Review by New York Times Review
IT'S BEEN 40 YEARS since the publication of Paul Theroux's "The Great Railway Bazaar," a vivid, witty, hugely entertaining account of his solo four-month journey, mostly by rail, from London to Tokyo to Moscow and back again. He had already published more than half a dozen novels and a collection of stories by the time that book appeared. (He has said he wrote it simply because he'd run out of ideas for fiction, a failure of imagination that was clearly fleeting; he has published some two dozen volumes of fiction since.) When "The Great Railway Bazaar" became a best seller, it helped establish its author as the best-known American travel writer of his time. Over the intervening years, Theroux has written accounts of similarly improbable journeys through Central and South America, Britain, China, Oceania, the Mediterranean and Africa. Each of them, as he said of the first, is "a thick book with lots of people in it and lots of dialogue and no sightseeing." He is armed with bottomless curiosity, a novelist's eye for setting and a novelist's uncanny ear for recreating conversations. His admirers have compared him to his literary fellow travelers Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens, Mark Twain and his mentor and sometime antagonist, V. S. Naipaul. His detractors accuse him of being too much at the center of things, tossing off one-line dismissals of whole nations and sometimes displaying a prickliness his own publisher once tried to soften by calling him "endearingly irascible." Theroux himself has summarized the appeal of books like his: "Most travel narratives ... describe the miseries and splendors of going from one remote place to another. The quest, the getting there, the difficulty of the road, is the story; the journey not the arrival matters, and most of the time the traveler - the traveler's mood, especially - is the subject of the whole business. I have made a career out of this sort of slogging and selfportraiture, and so have many others in the old laborious look-at-me way that informs travel writing." In "Deep South," Theroux set out to do something different. This time, he would travel within his own country, through some of the poorest sections of the rural South - the Lowcountry of South Carolina, Alabama's Black Belt, the Mississippi Delta and the Arkansas Ozarks. Instead of climbing aboard a train or pushing off in a kayak, he would drive, and rather than pick a destination, he would meander, visiting and revisiting the same "smaller places and huddled towns" through four seasons. A road trip in America is a "picnic," he writes. "In the travel narrative of struggle, I was not the struggler. I was the bystander or the eavesdropper, recording other people's pain or pleasure. I knew very little discomfort, never sensed I was in any danger. No ordeals, few dramas." The result is a leisurely, even languid book, reiterative and sometimes simply forgetful. We're told twice why so many motels are owned by members of the Patel clan from Gujarat, and are twice offered some of Nelson Algren's well-worn advice to travelers: "Never eat at a place called Mom's, never play cards with a man called Doc." One gun show is pretty much like the next, and the author chooses to visit three of them. I lost count of the number of times he suggests that a crossroads cluster of beat-up buildings reminds him of villages he had known in Africa. Discursive asides about everything from the many meanings of the "N-word" to the moral failings of William Faulkner slow the narrative. Although a portfolio of color photographs by Steve McCurry appears at the back of the book, there are no maps, so it's hard to remember where we've been or understand where we're headed. Yet Theroux's eye for landscape remains as sharp as ever. "Some days in the Delta," he writes, "the river was the only vivid feature in a landscape that seemed otherwise lifeless - no leaves stirring, no people in motion, cattle like paper cutouts, hawks as black as marks of punctuation in the sky; the monumental stillness of the rural South in a hot noontime, all of it like a foxed and sun-faded masterpiece of flat paint, an old picture of itself." but in the end it's Theroux's remarkable gift for getting strangers to reveal themselves that makes going along for this ride worthwhile. "The people are hospitable," he observes; "they are talkers, and if they take to you, they'll tell you their stories." His storytellers include people for whom the Civil War still seems like yesterday and others for whom the promises of the civil rights movement already seem like ancient history. There are black preachers and sullen white bigots, dirt farmers and factory workers who have seen their jobs disappear, many of them encountered in establishments with names like Doe's Eat Place and O Taste and See. The cumulative effect of their testimony echoes the author's finding that for all the warmth and courtesy they showed him, for all their pride and for all the richness of their culture, "these poor folk are poorer in their way ... and less able to manage and more hopeless than many people I had traveled among in distressed parts of Africa and Asia." For Theroux, the fact that the federal government and private philanthropies are willing to provide aid to unfortunates overseas but seem uninterested in improving the plight of those at home is evidence that "though America in its greatness is singular, it resembles the rest of the world in its failures." ? GEOFFREY C. WARD'S latest book, written with Ken Burns, is "The Roosevelts: An Intimate History."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [October 4, 2015]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* The idea that Theroux is one of the preeminent travel writers today needs neither proof nor explanation at this point in his distinguished career, but just in case some doubters do exist out there and raise their voices in objection to such an accolade, his latest travel memoir should quiet even the strongest of reservations. On several trips through the American South, a place Theroux admits he was unfamiliar with and thus knew little about, and as he eschewed visits to major cities and tourist attractions, choosing instead country roads (obviously also avoiding planes and airports), his experiences reinforced his conviction that the truest way to travel is the old way, the proud highway, the rolling road. His intended interviewees, the people he wanted to talk to and learn from about the nature of being a southerner, were the underclass. Who best would know what distinctive southern life was like than the submerged twenty percent. Contradictions abound in the South he explored, but just as those conflicts were the enticement for his repeated visits, they also represent the allure of this rigorous, poised, serious, and pulsing-with-life exploration of all aspects of the multisided American South. High-Demand Backstory: Theroux's books always appear on the best-seller list, and his latest may prove to be his most popular book yet.--Hooper, Brad Copyright 2015 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
Travel writer Theroux (Ghost Train to the Eastern Star) finds the traveling easier and his insights more penetrating in this engrossing passage through the South. Celebrating the wonders of American driving-no more rattle-trap trains or jam-packed buses-the New England native recounts several road trips from South Carolina through Arkansas, circling back to revisit places and people in a way he couldn't on his treks across foreign continents. His relaxed schedule lets him forget the journey and, instead, immerse himself in destinations that seem both familiar and strange ("Jesus is lord-we buy and sell guns," reads a billboard). Avoiding tourist traps, Theroux seeks out gun shows, church services, seedy motels, and downscale diners such as Doe's Eat Place, in Greenville, Miss.; he insistently probes the legacy of slavery and Jim Crow, and the appalling poverty of back-road towns abandoned by industry. All this emerges through vivid, novelistic reportage as he gently prods people for their stories, reveling in their musical dialects, mapping the intersections of personal experience and tragic history that give the South "a great overwhelming sadness that [he] couldn't fathom." Free of the sense of alienation that marked his recent travelogues, this luminous sojourn is Theroux's best outing in years. Color photos. Agent: Andrew Wylie, Wylie Agency. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
Theroux's (The Mosquito Coast; Ghost Train on the Eastern Star) title takes us on a trip to a part of the South few seek out. He avoids big cities such as Atlanta and New Orleans and heads to the Deep South: Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana, -Arkansas, Georgia, and South Carolina. The author visits, several times in some cases, a number of the poorest cities and communities in the nation. The result is a socially conscious travelog, with a good deal of Southern history thrown in, including literature, race relations, and economics. Theroux writes of the people he meets with sympathy and verve, and though many seem to fit Southern stereotypes, they still come across as genuine on the page. It's the people of the Deep South-from the frat boys and Southern preachers to African American farmers and local officials-working to save their small towns who bring this book to life. VERDICT A literary travelog that will interest readers of Southern history and literature and anyone with an interest in American urban history and the plight of the poor. [See Prepub Alert, 3/30/15.]-Sara Miller Rohan, Archive Librarian, Atlanta © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
An acclaimed travel writer and novelist's engrossing account of his journey through the Deep South. During his long, fruitful career, Theroux (Mr. Bones: Twenty Stories, 2014, etc.) has traveled to many exotic locations all over the world. Yet 50 years after he began as a travel writer, he was suddenly seized with a longing to travel through the hominess of the American South. Driving along rural highways and deliberately bypassing "buoyant cities and obvious pleasures," he sought out the sights and people that he believed would help him understand a remarkable but profoundly troubled region. The green landscapes of the Deep South still included tobacco and cotton fields, both of which stood as reminders of the "persistence of history." Even the many gun shows that Theroux visited seemed to recall the Old South's preoccupation with defending not only its soil, but also its values against incursions from the North. For African-Americans, churches still served as spaces of "focus and respite from a hostilemajority [white] culture." Memories of slavery and segregation even persisted in the geography, with whites living in the hills and mountains and blacks primarily inhabiting the agricultural flatlands. What stirred Theroux the most, however, was how so many of the places he observed resembled "what [was] often thought of as the Third World." Despite encounters with lingering racism and deeply entrenched social and economic problems, the author found a warm welcome almost everywhere he went. Everyonefrom barbers and welfare families to preachers and politiciansshowered him with kindness, generosity, and, more often than not, stories. Broken by history but rich in culture and spirit, the South that Theroux came to know was "a dream, with all a dream's distortions and satisfactions." As thoughtful as it is evocative, the book offers insight into a significant region and its people and customs. An epically compelling travel memoir. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
