SOURCE: Profumo, David. “Going on about Sex.” Spectator 263, no. 8400 (8 July 1989): 36–37.

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

There is an emphatic disclaimer prefacing this novel [My Secret History], to the effect that it is not autobiographical. This comes as a tremendous relief, for the narrator, André Parent, is an American novelist and travel-writer of such unrelenting selfishness and callousness that one would hate to think there was much of our author's own character in him. One suspects many of the wide-ranging events may be taken from the life, but if Mr Theroux assures us that ‘the characters all strolled out of my imagination,’ then we must believe him.

The novel comprises six sections which chart the life and loves of the rebarbative Parent, from his days as a lustful teenaged altar-boy near Boston, up until the present decade. Along the...