A Theroux:

violence in high style

THE FAMILY ARSENAL, by Paul Theroux; Hougton Mifflin, 309 pp., $8.95.

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Books

By Thomas Cullinan

One of the hottest young writers of the 1970s is Paul Theroux, an American who has been living abroad for a dozen years.

Theroux supported himself for a time by teaching in far-off places Africa, Singapore all the I while building a reservoir of exotic experiences. Then he produced several critically acclaimed novels, including 1974's The Black House. a superb Jamesian kind of ghost story.

Last year he published The Great Railway Bazaar, one of the best travel books of the decade.

Now he gives us The Family Arsenal, a thinking man's thriller with some highly interesting observations on violence in our time. The background is London, where Theroux now lives, and the book has already received extravagant praise in the British press.

Certainly it is remarkable in its originality, its texture and its implications. It presents violence as it is practiced by and as it affects several levels of society and seems to find a kind of acceptable logic in the actions of individuals and groups whose creativity lies in destruction.

The hero, or anti-hero, American Valentine Hood, is a former diplomat in Vietnam who, disillusioned with the war, has left his post, taking with him a supply of blank passports and official stamps. Idealism hasn't worked for Hood so now he turns to nihilism. He goes to work for the IRA Provos, not because he supports their cause, but because their

Paul Theroux

organization seems the most successfully destructive one around.

The novel is a tremendously inventive black comedy filled with larger-than-life characters: Lady Arrow, an anarchist lesbian; Araba Nightwing, a Trotskyite actress; Brodie and Murf, a pair of teen-age bomb makers; and assorted Provos and East End gangsters. There is also Lorna, beautiful widow of a hoodlum Hood has casually killed. The killing gets the story rolling toward its violent climax.

Theroux again proves his ability as a prose stylist and exhibits his marvelous gift for reproducing speech. He can, in just a line or two, give you a cockney, a Dubliner, an Ulsterman, an Indian or any other resident of London you want.

If the novel fails slightly, it is because of its excessive cleverness. Theroux sacrifices suspense and sometimes character to practice his word tricks and to display his Joycean erudition. Nevertheless, The Family Arsenal is an impressive piece of work by an increasingly important writer.

Thomas Cullinan is a Cleveland novelist and dramatist.