From The Washington Post:
Paul Theroux is something of a throwback. In an era when so many novelists jump up and down with tricks, verbal antics, shock and razzle-dazzle, all the while shouting — like Baby Roo — “Look at me, look at me,” Theroux just gets on with telling a compelling story, with the smoothness of a confident professional. The Elephanta Suite is his 27th work of fiction. The man knows his business. People mainly think of Paul Theroux as a travel writer, the man who gave us the larky, sometimes scathing and bitterly comic bestseller The Great Railway Bazaar. Over the years since then, he’s turned out many similar books, some of them marred by his slightly sour personality. In more ways than one, he’s the Somerset Maugham of our time.
All three novellas are tenuously connected. Not only by their themes — Americans in India; the temptations of sex, mysticism or both; unexpected consequences — but also because the main characters all stay, if only briefly, in the Elephanta Suite of a luxurious Mumbai hotel. What’s more, the businessman of the first story is mentioned in the second, and a young woman glimpsed in the second becomes the main character of the third. That said, nothing much is done with this interlacing. It even seems a little cutesy.
More here.
