Walter Kirn writes in the New York Times:
Paul Theroux is the thinking person’s James Michener, a globe-hopping chronicler of distant lands whose stories, some reported, some invented, aim to inform and broaden, not merely engage, and permit the armchair voyager to stamp new visas in his intellectual passport. Theroux delivers richer prose than Michener, subtler insights and slyer dilemmas, but he resembles the late mass-market master of narrative geography by treating societies as his true protagonists while giving his characters (in his novels, at least) the auxiliary role of inciting, observing or acting out the conflicts latent in their surrounding cultures. Art for art’s sake isn’t Theroux’s bag, and it needn’t be, of course. He likes to lecture a little between the lines, to show off the artifacts gathered during his travels and speculate on their significance.
Theroux’s new book of three novellas, “The Elephanta Suite,” is his attempt — brought off with mixed results but distinguished by worthy intentions and sturdy tradecraft — to display and explain contemporary India in all its swarming, seductive, anachronistic, disorienting dynamism. India’s contradictions seem to interest him most, especially its peculiar combination of ancient ascetic spirituality and information-age commercialism. Over here an ashram or a temple devoted to the quest for inner enlightenment or the veneration of Hindu gods, across the way a modern call center that fields complaints from Home Depot customers. Theroux hints in the book that India’s native novelists — or at least those who’ve won wide acceptance in America — have failed in some way to convey their country’s complexities, perhaps by emphasizing its picturesque folkways and exotic domestic customs as a way of enchanting Western readers. Theroux presumes to correct this situation by stripping some romance from the place.
