One of the best has to do with his henpeckedshoe-salesman father, who briefly frees himself from his wife’s suffocating influence by taking the part of Mr. Bones in a minstrel show. Paul Edward Theroux (born April 10, 1941) is an American travel writer and novelist, whose best-known work is The Great Railway Bazaar (1975). Travel essays take us to Ecuador, Zimbabwe, and Hawaii, to name a few. All of this seemingly in revenge for Jay’s failure to tell him that Jay had become seriously involved with a woman and had offered her a commitment ring.“Mother Land” is an exercise in mean-spirited score-settling. Mother Land is autobiographical fiction so thinly veiled that you wonder why Theroux even bothers changing the names. Theroux ends up assassinating all of his characters, but I still enjoyed the play.Stephen King on Paul Theroux’s Portrait of a Truly Horrible Mother They may not mean to, but they do.” I was reminded of my wife’s grandmother, watching me with gimlet eyes as I — then a very young man — staggered into her house with a load of luggage and baby paraphernalia.
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That’s a lot of ear-biting, and by the end of this exercise in self-regarding arrogance and self-pity, the reader may feel that his own ear has been savaged.All self-educated readers (that would be most of us) have holes in our curriculum vitae, and I’m no different. Donate $250 to support the print edition of our Quarterly Journal, and you’ll receive an annual subscription to the journal, along with all of the perks listed above, plus a limited edition tote. Alliances and allegiances shift and turn, rivalries and grievances simmer, and the dialogue and situations are so real that Like Theroux, I grew up in a big family (six kids) of talkers, not listeners.
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Jay has been twice married and divorced.
Buy this Book. It’s also fun. By Paul Theroux. Unlike Theroux — a successful author who owns homes in Hawaii and on the Cape — Jay’s books aren’t selling and he lives in a rented home near Mother and his siblings. As with some of the more gruesome Thomas Hardy novels (“Jude the Obscure” comes to mind), reading “Mother Land” is like watching a slow-motion car crash. And while I have a lot more affection for my mother and the rest of my family than he apparently does, I find that I’ve never read another book that better captures the tensions of existence in between the passing storm clouds of family feuds and rivalries. You’ll receive the Digital Edition of the Quarterly Journal, and a Reckless Reader card that offers discounts to participating bookstores, as a gift of our thanks.
But while there are differences between Theroux and his protagonist, some of the book’s richest material comes from areas where their paths convene. Upholding the family tradition of hostility, he agrees to review one of his brother Jay’s novels for Boston magazine and trashes it: “At best a beach read, a middlebrow brick just a step above Judith Krantz or Belva Plain… a bizzare chiasmus, a Rumplestiltskin prank,” its author a “name-promoting, self-absorbed” hack.
Mother Land by Paul Theroux review – vivid and vicious family vignettes. Published 05.09.2017 Eamon Dolan/Houghton Mifflin Harcourt 528 Pages. One of his sisters did indeed sell a book he had inscribed to her. (He hasn’t gone soft with age, either, recently taking on arduous overland trips to Central Asia and Africa for his I’ve been a faithful Theroux reader for 25 years, and have long been frustrated by Theroux’s refusal to tell his own story. Instead of speaking to her, he bit off a piece of her ear, spat it out and screamed, “You are the reason I’m here, about to die!”What follows this fable are 500 or so pages in which Justus bites not only his mother’s ear but those of six siblings. At the outset of this long slog, the narrator, J P (Jay) Justus, passes on a story his mother … Paul Theroux was one of my holes, a prolific writer I had always meant to get around to.
Paul Theroux writes: "If you’re looking for a theme in the book, or a point in the book, I wrote the book because over a 10-year period there were issues in my family that I was trying to understand." The party to celebrate Mother’s 90th birthday is only amusing, but the clambake in the assisted living facility where she celebrates her 102nd is downright hilarious, with the elderly children still sniping at one another in grammar-school argot. Creative types are supposed to enter a period of decline as they age, but somehow, against the odds, the old master Paul Theroux keeps getting better. In 'Mother Land,' Novelist Paul Theroux Creates A Portrait Of Himself “Swanking in the role of a comical slave,” Jay writes, “he’d become a frightening master to us.” The Mr. Bones tale was new to me, but will be familiar to many Theroux readers, as it has previously appeared in both The New Yorker and Theroux’s short story collection of the same name.The story of Jay’s older brother Floyd’s bedwetting is less funny (that fine line between humor and horror). The author insists that Jay isn’t a carbon copy of himself, but this beautifully crafted 509-page opus gives us plenty of insight into a large Catholic family on Cape Cod very much like Theroux’s, and furnishes us with an enjoyable opportunity to assess what’s fact and what’s fiction at each turn.The meat of the book follows Jay as he returns to the Cape in his 60s after two failed marriages, at a time when his career as a novelist and travel writer is sputtering. Mother Land - Kindle edition by Theroux, Paul. “What am I Theroux can tell a story when not occupied with his narrator’s need to enumerate old hurts and settle old scores.
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