SOURCE: Marien, Mary Warner. “Travels by Kayak, Pony, and Plane.” Christian Science Monitor (19 June 1992): 13.

In the following excerpt, Marien compares Theroux's mental state during his Pacific tour to his descriptions of the scenery in The Happy Isles of Oceania.

Paul Theroux's latest excursion, The Happy Isles of Oceania: Paddling the Pacific, reads like Gulliver's Travels—if Lemuel Gulliver had packed a portable kayak and a failed marriage on his journeys.

Just as Jonathan Swift propelled his protagonist on trips whose ulterior purpose was to reveal the flawed human condition, so too Theroux paddles the Pacific surveying life on its numerous islands only to discover how culturally bankrupt this cherished paradise of the Western imagination has become.

Unlike Theroux, of course, Gulliver was a fiction. Yet to an appreciable degree in this book, Theroux the writer has concocted Theroux the preoccupied, dour, recently separated traveler—a character who could...