SOURCE: Johnston, George Sim. “From Inside the Cavity.” National Review (2 June 1989): 58.

In the following review, Johnston offers a negative assessment of My Secret History.

Until Salman Rushdie came along, Paul Theroux was the literary establishment's most prosperous Third World junkie. Although he had published a number of novels, it was the accounts of his masochistic train rides through Asia and South America that brought him a wide reading public.

What is it about the Third World that attracts so many literary lions? There is the local color, of course; and for some a Marxist dictatorship set amid palm trees is irresistible. But the list of living writers who find refreshment in tropical squalor—Graham Greene, V. S. Naipaul, Rushdie, Theroux—suggests a deeper motive. Rushdie talks about “the hole inside me where God used to be.” This is a valuable piece of real estate for a certain kind...