern life,” notably racism. He notes something “weirdly colonial” in the way so many hotels in the rural South are owned by Indians.

I have no idea why he attends four or five gun shows but not one college football game. This is poor decision-making; it leads to a sameness. He does observe that football, in the South, turns people into “colossal, monologuing, and rivalrous bores.”

Theroux has no feel for music. This is too bad, because as Greil Marcus wrote in Mystery Train (1975) about the entirety of Southern culture, “Only the music got away clean.”

Theroux doesn’t have much feel for Southern food, either, though he seems to enjoy his meat-and-threes. Less appetisingly, one small place features “a deep tray of okra, as viscous as frog spawn, next to a kettle of sodden collard greens looking like stewed dollar bills.”

Some readers may find his use of dialect problematic. (I am queasily on the fence about this issue. It’s not wrong to suggest how people sound, but where does attendance to reality end and condescension begin?) Early on, a man says to him, “Ah mo explain the South to you,” he writes. This is not a bad alternative title for this book.

Many people are quoted this way. Unforgettably, there is the preacher who uses the word “dildo” during a story about sexual misconduct. Theroux relates his pronunciation this way: “dee-aw-doh.”

This book contains evocative colour photographs by Steve McCurry, who plays Walker Evans to Theroux’s James Agee.

Near the end, Theroux admits: “It dawned on me slowly over months that to them I was an old man, who didn’t really count for much but who needed to be humoured or grudgingly respected. This response made me mutter and shake my head, because I didn’t feel old.”

These lines suggest another element, so prevalent in many of his earlier books, that is missing in Deep South: a sense of the author’s libido, his swagger.

“It was odd,” he writes, “never to be in the presence of temptation, no flirting, no romance, no promise of another life.”

Ah, well. The South warmed him up in other ways. “The good will,” he writes, “was like an embrace.”

Deep South
Paul Theroux
Penguin
2015, pp 464, Rs 599