From Medford to Sicily, misadventure and memory
The Stranger at the Palazzo d'Oro and Other Stories
By Paul Theroux
Houghton Mifflin, 296 pp., $25
"The Stranger at the Palazzo d'Oro" is Paul Theroux's second book in a year; its title story is the intermittently pornographic novella that the author began, he tells us in the other book (an African travelogue titled "Dark Star Safari"), on the Nile, becoming "by turns melancholy, comic, reminiscing," and, for the solo traveler, "consolingly erotic." The two books are his 60th-birthday presents to himself, as the age matters in both the fiction and nonfiction as much as any of the first-person narrators. The two stories and two novellas in the new collection (depending on how you count) all have prominent attention paid to 60-year-olds, with one exception: the four stories of a Medford boyhood in the early 1950s that are collectively entitled "A Judas Memoir," which we'll call here a novella even though others might not.
These stories, of sex-addled Catholic boys, their church, parents, and the girls who drift by them, their recreations indoors and out, have a particular intensity that will absorb and unsettle Boston readers; it is rather timely, for one thing, to have a story about a boy-fondling priest -- timely too for the possibility that the boys are mistaken. This story, called "Scouting for Boys," with its obvious double entendre, is equally the portrait of the artist as a young man; one hears the future writer in the narrator who ends by thinking "I was alone, I was safe, no one would ever know me," echoing his words of estrangement from his father in the earlier "Pup Tent": "I only knew that my life would be harder because of my sins and my secrets, but at least I was on my own and in the world."
Theroux, of the world and originally of Medford, comes home in these four stories; the others suggest some of the places he departed for. The last two, "An African Story," and "Disheveled Nymphs" (set in Hawaii, where he now lives), mark a serious dropping off from what's come before: perfectly readable, like everything he writes, but downshifted to a more forgiving gear: tales with a twist, rather than literature. The 60-year-old's late-life crisis is most apparent here, but not in ways that have engaged the author much himself: an Afrikaner novelist who falls for a black woman with only one arm, and pays a hefty price; a retired Hawaiian businessman unmoored by his mother-and-daughter cleaning ladies. However many pages they take, they are fast tales requiring no great involvement, which is not characteristic of Theroux, a tough-minded, unsentimental author who puts every sentence to work as few other writers do, all to depict the world as beautiful but harsh, and our sins trying to live up to ourselves.
This more recognizable Theroux appears in the first and longest story, the novella set at the Palazzo d'Oro, in Taormina, Sicily. Here an accomplished American painter, 60 years old, of course, returns to the island where he whiled away a postgraduate summer nearly 40 years before, as something between a boy toy and a kept man for a German countess sojourning at a luxury hotel with her homosexual physician and procurer. The relationship that ensues is a difficult one, and intensely sexual, with some quirks, as there always are in these things -- the countess always in her clothes, on her knees, and gloved; the narrator never knowing her skin from her silk. The story revolves around their developing and mutual contempt, with an ugly lesson that is typically Theroux: Dislike enhances desire. Neither character is attractive in the least, and let there be no mistake that the author intends this: A young Wellesley student drops in for a short encounter with the narrator that confirms, even exalts, his humiliation. When he says that the countess "was purely a sensualist, and she demanded that I be the same -- but how could I?" it reveals itself later as a grudging compliment to a woman who at least has experience, or the virtue of knowing herself. The narrator's reply to his own rhetorical question suggests an inadequacy that goes well beyond sex or their affair: "Sensuality was almost impossible to fake, and so I was always struggling to satisfy her."
A theme of this collection is the proprietary nature of storytelling, starting with the painter at the Palazzo, who begins his tale, "This is my only story. Now that I am sixty I can tell it." "An African Story" begins similarly: A writer does not steal from a writer. Whatever he tells you is his way of practicing; "there is no question of your borrowing it." When a writer dies, the story moves to the surviving writer: "No one else knows." It is this aspect of secretiveness and solitude that joins these two stories to "A Judas Memoir." Theroux's problem is never that he has only one story. It's when the energy flags, although this has nothing to do with turning 60, one would think.
When a storyteller of talent and imagination, and above all a gift for "locale," starts churning them out, we have something like Roald Dahl (it clicks right at the end of "Disheveled Nymphs": the retiree Leland Wevill is Dahl's short-story character Henry Sugar). This is no mean accomplishment for any writer, but Theroux is capable of much more: both entertainment and literature, arisen from the cold writer's eye, and fluent, exacting insight into our weakness and mediocrity; occasionally too our grace. For all the immature boys and men in these stories, Theroux's has always been a mature voice, restless and relentless and deepened by experience. But sometimes it comes too easy.
Eric Weinberger teaches expository writing at Harvard University. 