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One of the most acclaimed travel writers of our time turns his unflinching eye on an American South too often overlooked
Paul Theroux has spent fifty years crossing the globe, adventuring in the exotic, seeking the rich history and folklore of the far away. Now, for the first time, in his tenth travel book, Theroux explores a piece of America — the Deep South. He finds there a paradoxical place, full of incomparable music, unparalleled cuisine, and yet also some of the nation’s worst schools, housing, and unemployment rates. It’s these parts of the South, so often ignored, that have caught Theroux’s keen traveler’s eye. On road trips spanning four seasons, wending along rural highways, Theroux visits gun shows and small-town churches, laborers in Arkansas, and parts of Mississippi where they still call the farm up the road “the plantation.” He talks to mayors and social workers, writers and reverends, the working poor and farming families — the unsung heroes of the south, the people who, despite it all, never left, and also those who returned home to rebuild a place they could never live without. From the writer whose “great mission has always been to transport us beyond that reading chair, to challenge himself — and thus, to challenge us” (Boston Globe), Deep South is an ode to a region, vivid and haunting, full of life and loss alike.
- Sales Rank: #26319 in eBooks
- Published on: 2015-09-29
- Released on: 2015-09-29
- Format: Kindle eBook
Review
"Free of the sense of alienation that marked his recent travelogues, this luminous sojourn is Theroux's best outing in years." —Publishers Weekly, starred "As thoughtful as it is evocative, the book offers insight into a significant region and its people and customs. An epically compelling travel memoir." —Kirkus Reviews, starred
“A generation of travel writers owes a debt to Theroux’s immersive, first-person narratives, captured with unflinching, sometimes merciless candor.” —New York Times Book Review
From the Back Cover
Early Acclaim for DEEP SOUTH
“This luminous sojourn is Theroux’s best outing in years.” — Publishers Weekly, starred review
“As thoughtful as it is evocative, the book offers insight into a significant region and its people and customs. An epically compelling travel memoir.” — Kirkus Reviews, starred review
About the Author
PAUL THEROUX's books include "The Last Train to Zona Verde, Dark Star Safari, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, Riding the Iron Rooster, The Great Railway Bazaar, The Elephanta Suite, A Dead Hand, The Tao of Travel "and" The Lower River. The Mosquito Coast "and "Dr Slaughter "have both been made into successful films. Paul Theroux divides his time between Cape Cod and the Hawaiian islands. His most recent work is Deep South.
Most helpful customer reviews
162 of 171 people found the following review helpful.
Great! More Books Based in the U.S. Please!
By T. Young
Take him or leave him, Paul Theroux always brings out a lot of interesting emotions in his readers. With Deep South this is no different. In fact, it is probably even more evident. I would assume that most of his readers are American. This being a very "American" book, it is perhaps too close to home for some. I can see many Americans not liking this even if they have liked Theroux's previous works. After all, it is easy to read about the negative aspects of a far away land. It is far harder to read about the issues that face locations closer to home.
I remember reading The Kingdom by the Sea, which chronicles Theroux's journey around Great Britain. In the first few pages he details his observations about this island. I was living in England while I read this and I thought it was the funniest, most accurate description of the British I had ever read. The insanity of a TV license, the general tone of the people, etc. I cannot remember everything. But I felt it was totally accurate. I read these pages to several of my English friends and they got extremely upset. They thought it was total hogwash.
I think Deep South might elicit a similar response from American readers. I've read nearly every non-fiction book Theroux has ever written. I've seen him speak in London and I feel I know the man pretty well. As well as you can know an author. He is constantly getting nailed for being misanthropic. However, I don't believe that's him at all. Quite the contrary. After all, why would someone spend this much time traveling and meeting new people? Surely you don't do this if you hate humanity. I don't even like to talk to people when I'm on a long flight!
What Theroux is good at is simply observing what is what and writing it down. That's all. If you're offended by the way Theroux nails the Southerners for not having a great vocabulary, or being poverty stricken... well, that's how he saw it. Take it or leave it. I know of many South Africans that didn't like Dark Star Safari and thought he was full of himself and didn't do the country any justice. Perhaps that's true. I don't know.
But what I do know is that I love how Theroux tells the story of the Deep South through the people he meets. This is true in all of his books. He meets quite a few people along the way and he tells their story with a keen eye for detail. He then passes this detail on to us, the reader. He's the best in the business at doing this.
I for one am a fan of Deep South. I think it tells a very accurate story of what the place is like and what it's people are like. I hope Mr. Theroux writes more books about America.
121 of 138 people found the following review helpful.
An interesting and worthy read unfortunately spoiled by an apparent agenda
By Colin Brown
Paul Theroux has fairly much travelled the world and written about his experiences, whether it is Africa, Greece or the far East. In Deep South, his latest travel book, Paul has decided to write about his experiences at home. Well...not quite home seeing as he is a Yankee and lives in Hawaii, but of the South, the deep South.
This book was written over the course of 4 trips to the South, one in each Season and his travels take him from the Carolinas through to Arkansas and his beloved Mississippi river, "The Old Man". Unusually, rather than taking in all that the South has to offer, Paul decided to go out of his way and visit the places that people don't really want to visit. Not the tourist spots or the bustling cities but the poorest and most run down areas of the South.
Paul is well versed in the travel books of others before him, "Reading made me a traveler; travel sent me back to books" and he often cites other works and authors in the text. During his travels he meets and interviews a broad spectrum of people from mayors to social workers, students to the myriad of friendly soul food diner owners.
Although the book is mainly split into the four major chapters, each covering a season (with a brief interlude in-between), each chapter is really divided into lots of short stories, each only a couple of pages in length. I find this style of writing a welcome change as you can pick up the book, read a few sub-chapters and put it back down again without losing the overall plot or meanderings Paul takes.
The tales range from abject poverty and hopelessness to hard working optimism, from gun shows which the author suggests are "White only" (he is totally wrong on this but it makes for a good narrative), to gospel churches which he suggests are "Black only" (again the author is wrong on this point but lets not get too picky about his findings). He travels to the home town of the Klu Klux Klan and hears some grisly stories to Helena and the beautiful towns in the delta of the Mississippi.
The author does make a good point numerous times throughout the book, why are we sending billions of tax payer dollars in aid to Africa (the fruits of which he himself has witnessed and written about) whilst basically ignoring the plight of so many here at home?
Although it is a good and interesting read, the author unfortunately leaves you with the impression that the deep South is nothing but poverty and racism. Like Paul in a way, I am a transplant to the South coming over from Europe but unlike the author I decided to stay here in the South. I have visited quite a few of the small towns that Paul writes about. To a certain degree I can see where the author is coming from, there are very poor areas in the South and racism is still a factor to a dwindling few, but that is absolutely no different from places in the North I have visited. In fact, no different really from places all over America I have visited. It certainly isn't just a Southern thing and the author didn't try to make matters better as he deliberately went to the poor areas.
Overall it is good and interesting read but leaves you with a sense that the author wants people to believe that the South is a poverty stricken and backwards part of America, nothing like the North where he comes from, which couldn't be further from the truth. It appears as though Paul had an agenda which wasn't just writing about his travels in the South and unfortunately this leaves a stain on an otherwise worthy read.
101 of 117 people found the following review helpful.
An interesting but ultimately sad and depressing journey south
By Elisa 20
Paul Theroux is a very good writer and he finds ways to remind us of it periodically--whether its the affluent life its given him on Cape Cod, his frequent critical riffs on other writers (Faulkner's "over-embellishments" just for one) or how dismissive he is when someone he is interviewing calls him out on being fifteen minutes late and not calling to tell them, informing him upon arrival that it seemed disrespectful, and a condescension typical of "white privilege".
To his credit, he tells the story, even though in doing so he scoffs at the idea that his lateness had showed any disrespect at all, even though the appointment, set as a courtesy for him, had been scheduled at the last moment for his convenience. There is an arrogance here--one that he would vehemently deny--and it bubbles all the more often to the surface because of the task he has set himself in "going south". He's a college-educated, wealthy white travel writer from Cape Cod, driving around "the South" to see how the poor (read: black) folks live. There are a few problems inherent in this journey right from the start and they don't really get fixed.
It's interesting, maybe to the point of being a mistake, that he decides to focus on the poor, the 20% of the Deep South that live in poverty, the 20% of the southerners--he tells us--for whom "poor" is synonymous with "black". He meets a lot of these impoverished minorities on his trip through Virginia (not exactly "deep south"), Georgia, Alabama, Arkansas and Mississippi. And almost invariably they are good-hearted, welcoming (even if some are initially a bit edgy given his purpose) and helpful. But because they are poor and black, this double disadvantage shows in their interactions with him as an education gap--something made all the more obvious by his choice of writing out their comments with the non-standard grammar, dialects and vocabulary written to sound as they do when spoken while he, of course, is always educated, articulate and easy to understand.
These poor African Americans are the product of the legacy of a lifetime of poor housing, poor health care and, most of all, poor education. He does not see these people as his equals because of this (they are a different class, race and education level after all--much too much for Theroux, who tends toward condescension in the best of circumstances, to overcome here.) The narrative suffers for it. And the problem is there, too, in the writers he chooses to discuss at length--Henry David Thoreau from his own neck of the woods (nearly) and some of the Southern--white--writers those works were written 40 or 50 years ago, Faulkner, McCullers, etc. He -observes- African Americans, listens to them with a somewhat sympathetic detachment, but he fails to capture their point of view (not even acknowledging it in literature) and--since this is his decision to focus on in his journey through "the South"--it presents a problem.
Poverty in 2014 doesn't look all that much different from poverty in 1964. Race relations are different--the laws have changed and some opportunities have changed with them. But you don't see much of that when you concentrate on poverty as its experienced by the poorest blacks in the South. Because poverty is a generational thing--one generation's poor won't look or sound all that much different from the next. It may do a disservice to the South where the rest of the people live--black, white, Latino, Asian--that this was the chosen focus here. What is he looking for really? What is he really trying to prove? What does he -really- want us to understand with these choices?
At 74, it is not really surprising that Theroux is no longer traveling the backwaters and byways by trains and buses and other public transportation. He drives down from Cape Cod instead in his car--ironic since he's in his own country and has been far more adventurous abroad. With his car, even staying in dives, he almost always feels completely safe wherever he goes, and rhapsodizes about how "the ease of travel in America is so complete and...lacking in obstacles" that the travel process itself feels like an unusual near-stress-free pleasure. He theorizes further "I was to discover that America is accessible, but Americans in general...are harder to know than any people I've traveled among." It never occurs to him that maybe that car has something to do with that difference, isolating and protecting him from people and interactions he would normally be forced into having.
Of course traveling through the South in his car is easier than his other travels. Here he is detached from the "natives" and in control of arrival and departure and whom he interacts with, except when he drops into stores or stops to visit with someone whose looks or occupation he feels might prove a good addition to his narrative. Why -not- instead travel the way most of the poor do, I wondered mid-way in? Why -not- take the buses, walk on foot to those back breaking, low-paying jobs, take the train or Greyhound for the longer trips? Theroux brings in some of the history of the areas he stops in--particularly how famous white writers like Faulkner, McCullers et al, viewed the South in the 1940s and 50s and of course thinks about the legacy of the civil war that seems to have never really faded away and maybe never will.
But traveling like the poor mostly do--not driving down from Cape Cod and motoring the byways to find an interesting person with a good story to share for his book--might have given him more insight into the hardship and the life and helped take the edge off of his detachment and superiority.
Another choice would have been to limit himself perhaps to African Americans, but -not- only to the poor, instead crossing classes in his effort to understand race in America and the persistence of discrimination and prejudice. I thought in the beginning that he was a bit of a snob, but by the end, I'd become one, too, watching the unfolding of the South in black poverty, with its deficit of educational opportunities, the importance of things like football, guns and, of course, the Christian church (usually Methodist or So. Baptist) in daily life. It's a life that seems little changed from 60 years ago and this knowledge is both sad and depressing. If Theroux had not focused only on the black poor, shown some upward mobility and the lifestyle changes it brought for the diversity of African American experience, even in the South, this would have been a different kind of South--and, I'm guessing, not such a bleak one.
I have mixed feelings because on the one hand, this is a good reminder of how racism is institutionalized, how education can reinforce the separation of classes or break it down, and how the culture of sports and guns and religion play such a role in bringing meaning and purpose into poor people's lives, even as they distract from the impediments at hand.
Theroux found no obstacles to traveling in rural America among poor African Americans. If he'd left the car (and maybe a few preconceived ideas) at home, I think he would have been able to show us more.
Note about photos: My copy didn't have any, but the published copy is supposed to have full color photos, which could only add positively to the experience of "Deep South".
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