Deep South by Paul Theroux

Reverend Lyles said he was proud of what had been done at the old Rosenwald school, how it had been fixed up and was now a well-attended community center. The Auburn Rural Studio was still building ingenious low-cost houses. It was not the town of Agee and Evans anymore. It was still struggling, but it was improving, and hopeful.

On a single visit I would not have seen this, but over the course of a year, in four seasons, the true condition of the town had become apparent. This was not a trip about my having had a good meal or a bad meal, or my laboring toward a destination in the old travel-book manner. It may have seemed to some people I met that I was headed somewhere, but I was still traveling in widening circles, happily, on back roads, meeting people, and revisiting friends.

Paul Theroux has traveled all over the world: India, Southeast Asia, Africa. But until he steps out of his door on Cape Cod in Massachusetts one morning and hops in his car, he has never been in the American South. He heads down the interstate, making brief stops in Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, Georgia, heading deeper and deeper into a land that is familiar but unfamiliar, recognizable but unrecognizable. His travels in Africa become a specific touchpoint: the poverty Theroux sees in Alabama, Mississippi, and Arkansas is not just a reminder of the third world, but an instantiation of it, right under the American nose. Deep South explores these forgotten places, which are not just unknown to Theroux, but to nearly every American, because they lie in the places that even the highways have passed by, where industry and work have vanished, and which the cultural and political leaders of the United States would just as soon turn a blind eye toward.

I'm a Southerner, though I have always thought of my home in North Carolina as quite different from the "deep south" of Mississippi and Alabama. It is interesting to read about yourself, or at least a region to which you are allied, from an anthropological perspective. At first, I felt a kind of bemusement at the Northerner who carries with him a set of bromides about the South, without wondering whether or not they are accurate or true. When Theroux writes that the church is the center of social life in a Southern town, and claims this is one way it differs from his native New England, I thought about how a few weeks ago, I visited Sandwich, Massachusetts--where Theroux literally lives--and ended up at a church festival where a bunch of elderly white Catholics were selling wreaths and dolls and chili hot dogs. Certainly for those folks, the church is at the center of social life in Sandwich. And what do we do with the increasing number of white Americans, southerners included, who no longer go to church but claim evangelical as an identifier? There's an awful lot of cant about the South, is all I'm saying, and it can be hard to set it aside and see the place clearly, especially if you carry your expectations with you.

This feeling was amplified, for me, by Theroux's pointed aversion toward urban life in the South. Charleston, Asheville, Natchez: Theroux passes these places by, stopping in them briefly, if only to tell us their charms have no interest for him. To Theroux, this is a way of side-stepping the tourist sheen of the South, of skirting the guidebooks. But it also presupposes a real South that lies in rural places. Of course you are going to find the South to be poor and rural if you define it from the beginning as rural and poor. But moreover, I found myself wondering if Theroux doesn't miss something crucial about the South by not interrogating the "New South," the cities where industry has fled, where investment in the tech sector, for instance, has created new opportunities for gentrification and dispossession. I'm not sure you can understand the depreciation of Greenville, Alabama, for instance, unless you understand the boom in Huntsville.

But anyway. Most of my reservations about Deep South came to little, because in the end, what makes Theroux seem reliable is the fact that he keeps coming back. Deep South is the story of not just a single trip, but four different trips, each in a different season. Theroux keeps coming back to the same locations over and over again, meeting with the same non-profit leaders, the same black farmers and unemployed whites, the same Indian motel owners. Out of this investment in time a real picture of a region emerges: a place rich in pride and cultural power, but torn inside out by the deprecations of global capitalism and political neglect. By the end of the book, Theroux is no longer ignoring the cities: he spends several chapters on his time in Hot Springs, Arkansas and the capital of Little Rock, integrating them into the larger story of the South as he sees it.

I brought this book with me on a trip to Mississippi last weekend. We didn't quite get up to the Delta, the poorest part of the state and where Theroux spends most of his time, but we did see much of what Theroux saw. For me, it was the sight of a roofless, wrecked building on the main street of Port Gibson, sitting next to a restaurant: someone's business and dream. Everywhere he goes, Theroux wonders why Africa gets so much aid from the USA while its own communities suffer. (I thought Theroux was a little silly in the way he would compare the money given to say, Ghana, population 31 million, to the federal aid provided to a town of 800, but still, point taken.) But among the neglect are people whose roots are deep, and who spend their lives trying to make those communities thrive.

The Mosquito Coast by Paul Theroux

He said, "It's savage and superstitious to accept the world as it is.  Fiddle around and find a use for it!"  God had left the world incomplete, he said.  It was man's job to understand how it worked, to tinker with it and finish it.  I think that was why he hated missionaries so much: because they taught people to put up with their earthly burdens.  For Father, there were no burdens that couldn't be fitted with a set of wheels, or runners, or a system of pulleys.

But instead of improving the world, he said, most people just tried to improve God.  "God--the deceased God--was a hasty inventor of the sort you find in any patent office.  Yes, He had a great idea in making the world, but He started it and moved on before He got it working properly.  God is like the boy who gets his top spinning and then leaves the room and lets it wobble.  How can you worship that?  God got bored," Father said.  "I know that kind of boredom, but I fight it."

Charlie Fox's father--that's what he's called, Father, by everyone, not just his children--is a brilliant but arrogant man.  He keeps his kids out of school, not wanting them to be corrupted by consumerist ideals.  He is a gifted inventor, working as a kind of handyman for a wealthy asparagus farmer in Massachusetts.  But he believes that he is the only one who sees America, and the world, for what they are, a man more capable than God himself, because God's inventions never seem to work properly.  It's the kind of arrogance that can only be sustained by brilliance, because it often seems like he might actually be able to back up the things he says about himself.

Increasingly disgusted by the commercialism of the developed world, Father decides to take his family to the wilderness of Honduras.  He's something like Sam Pollit of The Man Who Loved Children, in that his all-enveloping narcissism acts like a black hole for his family to fall in, but whereas Pollit is all progressive fantasy and high-mindedness, Father is closest to the kind of doomsday preppers you see stocking their bunkers with creamed corn and assault rifles.  In Honduras, he tells his children that America has fallen into war and been destroyed:

"Right now," Father said dreamily, "someone over there in America is painting yellow lines on a road, and someone else is wrapping half an onion in a blister of supermarket cellophane, or putting an electric squeezer down the garbage disposal and saying, 'It's busted.'  Someone's just opened a can of chocolate-flavored soup in a beautiful kitchen, because he can't get his car started, to eat out.  He really wanted a cheeseburger.  Someone just poisoned himself with a sausage of red nitrate, and he's smiling because it tasted so good.  And they're all cursing the president.  They want him re-tooled."

For a while, Father's project is a smashing success.  Deep in the Honduran jungle, he makes a functioning village with scraps and raw materials, bringing comfortable housing and irrigation.  His crowning achievement is a giant refrigerator that uses heat power, which he calls "Fat Boy."  But the resonance with the names given to the nuclear bombs dropped on Japan--Little Boy and Fat Man--foreshadows not only the fate of the refrigerator but Father's entire project.

The narrator, Charlie, is thinly written.  As the oldest, he's both suspicious of his Father's abilities, but also captivated by them, but swings between these two extremes according to Theroux's needs.  And yet, it's hard to imagine another character as vivid or powerful as Charlie's father, who sucks in every available breath of air.  (The fact that Sam Pollit wasn't the only strong character in Christina Stead's novel is one of the things that makes it so incredible.)  The novel is exactly as compelling as the character is, and it's hard to look away as both hurtle toward disaster.