My Other Life
Theroux, Paul
BOOKS IN REVIEW - "My Other Life" Paul Theroux: Many Masks, But Only One Life to Live My Other Life Paul Theroux Houghton Mifflin /456 pages / $24.95 REVIEWED BY M.D.Carnegie Uncle Hal hoards samovars and fish jaws, chomps...
...Ledeen shows how, at the very height of what ought to have been U.S...
...Grumpy because his marriage is already on the skids, and self-conscious about the paper clips he's using in place of his forgotten cufflinks, the hero finds himself cornered one-on-one with the grim Duke: Birdwood introduced me to the tall man who stood aloof, his hands behind his back, and then Birdwood withdrew...
...Rather, it was part of a global process of The American Spectator • December 199 6 81...
...At Freedom Betrayed: How America Led a Global Democratic Revolution, Won the Cold War, and Walked Away Michael A. Ledeen The AEI Press / 169 pages $24.95 REVIEWED BY David Aikman It was Karl Marx who inadvertently coined one of the most appropriate epithets for the decline and fall of the Soviet Empire: "History repeats itself the first time as tragedy, the second time as farce...
...political] parties to put together anything approximating a coherent post-Cold War foreign policy represents an extraordinary and unsatisfactory state of affairs...
...But just like the devil, the artifice (and the controversy) is in the details...
...Paul Theroux: Many Masks, But Only One Life to Live My Other Life Paul Theroux Houghton Mifflin /456 pages / $24.95 REVIEWED BY M.D.Carnegie Uncle Hal hoards samovars and fish jaws, chomps his tuna straight from the can, and ambles that sketchy line between a wee bit eccentric and totally bonko...
...That's Walter Cronkite," he snorts at the tube...
...He did not say anything...
...His smile was that of a man who is not comfortable...
...that of his creator...
...They weren't the only ones...
...And those hailstones," I said...
...How good is My Other Life...
...And his older brother Alexander, a lesser-known writer, trashed the book in Boston magazine, accusing Theroux of being (among other things) niggardly, a liar, a whore for celebrities like Bryant Gumbel, and an avid consumer of prunes...
...After the Soviet Union collapsed, he says, we all thought that we would see democracy triumphant everywhere...
...So far, so true...
...I don't know about the prunes, but his brother's dead wrong about this astonishing novel...
...This is a compelling thesis...
...The post-Soviet scenarios are still being played out...
...This was a man who knew how to express boredom...
...CARNEGIE is managing editor °file American Spectator...
...How much different has become a matter of hot dispute—the publication of one chapter in the New Yorker elicited an angry letter from Theroux's ex-wife, who denied that events took place as the author describes them...
...I imagine you were there," I said...
...Did granny truly mistake their thrashing for a hyena...
...He has tremendous powers of observation, his prose wears an understated elegance, and rarest of all, he has a gift for self-editing, a knack for paring a scene down to its essentials...
...For Ledeen, it's simple: Neither policy-makers, nor elites, nor the American public as a whole, have grasped what the post–Cold War era is really all about...
...He shrugged, and his deliberate snort, using both nostrils, meant, Of course...
...Hail to the Queen.' So amusing...
...Or, in his case, fellow Pauls: In one of the most moving sections of the book, the hero meets a German writer, Andreas Vorlaufer, of whom he has never before heard...
...In a used bookstore some months later, Paul discovers for the first time some ofVorlaufer's work, a short story that tells in aching detail of another formal and somewhat stiff dinner: that of the writer and his wife on the last night of their marriage...
...He hates me...
...He looked unbelieving...
...But you've been to New Guinea, Your Highness...
...Nor is he optimistic about the future: "The enemies of democracy are becoming stronger in much of the former Soviet Empire, and in some cases the very same men and women who inflicted the Communist terror are now returning to power, wrapped in a newfound mantle of democratic respectability...
...Granted that Bush never quite comprehended the historic events surrounding his own presidency, but what could the U.S...
...When it rained," I said...
...but the reader need pay no more attention to the postmodernist hall of mirrors than he need listen to the TV commentary to understand a tennis match...
...it in the New York Times Magazine, "The seven-year failure by both [U.S...
...As Owen Harries recently put DAVID AIKMAN is a former Time foreign correspondent...
...A lusty picaresque that does double duty as a serious meditation on the eternal questions, My Other Life is chockablock with the bubble and hum of life as it's lived: ribald, heartbreaking, darkly comic, preposterous often as not...
...Perhaps he meant weak jokes as well...
...I think the Brezhnev doctrine is dead," he explained...
...Such literary gaming is splashed like a background tint throughout My Other Life, yet Theroux is too fine a writer to bog his story down in self-conscious literariness...
...Ledeen calls it the "Age of the Second Democratic Revolution...
...seriously have done to prevent the re-emergence of the nomenklatura elites in the shaky post–Warsaw Pact republics of Eastern Europe...
...The problem is, how to explain this failure...
...With the deepest skepticism he said, "Do you really think so...
...The implication is that, for writer and reader alike, the pain and chaos of real life find order on the page...
...It's not exactly a flattering portrait of the Duke, but then Theroux is not especially sanguine about his fellow man...
...His seduction of the girl is one of the most exhilarating bedroom scenes I have ever read...
...as the narrator says later, "life has no apparent plot, and so it seems messier than fiction...
...it is another thing to influence the events that flow, often unpredictably, from them...
...Prince Philip did not ask me what I was working on...
...Certainly it is the most erotic mud-hut encounter to be found on any page anywhere...
...Howard Hughes was addicted to banana nut, which is another difference between us...
...Much older than Paul, Vorlaufer—his name means "forerunner"—appears already to have lived Theroux's life in duplicate...
...He's right...
...When the power went out in my building, I fumbled for my battery-powered laptop and switched it on to get light from the screen...
...As literary tricks go it's a neat one: We read about Theroux's breakup as he reads about it himself...
...It is impossible to see how it could matter to anyone other than Theroux's ex-wife...
...Almost every episode in the book is preoccupied in one way or another with the nature of identity...
...But it didn't happen, he insists, because "our leaders betrayed the Democratic revolution, abandoned our historic mission, and stood by as the forces of tyranny reestablished much of their evil sway...
...Dog biscuits are a favorite snack, but when it comes to ice cream it has to be frozen pudding...
...But the disaster in the Balkans is plain for all to see...
...Did the real Theroux make love to a black leper girl on the ground right next to her blind grandmother...
...Ledeen is at his most persuasive when arguing his larger thesis: that the collapse of Communism was not simply the consequence of Marxism-Leninism's inherent failure as a philosophical and economic system...
...An imaginary memoir" is what Paul Theroux calls My Other Life, "the story of a life I could have lived had things been different...
...self-assurance in surveying the collapse of Communism, President Bush, and his secretary of state James Baker, clung to a desire for "stability" not just within the foundering Soviet empire, but within collapsing Yugoslavia too...
...I did it my way...
...Sex is notoriously difficult to write about well, but then throughout a career that has spanned some thirty-odd books, Theroux has proven he can write superbly about most anything...
...Prince Philip said nothing...
...He shrugged again...
...But, as Michael Ledeen points out, Western intellectual elites have had a marvelous track-record of getting it wrong, whether in Russia, Eastern Europe, or elsewhere...
...In its place would be "The Sinatra Doctrine...
...That skill finds the dark comedy in another of the sections that has ignited a public brouhaha, a hilarious account of a dinner for the Queen of England and the Duke of Edinburgh...
...Like the real-life author, this fictional Theroux lives amid lepers in sub-Saharan Africa, teaches in Singapore, writes novels in London, and comes apart everywhere...
...Theroux is fiendishly smart, fond of the occasional whopper, and ambitious enough about his standing in Literature that he might easily have made My Other Life a very bad book—too clever by half, subsumed by the postmodernism and tone-deaf to human feeling...
...A number of readers took at face value a scene in which the Queen remarks indiscreetly on the "fuzzy wuzzy" hair of the prime minister of Papua New Guinea...
...Fascinating place...
...After his marriage snaps in two, he returns to the Massachusetts town of his birth and, newly single at 5o, tries to figure out how he ended up back where he started...
...But it may be over-simplified...
...Instead he has crafted a remarkable carnival of a novel: polished, profound, profane, prophetic...
...It is one thing to grasp a historical "knot," as Solzhenitsyn terms these tectonic global shifts...
...Still nothing...
...I did not want to stop reading...
...Many Western reporters thought this confirmed what a charming chap was now running the Kremlin, and how we really ought to do everything to keep him in power...
...Beginning with that comic sketch of Hal —who has written a masterpiece novel one is led to believe just might be the present volume—My Other Life recounts the story of one Paul Theroux, a writer whose biography seems identical to M.D...
...Get it...
...80 December 1996 • The American Spectator What Happened to the Great Democratic Revolution...
...When the tart-tongued Soviet foreign ministry spokesman Gennady Gerasimov was explaining to Western reporters in the fall of 1989 why Soviet tanks were not enforcing the survival of Communist gerontocrats of Eastern Europe, he coined a real doozy...
...Their books have the same titles, their holidays are spent in the same places...
...Nowhere near it," he said in a tone of tetchy surprise...
...Now he was the one looking hemorrhoidal...
...The Queen was just telling us a story about her speech in New Guinea," I said...
...Paul's books, he insinuated, were so many pieces of cow cake...
Vol. 29 • December 1996 • No. 12
