SOURCE: Staggs, Sam. “Paul Theroux: This Time around, the Protean Writer Pens a Novel with a Vegetarian Protagonist.” Publishers Weekly 241, no. 10 (7 March 1994): 48–49.

In the following essay, Staggs provides an overview of Theroux's life and career upon the publication of Millroy the Magician, incorporating Theroux's comments on his travel writing and publishing history.

A character in one of Paul Theroux's 16 novels says, “People don't know they're awful. They think they're nice.” This statement could almost stand as an epigraph to everything Theroux has written—with the exception of the protagonist of his new novel, Millroy the Magician, just out from Random House, whose eponymous hero is a present-day messiah of low-fat food and clean living. And even Theroux thinks he's nice.

Millroy, a sort of metaphysical Mr. Rogers, crosses America magically transforming, without benefit of kitchen, “big brown spuds into mashed potatoes, flour into bread, and milk into yogurt...