Life-changing events during passages to India

My one personal encounter with Paul Theroux occurred in 2000 at a luncheon celebrating the publication of “Fresh Air Fiend,” a collection of his travel writing. I was standing with half a dozen others when an ebullient Theroux bounded over, placed a hand on someone’s shoulder, then, without any sort of greeting or other preamble, asked our group, “Have you ever been to Seville?”

Silence ensued. Um no, none of us had ever been, so Theroux made his way to another cluster where the conversation lasted a good deal longer, probably because he found someone who had been there, or at least who had the wherewithal to ask why he was posing the question.

For a time among a few of us who had been at the luncheon, Theroux’s query became a catch-phrase for a particular sort of question, one that seemed awkward and presumptuous. “Have you ever been to Seville?” we would ask each other and smirk. And yet, looking back, I can’t help but feel some regret; I no longer have any idea what our group had been discussing, and whatever Theroux had to say about Seville would surely have been more enlightening. Or, to put it as Theroux does in his new trio of novellas, “The Elephanta Suite,” when describing a pair of American travelers enduring the monologue of someone they consider to be an aged blowhard (the theme of narcissistic dullards too self-involved to learn from the wisdom of others, including that of Theroux, recurs often in his work), “How easy it was to jeer at him, yet he had told them several things they hadn’t known.”

Theroux’s new book, which seeks to tell readers quite a few things they don’t know about India, presents Westerners whose stereotypes and misperceptions of that country put them in peril. Its title refers to a set of opulent rooms in Mumbai’s legendary Taj Mahal hotel; the suite, where the wealthy come to shut out the real India, makes an appearance in each of the novellas. But the suite that Theroux seems also to have in mind here is of the musical variety. Elegantly composed, his work is an often seemingly effortless cycle of themes, variations, repetitions. The mysterious fates of characters in one novella are alluded to in another; a particularly brutal manner of execution described in the second novella is made manifest in his third. All this is performed with grace and economy and without the contrivances one might expect.

Thankfully, there is also a tad more generosity of spirit than is often on display in Theroux’s writing. His main characters get more consideration than they might in his travel writing, where they might merit little more than a contemptuous aside. “Monkey Hill’s” wealthy, middle-aged American husband and wife, Audie and Beth Blunden, understand India little better than they understand each other, and exploit the country for their own adventures, sexual and otherwise; the crass, 43-year-old American attorney Dwight Huntsinger turns a Mumbai business trip into an escapade of sexual tourism, finding an unlikely redemption in “The Gateway of India”; and in “The Elephant God,” the book’s most affecting piece, the naive, plain-looking Ivy League graduate Alice Durand mistakenly expects to find in India the same sort of place she has seen in Merchant-Ivory films.

To his credit, Theroux attempts to see India from the perspective of each of his main characters, and virtually all manage to gain readers’ understanding, if not often their sympathy. For the Blundens, whose exploits bring to mind the purportedly titillating but ultimately staid shenanigans that one might find in an art-house feature starring a sexually frustrated Charlotte Rampling, India is “not a country but a creature, like a monstrous body crawling with smaller creatures, pestilential with people -- a big horrific being.”

For Dwight, it is a place that “attracted you, fooled you, subverted you, then, if it did not succeed in destroying you with the unexpected, it left you so changed as to be unrecognizable.” And as for Alice, whose efforts to teach American English to Indian tech support workers offer the book’s most humorous and insightful moments, “[f]rom a distance, India was splendor; up close, misery.”

One of Theroux’s aims here seems to be to provide a corrective to literature about contemporary India, to reveal the underside that V.S. Naipaul -- whose myth Theroux memorably and somewhat self-destructively attempted to explode in the 1998 memoir “Sir Vidia’s Shadow” -- is too prim to fully explore; to strip the country of the sentimentality with which it has been represented by authors such as Jhumpa Lahiri, whose work Theroux seems to be insulting when one of his characters dismisses as a “soporific,” an “Indian novel, much praised, by an Indian woman who lived in the States.” The problem with that unnamed novel, Theroux writes in a passage that is purportedly from Alice’s perspective, though it sounds suspiciously like his, is that it “did not describe the India she’d encountered or the people she’d met.” As he is drawing his presumably more accurate portrait throughout “The Elephanta Suite,” Theroux also seeks to present the remnants of an empire in decline, a common theme in books about the country in question, though here, the empire is America, whose representatives find themselves overmatched in a place they have seriously underestimated.

This is a bold and ambitious enterprise, and one that Theroux pursues artfully, if not, in the end, all that persuasively to this reader, and not only because the one time he ventured into my hometown in 1991’s “Chicago Loop,” his handful of minor errors made me even more suspicious of his bleak world view I hadn’t found that convincing to begin with.

The real issue here is that for all the discussion of travel as a life-altering experience, one does not have the sense that Theroux has transformed all that much, even after traversing the globe and writing more than three dozen book-length works of fiction and nonfiction. Though Theroux’s India may not bear much resemblance to that of the aforementioned authors, it will seem quite familiar to readers of his work. Here again are the twinned themes of sexual and economic domination as seen in “Saint Jack”; here is the fascination with characters leading double lives as in “Half Moon Street” and “My Secret History”; here is the idea of reinventing oneself in a foreign land. And here again are the base desires that lurk inside the repressed characters Theroux has found in London, Africa and Chicago. Theroux’s, as always, is a memorable and intriguing world, very cleverly constructed and often exceedingly well-described, but you wouldn’t want to live in it. Not even if you were traveling to Seville.

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Adam Langer is the author of the novels “Crossing California,” “The Washington Story” and the forthcoming “Ellington Boulevard.”