Summary: Good afternoon everyone and welcome to another edition of The Avid Reader. Our guest today is Paul Theroux, who to most of you needs no introduction. He is a renowned novelist, short story writer and perhaps is most well known as a travel writer whose The Great Railway Bazaar back in 1975 was a seminal work that influenced pretty much every travel writer since. He has written over 30 novels and short story collections, many adapted for the screen and about 20 non-fiction works, mostly devoted to travel, with the last being his Deep South in 2015, documenting his travels through the southern states of this country. Today we will be discussing with him Mother Land, published just last week by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. There are two ways that one could begin a discussion of Motherland. You could be a casual reader who happens into my bookstore, sees the book on the front table exhibited prominently and falls in love with the cover, and it is a striking one, not knowing who Paul Theroux is, or just vaguely recognizing the name and pick up the hefty (over 500 pages) book and deciding after reading the blurbs and jacket that the story of a large dysfunctional family over a series of decades, narrated by what may be a slightly unreliable brother is just what suits his fancy on that day. OR>>>>>>>> You could come into the bookstore knowing lots about Paul Theroux. How the number and members of his family almost exactly mirror the number and members of the family in Motherland, including his 103 year old mother. How Paul wrote two stories that appeared in the New Yorker, the first The Best Year of My Life in 2005 and the second Upside-Down Cake in 2016 (set 30 years apart). Both of which stories find their way into Mother Land. You might know that Paul is father to British authors and filmmakers Marcel and Louis and is the brother of authors Alexander and Peter. And Uncle of the American Actor and screenwriter Justin Theroux married to Jennifer Anniston. You would also know that Paul, decades ago, wrote a kind of autobiography My Other Life, that his then wife took umbrage to and wrote a letter to The New Yorker, objecting to certain aspects of the story. And Paul’s brother Alexander wrote a scathing review of My Other Life, which finds its way, sometimes verbatim into Mother Land. So scathing that it is sometimes held up as an example of the nastiest of all brother/brother diatribes. Mother Land contains all of Paul’s family, except you can’t really be sure if that is the case or not. For someone who has followed his career, it kind of confusing. As Paul’s Wikipedia entry states, “By including versions of himself, his family and acquaintances in some of his fiction, Theroux has occasionally disconcerted his readers. Well he certainly has this one. As Paul has said in the past, he thinks of his fiction as “my life, with liberties”. Bottom line is it is a fascinating hilarious mean-spirited book that keeps you on your toes, intimately involved with the characters and unfortunately if you have to get up early almost requires that you read it in one sitting. At least, to my own dismay, I did.
