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We speak with novelist and travel writer Paul Theroux about writing, travel, and about his new novel, “A Dead Hand”. It’s a thriller set in Calcutta… about a travel writer.

MARCO WERMAN:  I’m Marco Werman and this is The World.  Jerry Delfont is a second rate travel journalist.  He won’t mind that assessment of his work because Jerry Delfont is not a real person.  He’s the protagonist of the latest novel by first rate travel journalist Paul Theroux.  The book is called “A Dead Hand”.  Its other main character, aside from Jerry Delfont, is the Indian city of Calcutta.  Theroux finds the city fascinating.  In fact, he’s found the entire country fascinating since he first went there in 1968.

PAUL THEROUX:  It seemed to me very much as it seems to me now, a large, glittering, dusty, bewildering place.  Heat and dust were the defining sort of moods.  And it seemed to me a wonderful place.  The smell of it, the look of it, and that was, as I said about ’68 is 42 years ago I believe.  Most countries have changed significantly.  India is one that really hasn’t.  In high tech and manufacturing, it’s made a quantum leap.  There might even be a middle class there God knows.  But since there’s a billion and a half people, a phrase like middle class doesn’t mean very much.  The magic of India is that significant parts of it haven’t changed in the slightest.

WERMAN: You’re of course very well known for your non-fiction books, your travel writing.  There’s a section in “A Dead Hand” where the characters are on a train traveling through the Bodoland region in the northeast of India and one of them says “Who would want to possess it or want to blow it up?  Who could possibly care that much?  If they do, in their multitudes.  It’s not the weirdness of humanity, it’s the weirdness of the Indian personality and the way people write about them.  The travel books.  The novels.”  Do you think, Paul Theroux, you can say things about a place like India in a book like this, a novel, that you can’t say when you’re writing non-fiction.

THEROUX: I don’t know.  I make some pretty breezy statements both in fiction and non-fiction, sometimes complemented and sometimes abused for doing it.  The characters in Bodoland, Bodoland is in Assam, and it’s a place where there’s the Bodo Liberation Front.  Well who’s ever heard of them outside of India?  Who even cares about them outside of India?  Indians do care and there are a lot of very, very violent terrorist groups in India that outside of India make no impact at all.  But they really do kill a lot of people.  Can I make these statements?  I don’t know.  I sometimes think that’s why God put me on earth, to make wild generalizations.  But maybe in this case, not so wild because they are on a train and they’re passing through that area.

WERMAN: There’s also a lot of musing in “A Dead Hand” about writers and what they do and don’t understand.  Take this line for example “As an outsider, the traveling writer sees only surfaces.”  Do you feel that way about any of your own work?

THEROUX: Sometimes.  But surfaces sometimes reveal inner states.  So it’s like a face.  If you look at a portrait of Marilyn Monroe. It’s a face.  But sometimes a portrait of Marilyn Monroe reveals an inner state, troubled, disturbance, dysfunction, but it’s still a face, it’s still a surface.  And I think lots of the world is like that.  Calcutta is like that.  Calcutta seems a city, an antique city.  You think how does this work?  This is kind of falling apart.  Some of it is picturesque, some of its charming.  Two words I really deplore, charming and picturesque.  But then you see it works and you see that it’s a white city of this sort of Greek Revival, Raj, East India Company buildings, and people work in them.  And it’s a city that you can actually inhabit.  So it does have its surfaces, but stay a bit longer and you begin to understand that surfaces reveal inner states.

WERMAN: And the fresh eye also has to bring new perspectives on a place that locals take for granted and don’t see.

THEROUX: That’s true.  It’s also why it’s so difficult to write about where you come from.  I come from Medford, Massachusetts, and it’s maddening for me to write about Medford.  It’s very, very difficult.

WERMAN: Why?

THEROUX: When I start doing it images flood in.  There’s so much explanation.  There’s so much history.  I have so many feelings.  I am wired with feelings.  Or Cape Cod, for example, someone says to me write about Cape Cod.  Where do I begin?  But for the foreigner, they begin with the sand dunes and the salty air and the fried clams and I think that’s not where I would begin.  I would begin with something else, maybe the memory of my children there, or of my marriage or something like that.  So memories are very difficult things to deal with.

WERMAN: Now the main character, Jerry Delfont, in “A Dead Hand” is a writer.  He talks a lot about novels and travel books and really taking that to the extreme, the self-referential quality, is a scene in which Jerry Delfont meets Paul Theroux, you I guess, face to face.  What were you thinking then when you included Paul Theroux in referring to yourself in the third person?

THEROUX: Yeah, a couple of people said that; what were you thinking?  Good God, you know?:  I thought it was an opportunity.  First, you have a narrator.  It’s a he, he’s an American.  The reader would say oh I know who this is.  This is Paul Theroux, and they guy is a travel writer writing a book about Calcutta.  Him again.  Then I thought, wouldn’t it be interesting to introduce myself as a character.  It’s the first time you hear this guy’s name, Jerry Delfont.  Hi Jerry.  You think who’s Jerry?  Oh, it’s the guy who’s been talking to us in the book all this time.  And he’s been presenting himself in a sort of dignified way, but his work is not that dignified.  He’s one of these people that gets freebies at hotels and the P.R. person says I hope you’ll be kind to us when you write your article for whoever, Travel and Leisure Magazine, or something.  Not that they’re on the take, but everyone likes a mention.  Paul Theroux pops up and says hi Jerry and you suddenly see this guy isn’t everything that he said he is.  He’s slightly seedier even than he says he is.  And Paul Theroux is not in the book, I’m not bathed in glory in this portrait.  I deprecate myself in writing about myself.

WERMAN: Well I was going to say, you’re not easy on yourself.  In the mouth of Jerry Delfont he says, “I wanted to protect Mrs. Unger from this notoriously prying man.  What I knew about Theroux was what everyone knew about him.  He was known for being intrusive, especially among the unsuspecting strangers he met on trains, travelers who had no idea who he was, people thinking out loud in unguarded moments.  I resented his books sales and his bon ami and his breezy manner.”  Wow, you’re pretty rough on yourself.

THEROUX: Well, the operative phrase is I knew what everyone knew.  Read any review of my books.  You can see that I’m a genial person at the end of a microphone.

WERMAN: Were you recycling some of the worse lines you remember from readers?

THEROUX: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah.  People think he’s grumpy, he’s cantankerous, you know, so hard to please.  Listen, if you travel, you have to be a really nice person.  You have to be a genial person and you have to go with the flow.  You can’t call attention to yourself.  You really need to know how to get along with people.  I feel as if my father taught me that.  My father is a mild man, but a watchful man.  And that’s a good lesson, which is be a listener.  You’re not the most important person when you’re a traveler.

WERMAN: So much of your body of work, fiction and non-fiction, is set in places outside of the U.S.  When did that start, this interest in bringing readers outside their comfort zone?

THEROUX: When I joined the Peace Corps in 1963 I was sent to Nyasaland in Central Africa, later became Malawi.  I grew up being educated that the world is a wasteland.  You know, Samuel Becket, it’s a wasteland, Sartre, it’ a wasteland.  The world isn’t a wasteland.  I’ve had to reclaim landscapes.  So you say when did it begin?  It began when I left the States.  When I left my education behind and started to look at the world as it really was.  People are figures in a landscape and I supposed I’m responding to my travel.  And to my residence.  I lived in Singapore for three years.  I lived in Africa for six years.  I lived in England for 17 years.  So I was never in search of material.  I just traveled and that sort of percolated into my imagination, the idea that I was in a different place.  And I suppose I was responding personally to it because I felt I’m here, this is my material.  This is what I’m writing about.  But I’m also paying the electric bill, getting a Driver’s License, and having children and looking after them.

WERMAN: Paul Theroux’s latest novel is called “A Dead Hand”.  He spoke with us from Hawaii Public Radio in Honolulu.