Volume 29, Number 6 · April 15, 1982
Moby-Dad
By Robert Towers
The Mosquito Coast
by Paul Theroux
Houghton Mifflin, 374 pp., $13.95
Many novelists quickly establish an authorial identity that remains recognizable, through good books and bad, from the beginning to the culmination of the writer's career. The authorial 'ego' visible in The Pickwick Papers is still visible, despite a multiplicity of changes, in Our Mutual Friend. Marked stylistic traits, patterns of humor, anger, and disgust, patterns of behavior and response, a predilection for certain kinds of characters and situations—these constitute the general reader's awareness of such an identity; for the linguistically trained expert there are of course other, more 'objective' forms of evidence—word-counts, phrasal or grammatical tics, classification of images, etc.—that can often be computerized. I am sure that some of the latter apparatus could be successfully applied to the novels of Paul Theroux, but for many of us he remains the most protean of writers, a master of disguise whose authorial identity has yet to be fixed or revealed.
Review, 1903 words
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