Books, Arts & Manners: Sordid and Exotic

Sunrise with Seamonsters, by Paul Theroux (Houghton Mifflin, 365 pp., $38.95) The Imperial Way, by Paul Theroux, photographs by Steve McCurry (Houghton Mifflin, 143 pp., $19.95)

Paul Theroux, like most modern travel writers following in the tradition of D. H. Lawrence and Graham Greene, has shifted the center of interest from the external world to the self and made his books seem spontaneous revelations of his own feelings and thoughts. Subjective and impressionistic, he sees the natural world with the imagination as well as with the eye. He prefers a rough rather than a formal journey, popular rather than high culture, colloquial rather than mandarin style. Instead of romanticizing and glorifying his experience, he is engagingly frank whenever he suffers backward and brutal people, boring journeys, and self-created torments. “A man of the world,” Theroux writes, “is never content anywhere.”

About the Author

Jeffrey Meyers

Mr. Meyers is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and the author of John Huston: Courage and Art.

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Sunrise with Seamonsters, by Paul Theroux (Houghton Mifflin, 365 pp., $38.95) The Imperial Way, by Paul Theroux, photographs by Steve McCurry (Houghton Mifflin, 143 pp., $19.95)

Paul Theroux, like most modern travel writers following in the tradition of D. H. Lawrence and Graham Greene, has shifted the center of interest from the external world to the self and made his books seem spontaneous revelations of his own feelings and thoughts. Subjective and impressionistic, he sees the natural world with the imagination as well as with the eye. He prefers a rough rather than a formal journey, popular rather than high culture, colloquial rather than mandarin style. Instead of romanticizing and glorifying his experience, he is engagingly frank whenever he suffers backward and brutal people, boring journeys, and self-created torments. “A man of the world,” Theroux writes, “is never content anywhere.”