Deep South: Four Seasons on Back Roads

Like all of his other travel books, the narrative of his encounters with the people and the land is a joy to read. But his revelations of the human condition and character of the people living in the areas that he visits were an eye-opener for me. I found it easy to accept the conditions in Dark Star Safari, but HERE??? Thank you for the great read and awareness.

Before I tell you what reading Deep South is like I want to be clear that I bought and read Dark Star Safari, The Last Train to Zona Verde, and Riding the Iron Rooster. Sure, that is only four books out of a ton he has written but it does say that I truly enjoy his writing and I’ve read enough to know he has some axes to grind and is pompous. But as far as I’m concerned, some people earn a right to be pompous and he is certainly one of those. Here is what it is like to read his most recent travelogue: Imagine yourself in a large family room cramped with some family members but also guests whom you have no idea how they got into your family’s house. The thermostat is like 80 degrees and the conversation is loud and ranges from the inconsequential and trivial to some strands of poetic utterances detached like threads on the afghan thrown across your aging uncle’s lap. And for whatever reason—you can invent one—you are honored and stuck beside your aging, grumpy uncle for the duration of your visit which is to say about all day long. A good six hours anyway. During that time of asphyxiated bluster, your uncle regales you with stories. Some of the stories are delicious, far more so than the appetizers cold on the plate handed to you. But invariably and without fail, the old man always returns to his pet peeves. He absolutely hates Bill Clinton and no matter the story or circumstances of whatever it is he is trying to tell you, he comes back to Bill and uses him like a doorstop. Kicks him good and hard beneath the lip of the door and then sets sail again to some more stories. Included in his grumpy dissertation is a recurring condescension to anything remotely religious. He just cannot comprehend these people who pray and worship. He is blinkered to a fault. What you realize is, this old guy—as much as you love him—is offering you a whig travelogue. Herbert Butterfield defined Whig history as “the study of the past with one eye, so to speak, upon the present is the source of all sins and sophistries in history….” (I am indebted to an essay in the NYRB on Whig Science by Steven Weinberg for this reference). Your grumpy old uncle, in this case Paul Theroux, cannot tell a travel story without getting in the way. Granted, this is difficult in writing about travel since the traveler is the one seeing and describing what is experienced. But one cannot help but feel pity for someone who moralizes, pontificates and otherwise pounds the pulpit for hours when all we really want to hear are vivid descriptions of the people and places he has met along the way. Oh, you’ll get that and when you do it will be a like a fresh breeze blowing through that open door door-stopped by Bill C. You’ll finish this book saying what you say when you finally get to extricate yourself from the family reunion. “I’m glad that’s over.” Four years later, I reread this book as I drove myself through the South. I am raising the stars from 3 to 4. I think I was initially unfair. It is not his best book by a long shot but he really has a keen eye and writes so well. His grasp of literature and his courage in asking question and befriending people are laudable traits, especially for a travel writer.

I'd read several of Theroux's early train-travel novels, like The Great Railway Bazaar, and admired them greatly: his use of language is superb, and the books took you to an exotic place and made you feel you were there, with the sights and smells of a foreign culture leaping from the page. Deep South is different: Theroux is on American soil, and his transport is a car, not an iron horse. But many of the elements are still there: small towns in the Deep South, the grist for the book, are far from the American mainstream. He is frequently reminded of Africa and India, where poverty is deep-seated and a kind of hopelessness often permeates. Indeed, most of the people in the book - many of them black - are struggling to get by, still facing a kind of institutionalized racism and lack of opportunity. Jobs have evaporated, migrating to China or Mexico, and the land itself, rich and often beautiful, is blighted everywhere by rusted shacks and abandoned storefronts. Even the whites (apart from the genteel upper crust) are dispirited, resentful and apparently resigned to a second-class citizenship. What's most impressive in many ways in not just Theroux's power of description, which is prodigious. It's his reporting and his myriad of conversations with people, many of them black, who open up to him about their lives and their hopes and fears. The conversations are honest, revealing, galvanizing. In a number of cases, he befriends people and meets up with them months later to extend the dialogue. But for a Northerner who has little experience with the small-town South, the book is endlessly depressing. Theroux reminds us that so much of U.S. support (public and private) for foreign countries could have gone to rebuilding some of the towns and industries that have spiraled into decay. What is left today is a region that - far from the glittering towers of Atlanta -- is poor and getting poorer, mired in decades of gradual dissolution that shows little hope of recovery. Ultimately, then, it's a gloomy book, but a powerful one energized by the people and the places he visits and the reporter's eye he brings with him.

Our greatest living travel writer does it again. I think this may be Theroux's best travel book yet. It's more considered and introspective than some of his previous (all thoroughly excellent) books, perhaps because it's based on repeated journeys through the same places over the course of four seasons, rather than a journey through a place wth an end goal in mind. I admire his writing because it's always so incisive. He has a gift for dialogue, and an eye for that perfect detail or phrase which reveals so much about a place or a person. I've read everything he's published, and he's long been a source of inspiration for me as both a traveler and a writer. I enjoyed Theroux's thoughts on Southern literature, and I love how he brings his broader reading and the thoughts of the literary greats into his day to day life, and into the book. He strikes me as the sort of guy I'd love to sit down for a drink with and talk about our favourite books. Reading Deep South also brought back so many memories of my childhood in small town Ontario. We never had the poverty or racial discrimination of the South, nothing like that. But I did experience some of that openness and kindness, nature, the St. Lawrence River, good neighbours, country fairs, simple home cooking, and more. Theroux brought so much of that back, and as an expat and nonstop traveler he encouraged me to reevaluate it, and to get curious about my roots again. This is a well written, insightful book which will reveal new worlds in a place that you may have prejudged, and that you probably didn't know much about before. Highly recommended.

As a lifelong southerner, I was disappointed in this book. Although I felt the portrayal of the poverty and decline of much of the south was accurate, I felt the author's commentary was limited to only that aspect of the south. It seems the region is peopled by both poor black people and rich oblivious white people but no one else. There is a vast layer of working class whites and blacks who love their homeland, cherish their best traditions, and work hard to nurture the beauty, the charm and the current and future growth of the region. Along with abandoned storefronts and shacks, we have glorious countryside, many thriving small towns, and industrial growth and progress. His book is an interesting (at times) and rich discussion of dying towns and struggling farmers with some truly memorable interviews and relationships. Just don't be discouraged from visiting our hills and valleys, mountains, plateaus and flatlands by this book! We glory in our lives and will welcome you.

When did you ever think a book by Theroux could be described as being more a product of heart than head? On balance, I think it’s well worth reading. It’s also flawed. The positives: He does what almost no one else even attempts to do: take a long, careful look at the rural South. (By way of contrast, I just finished “A Measure of Belonging: Twenty-One Writers of Color on the New American South”. Not one of its essays takes us out of the city. Most don’t even take us out of the university. The countryside all around them might as well be on the moon.) He makes every effort to be fair-minded and write what he believes to be true. He shows us the depth of poverty in the South, and the extent to which racism and the legacy of slavery continue to afflict its people, both Black and White. Unlike some other reviewers, I enjoyed his “digressions” on Southern writers and the n-word. He displays more compassion and empathy than I would have thought possible from this infamous sourpuss. The less-positive: This is not a particularly well-balanced portrait of the rural South. If you ask every person you meet about race, you will produce a book that is predominantly about race. Similarly, if you seek out the poorest and most remote regions of the rural South, you will produce descriptions about how poor and remote they are. The rural South is not completely given over to racial divisions and desperate poverty. Reading Theroux, you could be forgiven for coming away with that impression. As a native Northerner who now lives much of each year in the South, I’m skeptical of Theroux’s often repeated claim that rural poverty in the South is on a different scale and level than in other parts of the country. Just as Clinton, Gates, and other major donors/foundations don’t have to travel to Africa to find areas in desperate need of help, so too Theroux didn’t have to travel to the South to find desperate rural poverty. Drive 10 miles inland from any part of coastal Maine; go down the dirt roads of rural - not touristy - Vermont and New Hampshire; get off the interstates in upstate New York. Why must we always be blind to our own backyards? Theroux accurately describes how limited the contact between Blacks and Whites can be in the South. To the extent this can be attributed to racism (as it inarguably can be), I suspect a defensive Southerner could note that, although Theroux could live literally anywhere, he has chosen to live on Cape Cod (with a Black population of 3%) and Hawaii (with a Black population of less than 2%). How much daily contact does he have with Black Americans? Finally, where oh where was Theroux’s editor? The book is highly repetitive and at least 50 pages too long. My own pet theory is that after writers sell a certain number of books and/or win a number of awards, they are deemed too “significant” to be subjected to the normal editing process. All too often, it shows. ———- On balance, and despite my cavils, do read this book. If, like me, you enjoy engaging with an author, you will be rewarded for your efforts.

This was a very good read, on balance. Theroux is a sort of gold standard for travel writing, of course. In this work he crosses Dixie from the Carolinas to Arkansas focusing on the Black Belt all the way. He does here what he does in his other works: he listens and listens and listens. He truly lets his people speak, and in this way we come to hear them, sense them, as he would have us to. In this work, perhaps more than in his others that I have read, he shows both empathy and sympathy for those he visits. And he should. The world he sees is dreadful. The brave new world of globalization has meant that jobs in the rural South have all but disappeared. The towns are left behind with pathetically small budgets for police, teachers, fire fighters, etc. Those who could leave have done so. Those left behind are clearly suffering. Segregation is every bit as strong as it was fifty years ago. There are, of course, some bright lights. He interviews some community organizers, some NGO types who are doing their level best to uplift the downtrodden. He meets some wonderful people who show lots of patience and take lots of time to explain aspects of local history to him and who refuse to be downtrodden by events of their lives. He hears a lot about the horrors of Jim Crow. But in the end I came away with an overall sense of gloom. I lived long in Dixie. I have seen many of the places Theroux describes. I suppose like most Americans I sort of thought the uprising of the sixties and early seventies would somehow put things right, set things straight and get us moving into a new world of acceptance. It hasn't happened in huge swaths of territory below the Mason-Dixon Line, and in truth I wonder if it has happened as often as it should above it. Theroux often wonders where Bill Gates and the Clintons are in all this. Millions and millions of dollars go to Africa each year. How about Alabama? It's a reasonable query.

Theroux follows his mentor V.S. Naipal to the South but where as Naipal traveled through the large cities to focus on the institution of slavery Theroux follows the Peace Corps tradition and travels to the most isolated, poor, rural parts of the Delta area and tells people's stories which he correctly realizes represent the vitality of the South. He plays the role of an eavesdropper and bystander trolling for fascinating personal stories and past situations and history few people outside of the area are aware of. He saves a real gem of a story towards the end on the small, backward community in Arkansas Bill Clinton was brought up in and how it influenced the man he would become. Theroux provides a unique perspective of the "show gun guys" by visiting a number of gun shows and explaining why multiple guns and all its paraphernalia are so important to many of the locals and their personal identify. Theroux reveals much about himself as a writer as well as his global world view. He returned to the area multiple times in order to provide a full view of the local culture and understood some of the underlying dynamics on why people are who they are. This so much more than a "travelogue" as it reveals a good deal about the author and the unique nature of the deep South. Theroux also brings a unique third world perspective of the hidden enclaves of the rural South which contrast with the "American Exceptionalism" politicians and talking heads often banter about. He makes many legitimate comparisons on what he finds in regards to abject poverty, a lack of a viable economy, low education and health standards and why they compare to places he's traveled through in Africa. The author provides a sobering image of the South as being abandoned by companies who took their business abroad as well a charities, especially the Clinton Foundation which fund the needs of Africans while ignoring the considerable needs in their own back door. I've read many of Theroux's books over the years because I love everything related to overseas cultures and travel but enjoyed this book just as much as it was almost as if he was traveling in some far off land abroad.

Het lijkt erop dat in het Zuiden van de VS de tijd heeft stilgestaan. Voor de ,met name , zwarte bevolking is er sinds de opheffing van de slavernij ( grof gesteld) weinig verbeterd. Helaas is de politiek niet met dit arme deel van het land begaan. Alleen in de verkiezingstijd worden er gouden bergen beloofd. We spreken over het rijkste land ter wereld waar aan armoede bestrijding weinig of niets gedaan wordt. Theroux noemt ook de geldsmijterij van de VS in Afrika . Politieke invloed in de ontwikkelingsgebieden is belangrijker dan hulp aan arme bevolking in eigen land.

An invaluable read if you have ever puzzled why southern Americans think and vote the way they do. Why are they still passionate about the Civil War? This book is a a fascinating read and a documentary in words. The layout, written in short story style, allows the reader an opportunity to really absorb each story and think about the message before reading on. I highly recommend this book for anyone who would like to appreciate the American psyche, especially the south.

Theroux has such an inimitable matter-of-fact style in his writing that it always seems delightful to read his footloose accounts. American south is something we Indian can relate with our own Deccan counterpart of our country. It has all the national characteristics with some added regional idiosyncrasies, which appears somewhat odd and typical to the rest of the fellow countrymen. (And believe me, they feel ditto about their northern countrymates too. :P) Same with the American south and the traveller captured it with his usual incisive eyesight. The book contains some terrific photographs by the great Steve McCurry and both the writing and the photographs complement each other beautifully. It was such a pleasure to read this travelogue.

Good book

Paul Theroux has spent some five decades traveling around and writing about the world, often alternating between novels (e.g. The Mosquito Coast) and travel literature (e.g. The Happy Isles of Oceania). However, the only time he’s written about traveling in America, to my knowledge, was in the first part of The Old Patagonian Express (1979), where he chugs from Boston to the Mexican border on his way to Central and South America. In 2012-3, properly ensconced as the godfather of travel writing (debatably, the best; undeniably, the most prolific), Theroux explores the southern United States, aspects of which he finds nearly as exotic and bizarre as features of India or Africa. To start, we get a rationale and something of a literature review: summaries of American travel narratives, with praise, and a criticism of what Theroux calls the mock ordeal. Writers often groan about the agonies of traveling in the USA, even on excellent highways and in first-world conditions, so the narrator indicates he’ll be skipping his imagined tribulation to examine the lives of everyday people. The author wants to talk to the “submerged twenty percent,” folks obscured by the smallness of their southern towns, while exploring topics he finds intriguing: racism, poverty, inequality, gun culture, slavery, college football, religion, violence, identity, hospitality, and so on. Theroux’s a keen ethnographer, and perhaps because he’s in an English-speaking country – his own – he does something he often doesn’t do in his other travelogues: he lets plenty of people speak, so we get a spectrum of views on a wide range of topics; plus snippets of history, Paul’s trademark flare for description and humour, and references to everything from psychology to anthropology – all rendered in an erudite, yet breezy and accessible style. Indeed, the writing is beautiful: crisp and fresh albeit seemingly pre-existing, as if the writer has discovered these stories etched into panels of marble and just dusted away the grit and debris so we can see what was hiding underneath. And the book does what it’s supposed to: takes you along for the ride. I’ve read ten of Paul Theroux’s travel books, and would rate Deep South as among his best. Troy Parfitt is the author of War Torn: Adventures in the Brave New Canada.