In an ideal world – by which I mean one that lives up to my most energetic fantasies – Paul Theroux and I would be meeting in some far flung and exotic place: on an empty platform in a distant railway station, or under a date palm in a dried-up desert oasis. Both of us would have dust on our boots. One of us would be wearing a bad hat, or even a good one. Our conversation, which would unfold like an old map, would come with a soundtrack comprising the cries of market traders, the whistle of a train and the bellow of a camel.
Alas, the world is not ideal. Neither one of us is going anywhere today. Theroux and I talk via video call, his summer-tawny face at first a little blurry on the screen of my laptop. He lives, for most of the year, in Hawaii. But he spends the summer at his house on Cape Cod, which is where he is today: in an attic, from the look of things. And I suppose this is appropriate, really, albeit a bit (for me) disappointing. While he has always made much of his escape from his Massachusetts roots, a process that famously began when, after university, he joined the Peace Corps and went to live in Malawi, he continues to be bound to this part of the world as if by invisible rope. Not only is his extended family still here, or some of it; New England is also the setting for his extraordinary new novel, The Bad Angel Brothers, a manic tale of sibling rivalry that owes its small town setting mostly to John Cheever, and its seething resentment mostly to William Shakespeare.
