Althouse: "On the one hand, he insists that the writer’s life is 'almost unapproachable, full of ambiguities.'"

July 2, 2018

"On the one hand, he insists that the writer’s life is 'almost unapproachable, full of ambiguities.'"

"On the other, he defaults to the writer’s highest calling, his obligation 'to be vigilant and unsparing'. Spend time with a writer, he declares, and what do you get? 'Wool-gathering, silences, rants, evasions, the contents of a cracker barrel.' But then... in fewer than 500 words, he tells us all we need to know and it’s almost banal in its simplicity. His divided self derives from his parents. On his maternal side, he comes from upwardly mobile, highly successful Italian-American late-Victorian immigrants whose 'competitiveness', he declares, made the Dittami family 'insufferably pretentious'. On his paternal side, his 'dear old dad’s' people were 'country folk, a kindly, laconic, unpretentious and uneducated family' who called him 'Paulie'. As the smoke clears and the mirrors cease to dazzle, we encounter the 'Paulie' who loves his dad and finds his mother 'demanding, thin-skinned and impatient'. Her legacy to her son is 'a horror of weak and vain, nagging and castrating women'. When Paulie hears the 'snarl of the she-wolf', he heads for the hills, driven by a determination never to become 'the person my father became in his old age, reduced to dependency on an unhappy woman.':

From a review in The Guardian of a new collection of essays by Paul Theroux. Here's the book, "Figures in a Landscape: People and Places."

16 comments:

Sebastian said...: "On the one hand, he insists that the writer’s life is 'almost unapproachable, full of ambiguities. On the other, he defaults to the writer’s highest calling, his obligation 'to be vigilant and unsparing'. . . . he tells us all we need to know and it’s almost banal in its simplicity. His divided self derives from his parents."

Really!?!? From his parents?? Who would have thought.

Almost, almost banal? And almost unapproachable at the same time? Leaving it fully ambiguous if the writer is full of himself or just a BS artist.

Judging by the summary alone, this is unsparing only in displaying the quality of thought in contemporary writing.; 7/2/18, 8:18 AM
MD Greene said...: I have enjoyed several of Theroux's books. The man can write, but his writing makes clear that, as a person, he' a genuine crank.

It has been argued that selfish certainty is required to become a truly fine artist like, say, Picasso. Still, it is hard to see how a person who is disinterested in or scornful of others can comment in a meaningful way about the human condition.; 7/2/18, 9:07 AM
Jaq said...: Almost, almost banal? And almost unapproachable at the same time? Leaving it fully ambiguous if the writer is full of himself or just a BS artist.

Actually..... I thought that was the best sentence in the whole article. It's like one of these great physicists of the 20th century said, if you can't put it into simple language, you don't understand it.; 7/2/18, 9:17 AM
Fernandinande said...: Sebastian said...
Almost, almost banal? And almost unapproachable at the same time?

I'm pretty sure the words "banal" and "unapproachable" were from two different writers, but perhaps not since the excerpt was almost unreadable.; 7/2/18, 9:35 AM
Fernandinande said...: tim in vermont said...
It's like one of these great physicists of the 20th century said, if you can't put it into simple language, you don't understand it.

"Hell, if I could explain it to the average person, it wouldn't have been worth the Nobel prize."; 7/2/18, 9:39 AM
Christy said...: I liked reading Theroux, but he's no V.S. Naipaul.; 7/2/18, 9:42 AM
rcocean said...: I like his travel books, they're performance art - the cranky curmudgeon who hates everyone and has terrible time - everywhere. And like many of these kind of books, I believe them more fiction than Non-fiction.

However, I will say in PT's behalf, he rarely describes himself as making "Witty" put-downs in his conversations with waitresses and service folks. He makes in clear he was *thinking* of these witty put-downs.

As for his fiction, its slightly above average. But I'd rather read him than Phillip Roth or John Updike.; 7/2/18, 9:51 AM
Jaq said...: Feynman was having a little snark, but he did say a couple of things that I think apply to Trump, for example: It is really quite impossible to say anything with absolute precision, unless that thing is so abstracted from the real world as to not represent any real thing.

Chuck should reflect on that as he rambles on about his take on “wiretapping.”; 7/2/18, 9:53 AM
Jaq said...: he rarely describes himself as making "Witty" put-downs in his conversations with waitresses and service folks. He makes in clear he was *thinking* of these witty put-downs.

For some reason “Five Easy Pieces” comes to mind. Let’s all just hope that was a dream sequence.; 7/2/18, 9:55 AM
rcocean said...: As someone who's read a lot of Writer's Bio's - most of them are neurotic bores away from the typewriter.

Of course a great bio writer like Ellman, even made James Joyce interesting.

Random thought: The famous writer as drunk seems to have disappeared.; 7/2/18, 9:56 AM
rcocean said...: "For some reason “Five Easy Pieces” comes to mind. Let’s all just hope that was a dream sequence."

I was thinking of Bryson and his Appalachian Trail book. Its full of sneers at small town waitresses and service folks.

I guess they didn't know who they were dealing with.

I half-expected Bryson to blurt out: "Don't you know who I am?"; 7/2/18, 9:58 AM
Owen said...: Tim in Vermont: thanks for the Feynman. He nailed it.

So, to me, this word-cloud about Theroux smells like a dead cat.; 7/2/18, 10:10 AM
Jaq said...: I have despised Bryson since the time I was working in the UK and he was over there doing publicity for his book by sneering at Americans for the delectation of the Brits.; 7/2/18, 10:33 AM
Bill Peschel said...: I read Dale Peck's takedown of Rick Moody yesterday, and today I'm quoting from it twice. Here's about Thoreux's belief in his genetic inheritance:

The real writer is incapable of seeing the world through anything but the prism of metaphor and narrative, which renders that world as falsely as chronology renders the progress of time.

The real writer suspects that character is just a by-product of these two forces—that what we think of as ourselves is nothing more than an assortment of chemicals acted upon by internal and external stimuli—and in some ways it is his urgent need to disprove this hypothesis, to assert at least the possibility of an existence independent of fate, that drives him to write fiction. It’s true, it’s true, what you have always suspected is true: it’s ourselves we blame, ourselves we’re trying to save. Not you.; 7/2/18, 10:39 AM
RichardJohnson said...: tim in vermont
I have despised Bryson since the time I was working in the UK and he was over there doing publicity for his book by sneering at Americans for the delectation of the Brits.

Sneering in the UK at a fellow Texan didn't work out very well for the Dixie Chicks, did it?; 7/2/18, 3:04 PM
Tom T. said...: I'm currently reading Paul Theroux's book about traveling across Africa. Grouchy but heartfelt, and he's a lively writer. His son Louis does documentary TV in the UK. A lot of his shows are kind of snarky, but he did a really grim program about end-stage alcoholics.; 7/2/18, 11:27 PM