MOTHER LAND

‘Theroux is the imperfect laureate of our endless imperfections’

Hamish Hamilton, 509pp, £20, Oldie price £13.24 inc p&p Paul Theroux, now 76, is still impressively prolific, turning out novels, travel books and journalism. ‘How on earth has he managed to keep it up?’ asked Ian Sansom, reviewing his latest novel, Mother

Land, in the Guardian. The answer, according to Sansom, is the author’s prodigious capacity for ‘fury, rage and spite’. His feuds with family and fellow writers are legendary and ‘Theroux’s great hurts and rages may be difficult to behold but they are nothing if not readable. Critical often to the point of self-harm, his work has never flinched from attempting to tell the truth, as he sees it, about places and people. He is the imperfect laureate of our endless imperfections.’

Mother Land, the story of a family of dysfunctional elderly siblings still dominated by a monstrous matriarch, is close to autobiographical. Alex Clark in the Observer wondered if it was ‘an act of projection too far’. James Marriott in the Times found the characters ‘superheroes of spite and petty resentment … less like individual siblings and more like a swirling current of toxic emotional energy’.

Clark thought it ‘a phenomenally strange novel, maybe one of the most repetitive I’ve ever read, with words (indirection, teasing, frugal), accusations and anecdotes recurring to the point of fatigue. Is this an echo of the nature of family life, of our ability to nurse grudges and fuel hobbyhorses, or just writerly indiscipline?’ In the New York Times, fellow novelist Stephen King also picked up on the repetitions in what he called ‘an exercise in meanspirited score-settling’: ‘Anything the narrator Jay says is worth saying at least twice (or a dozen times).’ But King, like most of the other reviewers, couldn’t help being swept along on Theroux’s irresistibly spit-flecked and rancorous rollercoaster. ‘I kind of enjoyed it.’