A Stranger in the Earth: A Novel - Hardcover

Theroux, Marcel

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0151004080 ISBN 13: 9780151004089

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1999

Synopsis

Arriving in London to work for his great uncle at the local newspaper, Horace Littlefair is unprepared, overdressed, and underpaid for what awaits him when he is hurled into a world of love, racism, blackmail, political intrigue, and Scrabble, where disaster follows his every step. 25,000 first printing.

About this title

About the Author

Marcel Theroux, son of Paul Theroux, was born in Kampala, Uganda, in 1968. He studied English at Cambridge and international relations at Yale. He worked in television news in Boston and New York and now works in London.

Reviews

A few weeks after his arrival in London, country-boy Horace Littlefair sheds his grandfather's tweeds for the synthetic accouterments of hip-hop style, but cannot shake the provincial integrity of his upbringing. An innocent youth from the village of Great Must, Horace blunders comically through Theroux's first novel: his failed efforts to join the chemical generation are matched only by his bungled attempts as a journalist at the South London Bugle, the newspaper owned by his striving, blow-hard great-uncle Derwent Boothby. After losing his first love interestAa lovely Pole named JanaAto the immigration authorities, and finding himself relegated to writing the Bugle's garden column, Horace accepts an assignment to profile one of London's centenariansAthe ancient Agnes KettleAand the plot heats up. Soon after Horace interviews her, Mrs. Kettle is visited by zealous Trevor Diamond, head of a one-man campaign to save the urban fox. Horace starts to write puff pieces about Trevor, and the two fall into an uneasy, malt-hazed collaboration. WhenAshades of Ian McEwan's recent Booker Prize novel, AmsterdamAMP Barnaby Colefax is caught with a prostitute, a conspiracy to cover it up drives Colefax and Diamond into each other's arms. Meanwhile, Horace plays Scrabble with his landlord, Mr. Narayan, agonizes over Narayan's wayward daughter Lakshmi and starts to fall for a smart, hard-boiled city girl. The quippy, English humor of this novel supplements its loose, picaresque style. As a satirist, Theroux is often very sharp; he is, however, sometimes a bit ham-handed, as when Horace's devastating hangover is followed, after a section break, by the old A.A. meeting standard, "My name is Richard and I'm an alcoholic." Still, Theroux's fun poking is genuinely appealing. He is deeply sympathetic to London's motley denizens, and is an ambitious architect of plot. (Aug.)
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Many funny moments and a beguiling cast of bona fide English eccentrics adorn harming picaresque coming-of-agerthe fictional debut of veteran novelist Paul Theroux's son. The story chronicles Horace Littlefair's passage from the the delightfully deranged provincial village of Great Much up to London to begin employment with the nondescript newspaper (the South London Bugle) thats owned and operated by his hustling, social-climbing uncle Derwent Boothby. Theroux sets the plot aboil quickly, shifting his focus from the helpless Horace (who's immediately victimized by a predatory cabdriver) to such prominent secondary characters as phlegmatic landlord Ugandan Mr. Narayan; centenarian Agnes Kettle (the subject of Horaces first in-person interview); and unlikely best pal Trevor Diamond, a passionate environmentalist dedicated to saving ``the urban fox'' from public opprobrium and extinction. The ineffably good- natured and game Horace is a perfect foil in an interlocking series of misadventures that begins when he inadvertently causes the deportation of a Polish shopgirl who had caught his fancy, picks up steam when a randy MP (Barnaby Colefax) is caught in flagrante with an accommodating prostitute, and climaxes when the mystery of whether Horace is indeed ``the grandson of a famous communist'' coincides hilariously with an ``anti-quarantine rally'' organized to save the foxes and put the duplicitous Barnaby firmly in his place. Without laboring the point, Theroux draws an amusing, touching parallel between the endangered foxes and the almost preternaturally innocent Horace (who is, incidentally and happily, no match for any of the several resourceful and forthright women here). Despite a slight relaxation of comic tension at the close, a wonderfully intelligent, generously imagined, skillfully executed debut. If its occasionally Waspish observations of human folly bring to mind both Evelyn Waugh and Theroux pre, its infectious enthusiasm and warmth announce the appearance of a gifted young writer very much his own man. -- Copyright ©1999, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Mr. Deeds goes to town again. The town, this time, is London, and standing in for Mr. Deeds is the charming Horace Littlefair. Following the death of his grandfather, who raised him in the tiny village of Great Much, Horace sets out for the big city with a duffel bag full of his grandfather's tweed suits and the promise of a job on his great-uncle's newspaper. Like Mr. Deeds before him, Horace falls prey both to wily sophisticates out to manipulate him and to a few lost souls eager for companionship. Among the latter are his new landlord, Mr. Narayan, a Tamil refugee and former university lecturer whose evening Scrabble games with Horace provide his main source of pleasure; Agnes Kettle, a still-independent centenarian whose story Horace is sent to cover; and Trevor Diamond, the founder of Fox Outreach, whose aim is the passage of a quarantine bill to protect Britain's foxes from rabies. Chief among the manipulators is Barnaby Colefax, a scheming politician who has been caught with a prostitute and needs Trevor's cause and Horace's pen to restore his reputation. In time, Horace gains street smarts, a better wardrobe, and romance. This gently satiric first novel belongs in most public libraries.ABarbara Love, Kingston Frontenac P.L., Ont.
Copyright 1999 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 1999
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0151004080
• ISBN 13: 9780151004089
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 279