Just as people are now living for longer, so writers are now writing for longer. Martin Amis published his first novel in 1973. Margaret Atwood started in the 1960s. It’s almost 20 years since the publication of Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. In the future, careers the length of Agatha Christie’s and Barbara Cartland’s may become the norm.
Paul Theroux offers one example of how to cope with literary longevity. Starting out as a novelist – with Waldo, published in 1967 – Theroux then began publishing short stories, travel books, yet more novels, and more and more, dozens and dozens of books, including fiction and non-fiction which often blurred the line between fiction and non-fiction. How on earth has he managed to keep it up?
With fury, rage and spite, it seems. Theroux’s new novel Mother Land has as an epigraph the famous lines from WB Yeats’s “Remorse for Intemperate Speech”: “Great hatred, little room, / Maimed us at the start. / I carry from my mother’s womb / A fanatic heart” – which pretty much sums up the tone of the book. Stephen King in the New York Times has described Mother Land as “an exercise in self-regarding arrogance and self-pity” (which is certainly one way to read it), though he also admitted that he enjoyed the book “against my will”.
Which is exactly the point: Theroux’s great hurts and rages may be difficult to behold but they are nothing if not readable. Critical often to the point of self-harm, his work has never flinched from attempting to tell the truth, as he sees it, about places and people. He is the imperfect laureate of our endless imperfections. The Kingdom by the Sea (1983) remains perhaps the most deliciously bitter and most thoroughly clear-sighted travel book ever written about the UK. Sir Vidia’s Shadow (1998), about his relationship with VS Naipaul, may be only half-true, but it’s also one of the most truthful portraits of the challenges and dangers of friendship.
In Mother Land the object of Theroux’s articulate rage is the narrator’s ancient mother – referred to throughout simply as Mother – and his many siblings, whom he carefully describes with utter contempt, one by one: Fred, the bossy lawyer; Floyd, “volatile”, “a mocker”, a writer and academic; sisters Franny and Rose, both pathetic schoolteachers; Hubby, an ER nurse and a “creative belittler and fault-finder”; and Gilbert, a career diplomat, sweet-natured but absent.
A description of a family “enmeshed in perpetual contention”, the plot is slight but sufficient for Theroux’s purposes. The narrator, Justus, in his late 60s, heading for semi-retirement, has returned to the town where he grew up to help care for his mother. The book is essentially a series of brilliantly vivid, often vicious vignettes of family life, some of which – most notably the reminiscences about Justus’s father donning blackface for a minstrel show – have appeared elsewhere in Theroux’s fiction and non-fiction and are reimagined here with new vigour.
In another autobiographical novel, 1996’s My Other Life, Theroux claimed that “It is the writer’s privilege to keep some facades intact and use his own face in the masquerade”. Anyone interested in looking for the face in the masquerade that is Mother Land will quickly find correspondences between Theroux’s life and work and the life and work of Justus. Both men are writers from Massachusetts who write travel books. They both have two sons, one of them a screenwriter, the other a TV documentary maker (Theroux’s sons are the TV documentary maker Louis and the writer Marcel). Justus’s brother Floyd is an academic and writer who publishes a scathing review of his brother’s work: Theroux’s brother Alexander is an academic and writer who published a scathing review of Theroux’s work. But really, who cares?
I knew nothing about Theroux’s family until Google got the better of me; what I do know is that the novel brilliantly depicts characters in pinpoint prickly prose and continually warns the reader very precisely not to seek equivalences between the family depicted and Theroux’s own, since of course all families are essentially unknowable. “To the world at large my mother was a resourceful and hardworking woman who had raised seven children … the matriarch of a big happy family … What the world knew of us was untrue. We shut the door of our big, respectable-looking house and withdrew to the dilapidated interior … backing into it like rats protecting their nest, baring our yellow teeth, not just keeping the world out but actively engaged in the hopeless self-deception of keeping up appearances.”
There are dozens of insights and aperçus throughout the book not only about the mysteries and challenges of family life but also about the writing life. “And it must have seemed that I was writing stories, book reviews, novels, travel books, magazine articles, essays, newspaper columns, more novels, more stories, another travel book. But it was not an unsorted stack of vagrant scribbles; it was in words a sort of edifice.”
Theroux writes of Mother: “She had a predator’s eye and nose for a person’s weakness and was remorseless in exploiting it. We were shocked at Mother’s sudden denunciations, and not just the vividness of them but the basis in fact, followed by the serious question: who’s next?” Given that Theroux has so far sustained a very successful 50-year career on the strength of his own predatory eye and nose, the only real question is: what’s next?
• Ian Sansom’s Essex Poison is published by 4th Estate.
Mother Land is published by Hamish Hamilton. To order a copy for £17 (RRP £20) go to bookshop.theguardian.com or call 0330 333 6846. Free UK p&p over £10, online orders only. Phone orders min p&p of £1.99.
