Deep South

Paul Theroux

(Hamish Hamilton £20)

Reviewed by Hugh MacDonald

It is not the most elegant of Theroux sentences but it lacks nothing in power. Deep in the Deep South these words emerge from the red dirt, the interminable dust, the baking tarmac to cause the mind to reel.

“In some counties almost 30% of the people were living below the poverty line and one in four of Arkansas’s children were classified as hungry – ‘food deprived’.’’

One in seven of residents in Arkansas will never read this. They are illiterate. This is the reality of the Deep South and it is one that that shocks and moves Paul Theroux, a writer with an erstwhile enviable gift of detaching himself from his subjects while spending the past 50 years travelling the world and writing more than a dozen books that can justly be called travel literature.

The Deep South is not just wonderful writing, it is personal. Theroux departs from his normal travel mode. There are no trains, boats and planes. The journey to the Deep South is made by car. Intriguingly, Theroux does not just visit Alabama, the Carolinas, the Mississippi Delta, Georgia, Tennessee and Arkansas, and leave them behind forever. He revisits them in each of the seasons, deepening his knowledge and strengthening friendships.

Much of what he finds is predictable. The poverty is obvious and the racism can be stark. “Poor is shorthand for black,” observes one subject but Theroux is too scrupulous a reporter to leave that assertion uninvestigated. His travels, stunningly, bring him to the conclusion that parts of the South are “poorer and more hopeless’’ than "distressed parts of Africa’’.

More than 150 years after the emancipation of slaves, he finds racism – casual and violent – can be heard on the streets, viewed in the press and experienced in the diner as he dines with two black famers. The last lynching in Alabama, he notes, was only in 1981.

Yet Deep South is no sneering Yankee denunciation. Among its noble virtues, it is both an argument for aid and a celebration of what is good below the Mason-Dixon line. Theroux does not shirk racism, indeed one of his diversions includes an essay on the N-word. He obviously does not sidestep the poverty, striding purposefully into the homes and lives of the dispossessed and disenfranchised. He is astonished by the lust for guns.

But there is a personal, even spiritual aspect to the book which does not just involve Theroux’s visits to the churches that seem to stand on every corner of the South. There is something of the prodigal son coming home and being dismayed at what he finds.

This despair is accentuated by the realisation that the USA, certainly the more prosperous parts of the North, do not know how their compatriots are living. Theroux dose not spare Bill Clinton, a son of Arkansas, for raising hundreds of millions for everywhere bar the Deep South.

But this is a Theroux work that is largely devoid of his more acidic observations, certainly in relation to the people he meets. His conversations with most in the Deep South reveal a struggling constituency that nevertheless retains a hospitality and a kindness to strangers. They also cleave to a way of living that has positive aspects of family, faith and resilience.

“The poor, having little else, keep their culture intact as part of their vitality, long after the well-off have dumped it,” says Theroux. This brings out the best in him, both as a writer and a personality.

He retains his gift for unblinking insight, he shows his intellect in diversions such as the investigation of Faulkner as a Southern writer, but he also displays a humanity that he has kept disguised in many previous episodes. Theroux’s brilliance could once be criticised as cold. The Deep South has warmed more than bones of a 74-year-old writer. There is a softness to the hardened traveller. He seeks to understand, he offers to help, he commiserates genuinely with the afflicted, whether they may be the inhabitants of a crowded shack or a fellow bibliophile blighted by depression.

His conversations with barber, politician, aid worker, farmer or author are frank, honest, even humble. He is invited into lives and does not take liberties with that accommodation.

At one point, he finds himself deep in conversation with a distressed quarry man who confides an anguish about his unfaithful wife and admits an almost Gothic desire to kill her. Theroux gently offers: “My only advice would be, suppress the urge to kill her.”

Once this could be dismissed as a barb from Theroux the ironic. It is, instead, a mark of Theroux the sincere. This is his best work of non-fiction. If acted upon, it may prove to be his most important.