Life’s gritty little lessons

In one of the four long stories in his new collection, “The Stranger at the Palazzo d’Oro,” Paul Theroux indirectly gives us his artistic credo. The protagonist of “An African Story” is Lourens Prinsloo, a 60-ish South African writer who loses his farm and family because of a disastrous affair with a black woman. The American narrator lists Prinsloo’s Afrikaans-language works, including “his funniest, his cruelest, his most unsparing”: the tale of a man who has the mysterious ability to “translate” what people say to him into what they actually mean. What Prinsloo’s character hears is dispiriting: They all dislike him or want to cheat him. “But as soon as you conclude that in these encounters there is not an ounce of generosity,” the narrator says, “you realize that [the man] -- for his amazing gift of translation -- is the soul of kindness.”

Throughout his long career in fiction and nonfiction, Theroux has had the reputation of being unsparing, even cruel, toward the characters he portrays. Instead, he may feel that he is cursed with the man’s gift: an unusual sensitivity to the ways humans deceive others and themselves. The man answers people politely, as if others really meant what they pretend to be saying. Theroux’s close attention to his characters -- his refusal to dismiss even the most distasteful out of hand -- and the artistry with which he tells their stories may be his version of the Afrikaner’s kindness.

Certainly, Theroux has rarely been in better form than in “The Stranger at the Palazzo d’Oro,” which ponders the question: What is a person of about 60 -- Theroux’s age, as well as Prinsloo’s -- to do about sexual desire? Sixty isn’t old, quite; physical capacity isn’t lacking, usually; but one no longer feels suited for the role. Central Casting -- another term for Nature -- would supply somebody younger. The late-middle-aged lover is obliged to pay extra, in money or humiliation, or to blind himself to some of the lessons he’s already learned.

In the title story, a 21-year-old American artist, bumming around Sicily in the 1960s, spies a German countess and her male companion eating outside a luxury hotel. “I thought, I want your life,” he recalls four decades later, “the sort of envious wish I was too young to know was like asking for my undoing.” The narrator, his brain teeming with Italian film scenarios about wealthy couples picking up young hitchhikers, offers himself up to be seduced and finds himself playing games whose rules he won’t fathom until he has reached the countess’ age.

The story, which displays another of Theroux’s gifts, his vivid rendering of foreign places, has a circular structure in which the neediness of the aging finds its complement in the ruthless, if naive, opportunism of the young.

In “Disheveled Nymphs,” a variation on one of the subplots of Theroux’s last novel, “Hotel Honolulu,” a wealthy retired lawyer, Leland Wevill, falls in lust with the mother and daughter who clean his house in Hawaii. He stalks them on a gambling trip to Las Vegas and is duly disgraced. As a lawyer he liked to say, “I bite people on the neck for a living”; now he’s “a big soft man with white hairless legs and a potbelly.” Only after Wevill fully realizes that he doesn’t deserve it does one of the women grant him a measure of affection.

Prinsloo, on the other hand, is doomed, not because of racial prejudice but because he has fallen in love wholeheartedly. Unlike a younger man, he had to trash his previous life to do so. When the affair proves to be a mistake, he has nothing left and no time to recoup.

The richly detailed fourth story, “A Judas Memoir,” focuses on preteen boys rather than older men. The narrator looks back on his Boston Catholic upbringing and three stages in his rejection of it. During Holy Week services, under the nose of a priest sermonizing about the sins of the flesh, he finds the flesh, in the form of a pretty but slatternly girl whose slip and bra straps show, to be irresistible.

Later, he hides in an Army surplus pup tent in his backyard, where the girl visits him. Nothing much happens -- these are innocent, if foul-mouthed, kids -- but what does happen is pivotal. Later still, he and other boys prowl the woods with .22 rifles in search of a man who tried to molest one of them, and they come perilously close to murder.

Growing up can be scary, he finds, but the freedom is worth it. “I was a sinner, and would stay that way because I wasn’t sorry.... [B]ut at least I was on my own and in the world.”