In the following review of Fresh Air Fiend, Cussen examines Theroux's attitudes toward aging, his commentaries on other noted travel writers, and his problematic postcolonial views.

In the following essay, Wheeler provides an overview of Theroux's travel writing and fiction, drawing attention to recurring themes and preoccupations that link his work in both genres, including his use of fictional doubles.

In the following negative excerpt, Allen expresses contempt for what she sees as the hostility, jealousy, and hypocrisy in Sir Vidia's Shadow.

In the following review, Coster contrasts the autobiographical aspects of The Pillars of Hercules with those of Theroux's fiction.

In the following review, Wilson describes Sir Vidia's Shadow, as an engrossing, if unflattering, portrait of literary jealousy and resentment.

In the following essay, Staggs provides an overview of Theroux's life and career upon the publication of Millroy the Magician, incorporating Theroux's comments on his travel writing and publishing history.

In the following review, Krist analyzes the relationship between character and theme in My Secret History.

In the following review, Leader examines the imaginary and the real-life incidents in My Other Life, distinguishing the significance of the difference between the two.

In the following positive review, Mirsky praises Theroux's attention to sensual details in Kowloon Tong.

In the following review, Urquhart offers a mixed assessment of The Pillars of Hercules, which he concludes is “an uneasy book” despite its “many delights.”

In the following review of Riding the Iron Rooster, Tung objects to Theroux's negative portrayal of China, which the critic finds only partially justified.

In the following review, Sexton offers a positive assessment of The Collected Stories and comments on the difficulty of assessing Theroux's overall literary achievement.

In the following review, Eder describes Sir Vidia's Shadow as fascinating yet deeply flawed by Theroux's recriminations against Naipaul.

In the following positive review, Frater praises the insights, accessibility, and humor of The Happy Isles of Oceania.

In the following review, Stewart offers an unfavorable assessment of Fresh Air Fiend.

In the following review of My Other Life, Rubin commends Theroux's skillful prose and lively characterizations, but finds shortcomings in his efforts to probe the psyche of his alter-ego.

In the following review, Williams offers a generally positive assessment of Millroy the Magician, but finds the novel's imagery and style overbearing.

In the following review, Mann praises the detail and honesty of Theroux's description of China in Riding the Iron Rooster.

In the following review, Jaffe praises the evocative descriptions and attention to detail in My Secret History.

One needs energy to keep up with the extraordinary, productive restlessness of Paul Theroux…. He is as busy as a jackdaw in the way he scavenges for forms and styles. In earlier novels he has taken conventional popular molds, like the ghost story (The Black House), the thriller (The Family Arsenal), the celebrity memoir (Picture Palace), and made them over for his own thoroughly original purposes. The geographic locations of his tales now make an almost unbroken ring around the globe. His train journ...

In the following review, Wright compliments the authentic details and candid tone of The Happy Isles of Oceania, praising it as one of Theroux's best works.

In the following review, Bowman asserts that Sir Vidia's Shadow is an interesting memoir, but a poor display of Theroux's self-pity and anger.

In the following review, Raphael offers a positive assessment of Sir Vidia's Shadow.

In the following negative review, Curran asserts that Jilly's characterization and the narrative of Millroy the Magician are underdeveloped.

In the following review of Hotel Honolulu, Newton finds Theroux's preoccupation with sexual indulgence tiresome, but appreciates his larger interest in the significance of literary culture.

In the following review, Johnston offers a negative assessment of My Secret History.

In the following negative review, Profumo criticizes the lack of emotion in My Secret History.

In the following review of The Collected Stories, Tandon commends Theroux's satires on cross-cultural blunders, but concludes that much of his fiction is marred by a sense of self-indulgence.

In the following review, Brookner argues that Chicago Loop represents “a clinical tour de force” for its relentlessly dispassionate portrayal of the psychopathic mind.

In the following negative review, Shone argues that Millroy the Magician is inferior to Theroux's earlier novel The Mosquito Coast.

In the following review, Rose offers a positive assessment of Fresh Air Fiend, but notes the uneven quality of the work's diverse selections.

Mr. Theroux's Picture Palace examines the relationship between the personal life of an artist and the art it produces (or, as we shall see, doesn't produce). The story is told by a celebrated photographer, Maude Coffin Pratt …, who is engaged, as the sole surviving tenant of the family house on Cape Cod, in looking through her old pictures, piled in the adjacent windmill. With her is trendy Frank Fusco, who is mounting a Maude Pratt retrospective, bedizened with stereophonic sound effec...

From the start, Paul Theroux's ["Picture Palace"] takes us by surprise. In the first place, it's less exotic than most of his books, which tend to be set in far-off countries and to be peopled by characters who are foreign at least in outlook, if not in fact. It lacks the snap and crackle of, say, "The Family Arsenal," his best-known novel, and draws its energy instead from internal events: the unfolding and shaking out of old memories, the slow evolution of charact...

In the following review of The Collected Short Novels, Crane argues that Theroux's short fiction, while highly competent, is formulaic and unrelentingly morose when viewed cumulatively.

In the following excerpt, Pritchard praises the culinary aspects of the prose in Kowloon Tong.

In the following negative excerpt, Wilhelmus objects to the protagonist, plot, and tone of My Secret History.

In the following review, Kennedy offers a positive assessment of Millroy the Magician.

In the following review, Hopkins evaluates the strengths of The Pillars of Hercules, after confessing his initial apprehension about reading the work.

In the following review, Wright offers a generally positive assessment of Riding the Iron Rooster.

In the following negative review, Mirsky criticizes the plot, characterization, and dialogue of Hotel Honolulu.

In the following review, Feehily provides an overview of the narration and themes in Hotel Honolulu.

In the following review, McAlpin offers a positive assessment of Hotel Honolulu, calling Theroux a “sharp, unblinking storyteller.”

In the following review, King focuses on Theroux's descriptions of V. S. Naipaul as a man and as a writer in Sir Vidia's Shadow.

Paul Theroux has chosen to measure himself against a very tall ghost indeed: Joseph Conrad. Jungle Lovers is an audacious attempt to tell the other half of The Heart of Darkness, to reveal precisely what it was about Africa that drove the humanitarian trader, Kurtz, out of his mind and reduced him to a raving savage with human skulls impaled atop his palisade. The novel's setting is the Central African peanut republic of Malawi, a country that is in actual fact at least half fictitious—one of ...

"Girls at Play" is a horror story—not in the usual sense, but in the way that "King Lear" is a horror story. It is, more precisely, a novel of interlocking horrors; of lonely women exiled from society by their own peculiarities; of an isolated girls' boarding school; of Europeans (with their obsolete convictions about white superiority) in an African land recently emancipated; of the Africans, proud, bitter, tempestuous and full of elemental hatred; of the collision...

In the following review, Powers offers a mixed assessment of My Other Life, which she judges to be alternately “funny” and “off-putting.”

In the following excerpt, Flower offers a mixed assessment of Millroy the Magician, citing shortcomings in the passive characterization of Jilly.

In the following review, Sylge offers a positive assessment of Fresh Air Fiend.

In the following review, Knudsen offers a mixed assessment of Kowloon Tong, which he finds excessively “dreary,” but redeemed in part by Theroux's observational skill.

Paul Theroux is simply a wonder, and [Picture Palace is] a remarkable piece of work. In reviewing … The Family Arsenal … I spoke of how it (and its very fine predecessor, The Black House) each featured a desperate man endowed with great sensitivity, irony, and visionary or novelistic powers of forecast and apprehension. I also noted that both novels were consistently entertaining…. Picture Palace is even bolder and more daring than the last two, partly because its narrator … is a...

The first thing to say about [The Consul's File] is that it makes excellent reading. The stories span a wide range of mood and theme. At one extreme there is comedy—a forty-five-year-old Englishwoman blandly commandeering the title role in the local drama society's production of Suzie Wong; at the other there are revenge, rape, murder and a ghost or two. Paul Theroux appears to be equally at ease with any of these subjects. He is a natural short-story writer. Repeatedly he contrives a p...

"There is an English dream of a warm summer evening on a branch-line train," writes the novelist and travel writer Paul Theroux in one of the many evocative passages in "The Kingdom by the Sea: A Journey Around Great Britain." [One] of the challenges that confronted Mr. Theroux in writing about Britain was to penetrate the English dream and find the reality. Another was more practical—how to find a systematic route, for in "choosing a route, one was choosing a subje...

[The Picture Palace] is an entertainment in the best sense…. Theroux knows what he's about, writing lively narrative, controlling the mystery story element of his plot, withholding a significant scene. Maude Coffin Pratt is a famous photographer, an appealing, arrogant, cantankerous old woman and a brilliant creation on Theroux's part. She has become a legend and, though she has spent her life in seeing the major events and most celebrated faces of the century and in sorting out art fro...

In the following review, Mortimer offers a generally positive assessment of The Pillars of Hercules.

It was bold of Theroux to make Maude a photographer [in Picture Palace], and that she is believable as one is a remarkable feat, since artists are notoriously hard to draw. In a story of self-deception, photography is a near perfect metaphor for imperfect perception…. The plot's quite a creaky business in Picture Palace, but it hangs on a marvelously constructed and nicely realized metaphor of vision and blindness. At age eleven, snapping her first photograph, Maude suddenly cries, "I c...

To Somerset Maugham it was the F.M.S., to Henri Fauconnier Malaisie, to myself Malaya; to the American writer Paul Theroux … it is Malaysia. It is recognizably the same place in all its nominations, and there is nowhere in the world quite like it. I wrote about it from the viewpoint of a Colonial Education Officer, Fauconnier from that of a French rubber-planter who loved the Malays and was learned in their language. Willie Maugham, who knew the country least, has unfairly effected a literary near-mo...

In the following review, Mortimer offers a negative assessment of The Happy Isles of Oceania.

"The war did not destroy the English—it fixed them in fatal attitudes. The Japanese were destroyed and out of that destruction came different men; only the loyalties were old—the rest was new." Thus the thirty-six-year-old New Englander Paul Theroux, pursuing his studies of the post-Imperial British, this time in Malaysia, Somerset Maugham country. The short stories in The Consul's File should be popular. How to cope, or more precisely how not to cope, with losing an empir...

In the following excerpt, Marien compares Theroux's mental state during his Pacific tour to his descriptions of the scenery in The Happy Isles of Oceania.

It is refreshing to find a story that touches on the relationship between art and life and still manages to avoid the narcissism which so often drenches such productions, giving you the uneasy feeling that the writer is hiding behind some half-open door, peering in as you read to see if your face is registering the proper degree of respectful sympathy. Picture Palace succeeds partly because Maude's discussions of her craft seem convincingly to be about photography—there is no sense that pictur...

The title of Paul Theroux's new book [The London Embassy] is rather misleading. The anonymous narrator indeed works at the American Embassy but his work takes him out of that grotesque building in Grosvenor Square and allows him to wander all round London. In fact London at times seems to be the real hero of this collection of short stories. The city is always present. Sometimes it is a rather strange, foreign city—not so much a capital of an Empire but a far off, distant colonial outpost. Thi...

Paul Theroux's brilliant new novel ends with a startling scene. Maude Coffin Pratt, a famous American photographer, is attending the private view of a retrospective exhibition of her life's work…. With the arrival of the young man who has organised the the show, it becomes deafening. Maude realises that it is he, Frank Fusco—the toadying recipient of a Guggenheim fellowship—who is the hero of the hour. The artist herself is a mere onlooker. She remains where she always was...

Paul Theroux's comic and disturbing fifth novel, Jungle Lovers [is] set in the brilliantly, and sometimes maliciously, realized Malawi of today. His fable, with roots in satiric caricature and documentary terror, uses the linguistic complexity to underscore the wavering relationships between lingering British, Africans, and the two American protagonists, a genial insurance salesman, Calvin Mullet, and a tough, often brutal, revolutionary, Marais, the dissolution of whose interlinked ideals forms the ...

I am unfamiliar with Paul Theroux's highly-praised earlier novels, and only wish I could like "Jungle Lovers" more. There is so much that is admirable in the novel, and deeply-felt; it distresses me to have to say that I, for one, found it ultimately unsatisfying. Forced in the ideological hothouse. Even so, "Jungle Lovers" abounds with virtues. It is genuinely perceptive. Mr. Theroux's ear for the absurd, for the nuances of British and African dialogue, is convinci...

Jungle Lovers invites comparison with Graham Greene. The setting might certainly have been his, the serio-comic situations in which the characters find themselves frequently made me speculate as to whether Greene could have handled them any better. This is a Black—and a black—Comedy. I was reminded forcefully both of The Comedians and Travels with my Aunt, which is not to say that Mr Theroux sets out to imitate either, or that he is as good a novelist as Greene—yet. His use of language ...

[Waldo is a] good funny novel. It starts, appropriately enough, with the hero's getting a cream pie flung in his face and ends Paul Theroux 1941– Photograph by Mark Gersonwith his becoming a star cabaret turn, as a sort of Writer in Residence—the Residence being a glass bubble in the middle of a dance floor. While Waldo is inside, pecking away at the typewriter, the subject of his prize article stands outside, reciting t...

Paul Theroux may be the most irascible traveler since Tobias Smollett. Unfortunately, though, his anger never reaches the manic rage of that entertaining author, but devolves into whine and fret. Setting out from his home in Medford, Massachusetts, one morning, Theroux begins a train journey that will take him down the length of South America, a continent not known for its kindness to dyspepsia. He finds much to upset him: The other passengers are boring, the food disgusting, and the trains filthy and decre...

Paul Theroux's short stories [in World's Fair] avoid … problems of commitment by their comedy and brevity; when he expands in the longer form of 'The Greenest Island' (some 50pp) the attempt at seriousness and psychological interest becomes dogged and unconvincing. His natural gift for place is a means of capitalising on his passion for travel, and the short story with its emphasis on plot and its need for quick and shapely resolution is an ideal form for him. A restlessne...

Travelers, truants and transplants—Paul Theroux's favorite people since the start of his writing career—are the central figures in "World's End," his new collection of stories…. Impressive as much of "World's End" is …, the book's preoccupation with uprootedness does become wearing before the end. In Mr. Theroux's work in longer forms, no single preoccupation ever tyrannizes. A travel jotting in a novel stands adjacen...

In Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad brilliantly evoked the sense of isolation that white interlopers feel in Africa: the indescribable loneliness and physical languor that eventually bring on moral collapse. In the person of Kurtz, Conrad seems to be saying that Africa is no place for whites unless they have extraordinary strength of will. In the deceptively titled Girls at Play, Paul Theroux returns to this haunting theme with a vengeance. His people, three white women—teachers in a girls' sc...

Paul Theroux has set his novel [Girls at Play] in East Africa, and the country is every bit as important as the characters. Its effect is pernicious; its principal weapon, dilapidation—both physical and spiritual. The action centres almost exclusively on a girls' school and the women who teach there…. Even in its smaller aspects, the novel is unremittingly depressing. The domestic guerrilla warfare waged between Miss Poole and Heather has not the slightest element of farce about it. Lik...

[In Paul Theroux's Waldo the hero] is a shadowy, passive young man, who moves from one intensely symbolic site to another until he has turned into a slightly older shadowy, passive young man…. The novel is introduced with a quotation from Tristan Tzara, a founding father of Dadaism, which is an omen of the bizarre turns in the road ahead rather than a clue to where it is leading. The conclusion—"It didn't have anything to do with love"—is as good a conclusion...