SOURCE: Shone, Tom. “Suspiciously Wholesome.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4723 (8 October 1993): 26.

In the following negative review, Shone argues that Millroy the Magician is inferior to Theroux's earlier novel The Mosquito Coast.

When, at the start of Paul Theroux's new novel [Millroy the Magician], the eponymous protagonist asks “how can you take any religion seriously if it leaves out nutrition?,” keen Theroux readers will nod in recognition: one of his favourite subjects is on the menu again. Food has played an increasingly large role in his fiction. What started with Allie Fox's tirades against junk food in The Mosquito Coast, continued with the scrupulous food faddism of Doctor Slaughter and reached a violent nadir in Chicago Loop, in which a psychotic real estate agent bites a woman to death, has now come full circle.

Millroy is, like Fox, one of Theroux's funky evangelists with the gift of the gab; a...