SOURCE: Bowman, James. “Shadow Boxing.” National Review (26 October 1998): 54–55.

In the following review, Bowman asserts that Sir Vidia's Shadow is an interesting memoir, but a poor display of Theroux's self-pity and anger.

If only Paul Theroux had consulted Dr. Laura Schlessinger. When she gets a call from someone who wants to know what to do about a new stepmother, recently married to a widowed or divorced father and now interfering with or even destroying the old intimacy of parent and child, her advice to the child in question is: “Honeybabe, don't pick a fight with the woman he's sleeping with.” Mr. Theroux is a clever man and often a good writer, but he could use a little of Dr. Laura's common sense. When his surrogate father, his literary father, Sir Vidia Naipaul, remarried two months after the death of his wife, Pat, in 1996, it should have been obvious that...