One needs energy to keep up with the extraordinary, productive restlessness of Paul Theroux….

He is as busy as a jackdaw in the way he scavenges for forms and styles. In earlier novels he has taken conventional popular molds, like the ghost story (The Black House), the thriller (The Family Arsenal), the celebrity memoir (Picture Palace), and made them over for his own thoroughly original purposes. The geographic locations of his tales now make an almost unbroken ring around the globe. His train journeys (The Great Railway Bazaar, The Old Patagonian Express) are best read as freewheeling, impromptu fictions—the adventures of a picaresque hero who happens to bear the same name as his author and who shares his author's chronic cabin fever.

Theroux is 40 now—the most gifted, most prodigal writer of his generation…. He has moved in skips and bounds, never staying long enough in one...