JUST THE FACTS (MAYBE...)

By Paul Gray

Paul Theroux's 20th novel, My Other Life (Houghton Mifflin; 456 pages; $24.95), begins on a decidedly unpropitious note, an Author's Note, in fact, in which Theroux describes his novel as "an imaginary memoir" and goes on to say that "even an imagined life resembles one that was lived; yet in this I was entirely driven by my alter ego's murmur of 'what if?'" Groaning seems a proper response at this point. Oh boy, another self-regarding writer playing solipsistic games for his own amusement. Anything good on the tube?

Patience is recommended because it will be handsomely rewarded. My Other Life is Theroux's best and most entertaining book to date, a bold claim, perhaps, since there are so many of them; in addition to his volumes of fiction, Theroux has written 10 highly regarded and popular travel books. He has, in other words, moved consistently and successfully between the realms of fact and fiction. This time he roams the strange and, in his telling, enchanting territory in between.

A character named Paul Theroux moves chronologically, chapter by chapter, through a life that is identical in all external details to the biographical sketches familiar to author Paul Theroux's readers. First comes his stint as a Peace Corps volunteer in Africa in the mid-1960s, followed by a period in Singapore, where he teaches English and begins attracting attention as a promising young novelist. Then comes the long sojourn in London, where, as an American expatriate and the happily married father of two sons, he writes novels (The Family Arsenal, The Mosquito Coast) that firm up his reputation and livelihood. A divorce ends this phase and sends him back to the U.S. and into an emotional and creative tailspin.

At a low ebb he receives a phone call inviting him to a dinner party in London being given by a wealthy American for Queen Elizabeth and Prince Philip. Theroux accepts and then, on the day of the occasion, conceives the idea that the Queen can somehow cure his malaise. At the party he hears and reports on royal conversations, including the Queen's comment on the Prime Minister of Papua New Guinea, whom she had recently met: "He had splendid hair. Fuzzy wuzzy hair!" As she is leaving, the Queen looks at Theroux and says, "You're in a frightful muddle, aren't you?" He says yes. She tells him to "Go back to books," start writing again. She briefly touches his hand, and, Theroux writes, "something like a bee sting made me involuntarily splay my fingers."

When this chapter of the novel appeared in the New Yorker last March, transatlantic eyebrows were raised, particularly after it became known that the real Paul Theroux had once actually attended a dinner given for the Queen. As a stand-alone piece in the New Yorker appearing under the rather puzzling rubric "Fact and Fiction," Theroux's account provoked justifiable confusion. In the context of My Other Life, though, the episode seems entirely consistent with the mildly plausible and cumulatively bizarre contents of the rest of the novel.

There are, for example, the character Paul Theroux's comic misadventures with women. Visiting a leper colony in Malawi, he meets a nurse who is not a nun but who dresses in a nun's habit. "This stuff's cooler," she says, when he asks her why. "I mean, I'm naked underneath." Their attempt at a tryst--she has a room in the nuns' quarters--is not a success.

This incident and other not dissimilar ones could, of course, have happened exactly as Theroux recounts them. But their very repetitiveness hints at artistic patterning, leading up to a payoff of some kind. And sure enough, it arrives. In a chapter titled "The Shortest Day of the Year," Theroux recalls spending time just before Christmas 1982 checking facts for his travel book on the British coast, The Kingdom by the Sea. He finds himself, weary and unshaven, somewhere in rural Yorkshire on a cold, rainy night. He seeks refuge in an isolated pub, where he meets and falls into conversation with an attractive woman. For reasons he doesn't understand, he tells her his name is Edward Medford. She invites him back to her cottage for a nightcap, and for once in this narrative Theroux plays the rejected seducer. Spurned and humiliated, he is preparing to leave the cottage when he notices on the owner's bookshelves an array of books by--Paul Theroux. He asks the woman what she thinks of them. She speaks enthusiastically of The Great Railway Bazaar and every other Theroux book in her collection and then says, "I'd so like to meet him...I think we'd have a smashing time. I think I could make him very happy."

This comic moment is only one of the novel's many slapstick confrontations between differing definitions of reality. The butt of nearly all these jokes is Theroux, whose vocation as a writer has produced a weird and exasperating clone: the public writer who gradually begins to cast a blighting shadow over the private man's life.

The enigma of identity--who we are, how others see us--lies at the heart of My Other Life, and Theroux on a few occasions falls into some heavy breathing over this topic: "In one long life, so many people, so many other lives. Yet because they happen to that one person, a pattern is established, so large and elaborate that it cannot be read from the little we are able to see." This is interesting but not nearly as vivid as Theroux's dramatization of the same principle elsewhere in the novel. He has produced a seriously funny novel.