Paul Theroux's Dixie: how to write a self-fulfilling prophecy

The author Paul Theroux conducted a conspicuous, if irrational, feud with Sir V. S. Naipaul for fifteen years. Though the combatants declared it over in 2011, Theroux, now 74, seems to be working through some unresolved issues with a new book, Deep South. In it he retraces Naipaul's 1989 exploration, A Turn in the South.

Where Naipaul was observant and curious about the manners and morals the people among whom he moved, Theroux- who was born and educated in America but has lived in the UK for decades- appears to be cut from the same cloth that has produced two centuries of condescending British visitors to America, eager to find what they expected and triumphantly reporting it was as bad as they had hoped. In her 1832 memoir, Domestic Manners of the Americans, she set the standard when she faulted Americans for holding her own views as a citizen of the world’s Top Nation:

A single word indicative of doubt, that any thing, or every thing, in that country is not the very best in the world, produces an effect which must be seen and felt to be understood. If the citizens of the United States were indeed the devoted patriots they call themselves, they would surely not thus encrust themselves in the hard, dry, stubborn persuasion, that they are the first and best of the human race, that nothing is to be learnt, but what they are able to teach, and that nothing is worth having, which they do not possess.

A well-written review in The Washington Post, by Jack Hitt, will spare readers the loss of $30 for a slog through 441 pages of bearing the literary white man’s burden:

He’s read the great classics as well — Chaucer, for example — and is amused that people living in rural outbacks didn’t spend their college years in Middle English seminars. At one point he is talking to a black clergyman who introduces himself as Bishop Palmer. Theroux says: “I think of a palmer as a pilgrim, bringing a palm from the Holy Land. Like the line in Chaucer.” Bishop Palmer seems confused, so Theroux says: “Canterbury Tales. ‘Palmers for to seken straunge strondes.’ ” Theroux whispers to the reader, “He smiled as people sometimes do when hearing an unintelligible language brazenly spoken, or a dog with an odd bark.” After attending Palmer’s church — which was a big afternoon of singing and preaching, followed by a luncheon spread — our traveling Yankee notes, “It was touching to see how some serious tinkering with Scripture could lift people’s spirits.”

Naipaul- from India, itself a multicultural, strife-riven, violent nation, easily wins this round. He went to the American South to see what was there. Paul Theroux went to prove it as bad as he knew it, and himself vastly better than its best.