contact with Paul?

Jon D. Evers · Paul Theroux Aficionado Joined: 03 May 2005 Posts: 26

has anyone ever written this hero and gotten a response? With a wife, thousands of bees and lots of honey, books to write, books writting themselves in his head, lousy book tours, and daily kayaking, he would not have time (not to mention all of the traveleling and dissconnection he suffers thru ) to get back to his insane freak club fans. I think Paul is: An Underated Very Important American And National Writer.

whitezulu · Posted: Tue Jun 14, 2005 7:40 pm Post subject:

Not being an American, I am curious about Theroux' status in America. Is he a National writer? Is he up there with Graham Greene and V. S. Naipaul or John Updike with the literati? What would the man in the street answer if you asked him?

Lance Kirk · Joined: 16 Jun 2005 Posts: 3 Location: Singapore

whitezulu,

I think you're asking the wrong people. Anyone who logs into this forum has a skewed view of PT. I've read nearly all of his books over the past few years and can no longer how I perceived him before I started. I'm an avid reader and used to work in a bookstore, so I knew his best seller was Mosquito Coast and Picture Palace was a remainder at the time I was in the book store. Other than that, I knew he wrote travel books. I'm not entirely certain the "man in the street" would recognize PT's name. If they do, it's probably in connection with Mosquito Coast.

LK

Diana L Boeckmann · Posted: Fri Jun 17, 2005 10:41 pm Post subject: theroux's status

I can give the view from academia. Theroux is not widely read in English departments, although some of his works appear at the Association for Literature and Environment (ASLE) website at www.asle.umn.edu/syllabi. Also, some of his works appear in syllabi collected at The Postcolonial Web; sorry don't have the URL to hand.

There are several reasons why Theroux is not "canonical" in American Universities, but my top reason is that it's because he is a living white man, as opposed to a dead one.

Anyway, the time is write for Theroux in academia. My goal is to institutionalize him by writing the great American criticism of one of his books.

Rock on, fans!

Di

whitezulu · Posted: Fri Jul 01, 2005 5:41 pm Post subject:

diana

I think you should write something about the faction and fiction in his books, which I believe in the end is the big thing with Theroux together with him revitalizing the the great travel book genre.

After all, I find myself most curious not about his signle books, but by what is real and what is fiction in anything he writes. In the end, I am curios if he knows himself....

This is i big question in liteature, and I find noone doing it more therouxogly than Theroux.

M.L.Johnson · Posted: Wed Jul 13, 2005 8:12 pm Post subject:

Among my friends, I'm the only one I know of that is avidly admiring of Theroux--but granted, I'm no social butterfly. Still, I bring him up in literary conversations as much as I can--still trying to convert the uninitiated. Individual taste has something to do with it, I imagine. Even my English major friends haven't read him. But most of them haven't read Greene, either--they tend to go for other fodder.

My personal opinion? As Lance said, I doubt the man-on-the-street (whomever he is) wouldn't know who Theroux is--but if you mentioned Mosquito Coast, they'd be liable to say "Harrison Ford".

You can lead a horticulture but you can't make her think, as someone once said...(Parker?)...

drchris · Posted: Mon Jul 25, 2005 7:31 am Post subject: I wrote once but to no avail

I recall writing to PT once (in care of the publisher) when I first discovered his material and was young and naive enough to believe I would get a response. Perhaps a better address would have worked but how on earth would you find it? Possibly: PT, care of Hawaii?

lesliet · Joined: 28 Nov 2006 Posts: 1

Once, I saw Paul Theroux speak at UMASS/Amherst..spring of 1990, I think. He seemed a little anxious. He was funny, interesting..had inspiring stories, and he quoted part of a DH Lawrence poem, I think, about parents. "God damned our parents" and what they do to us..or something like that. I tried to find the DH Lawrence poem later but never did. I read sometime later that his parents had come to the event with him.

I knew the UMASS English professor who introduced Paul Theroux at the event, so the next day I went to the professor's office and asked for Paul Theroux's address so that I could write him a letter. He gave me Paul Theroux's address on the Cape. I asked the professor if he thought PT would mind if I wrote him a letter. The professor said .... I can't remember what the professor said, but I never wrote Paul Theroux, and I lost my address book a few months later w/PT's address in it. Sorry.