High-Fiber Moralist

By R.Z. Sheppard

Paul Theroux has written nearly 30 books, both novels and travel memoirs. This far-flung native of Massachusetts has never been mistaken for a regionalist. His work reflects his experiences as a teacher in Africa and Singapore and as a wanderer in the Third World.

Ironically, Theroux's nonfiction, notably The Great Railway Bazaar, has excited the public's imagination more than his fiction. Few know he wrote The Mosquito Coast, remembered more for the film version than for the original novel. Too bad, because Theroux is a gifted and versatile tale spinner. He usually writes about outsiders: artists, adventurers and dreamers on the run from conformity. This partly explains the years Theroux lived abroad. Now an ex-expatriate, he is apparently still edgy enough about the U.S. to live near the exits, in Massachusetts and Hawaii. Millroy the Magician (Random House; 437 pages; $24) gives us a good idea why.

In the tradition of satirists from Mark Twain to Salman Rushdie, Theroux updates the story of the prophet without honor in his own country. For prophet one could read writer, although the plot of this allusive entertainment gallops on its own. The style is picaresque, the message is salvation through health food, and the medium is Millroy, a road-show magician. Part Jesus, part Prospero, part yogi, he alone would make this a novel to conjure with. But Theroux adds another delight, Jilly Farina, a plucky adolescent with an artless narrative voice that, like Huckleberry Finn's, grabs and holds the reader's attention from the first page: "I had walked from Gaga's in Marstons Mills to Mashpee, where Dada was living with Vera, his Wampanoag woman, and when I got there he was black-out drunk and she was gone. I looked at Dada lying on the floor and made sure he was not dead." The resemblance to Huck Finn does not appear to be coincidental. Not only is her father a soak, but Jilly also cross-dresses to hide her identity when she runs away from home aboard an Airstream trailer.

That contemporary version of a river raft belongs to Millroy, who enlists Jilly in his mission to purify America's digestive system. It's a sewer, he says, clogged with grease, sugar and the flesh of slaughtered mammals. The wizard preaches the loaves-and-fishes diet. His nutritional guide is the Bible: "The book of life. The book of food. The book of meals and miracles." % In its pages he finds the secrets of longevity and regularity. From Ezekiel come the ingredients for bread. Daniel serves lentils, and Nahum offers figs. Millet, barley, honeycombs and melons tumble from holy writ as exaltations of roughage.

This gut reaction to scripture is a deft stroke of literary subversion. It should not draw a Fundamentalist fatwa, though beef lobbyists and overweight- pride groups may grumble about the ceaseless bashing of carnivores and the amply proportioned. Theroux's main dodge is to see American puritanism in a frankly physical rather than spiritual light. Readers may take this sleight to heart or turn it into a belly laugh. Either way, the sorcerer and his apprentice encounter a nation with more than its share of knaves and hypocrites, including the Reverend Huber, a stock evangelist huckster, and Mr. Phyllis, cooing host of a TV kiddie show who is a child molester offscreen.

The meat business gets special attention. A star-spangled banner flying over a fast-food restaurant has nothing to do with patriotism, says Millroy. "That's just an attention getter so that they can sell grease dogs and fat burgers and rubber chicken." He counters by opening a chain of Bible-food diners, but not before scandalizing the cultural pharisees with bowel-saving sermons on children's television. "Millroy gives America an enema," cracks Larry King.

This may be no way to treat a savior, especially one who can juggle a bowling ball, a lighted propane torch and a snarling chain saw, calm a storm and raise the dead. But it is the traditional way. Overexposed, Millroy falls victim to celebrity and gossip. That assures the triumph of imagemakers over artists, in this case Millroy the Magician. What makes us suckers for the artificial and skeptics about authenticity? If Theroux knows, he keeps it to himself as magician and waif light out for Hawaii, where the novel turns a touch self-serving and puts on some excess symbolism. On the upside, the move rounds out the humanity that makes Millroy and Jilly the most enchanting characters Theroux has ever pulled out of his hat.