Mother Land

Paul Theroux Penguin €13.70

Jay Justus, a writer closely modelled on Theroux, recalls his early life on Cape Cod and the roots of the ‘recreational sadism’ practised among his six siblings, abetted by the canny cruelty and favourite-playing of ‘Mother’. A novelist known for drawing on his family, Theroux seems to go beyond the pale here. Painfully repetitious, the narrative consists of countless visits to the matriarch and endless pettiness, insults and feuding (including quotes from Alexander Theroux’s famously vicious review of one of his brother’s earlier novels). Scarce moments of humour and insight hardly relieve the splenetic slog of this bloated whinge-fest.