SOURCE: Tandon, Bharat. “Scrutinizing the Self.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 4896 (31 January 1997): 20.

In the following review of The Collected Stories, Tandon commends Theroux's satires on cross-cultural blunders, but concludes that much of his fiction is marred by a sense of self-indulgence.

Paul Theroux observes in his introduction to this collection [The Collected Stories], “As a person I am hurt and incomplete. My stories are the rest of me,” going on to check himself with the qualification “No, no—my stories are better than me.” His remark has precedents, not least Chesterton's suggestive flourish about Dickens's characters being more real than their creator, but it is also typical of one tone within Theroux's literary accents which sounds throughout his stories all the more clearly, and perhaps somewhat too loudly when a quarter-century's work is read together. Chesterton, after all, was talking of someone else's writing; it is another thing altogether...