Fresh-Air Fiend : (Hardcover)

In Fresh Air Fiend, Theroux's pen serves him well with astute, lively pieces that stray far beyond simple "travel essays" and reveal his self-inflicted lifestyle of compulsive travel, writing and alienation. In this collection--containing mostly previously published magazine pieces written over the past 15 years--there is a strong autobiographical streak, as well as historical perspectives and a sardonic view on ageing. "One of the more bewildering aspects of growing older", he writes in "Memory and Creation", "is that people constantly remind you of things that never happened".

Now nearly 60, Theroux has lived a rich, varied life: the book jumps from post-Mao China and years spent as an Africa-based Peace Corps volunteer in the 1960s to turtle watching in Hawaii and kayaking on Cape Cod; the jumbled collection even includes pieces on other travel writers (Bruce Chatwin, Graham Greene and William Least Heat-Moon) and the film adaptation of his novel The Mosquito Coast. A chronic sense of aloneness permeates all these pieces--be it the lost traveller paddling through fog, the lone writer living without a phone, or the hermetic trekker who can't speak the native language. Most touching: a short sketch of a road trip when he's lost, his wife is anxious and the children are fighting; Theroux doesn't want the moment to end and soon enough he returns to his self-imposed alienation. It's that perpetual sense of loneliness and not fitting in that seems to motivate Theroux in many of these essays. Theroux may be getting older, even nostalgic, but as these vibrant essays show, he sure isn't getting stale. --Melissa Rossi, Amazon.com --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

The essays are arranged around topics like the Pacific, writings on other people's books and time. The book takes its title from the second and strongest section of Fresh-Air Fiend. Theroux the traveller is perpetually attracted to the challenging: here he finds it kayaking on the ocean close to his childhood home of Medford, Massachusetts. In "Dead Reckoning to Nantucket" he paddles across the treacherous Muskeget Channel: "My dream of paddling through the wilderness of open water was the dream of someone who had had enough of foreign travel for a while, of places that were crowded and thoroughly tame, of the tedium and sleep-deprecation of long plane journeys and of the yappy turbulence of other travellers." Other sections revisit subjects Theroux has tackled in earlier books: there are long and interesting essays on China ("Chinese Miracles"), Hong Kong ("A Letter from Hong Kong on the Eve of the Hand-over"), Christmas Island ("Christmas Island: Bombs and Birds") and other travel writers ("Thoreau's Cape Cod").

There are standard Theroux moments here: an insomniac Theroux pacing through Amsterdam's red light district, sleeping naked on a tropical island. But what emerges is a portrait of the inward Theroux, pensive as he turns 50, pondering what made him a writer ("I remembered everything") and what makes for good travel writing ("prescient without making predictions"). Thoroux's account of his own life journey is, as it turns out, every bit as interesting as his meditations on more far-flung destinations. --Tamsin Todd