Free State

By R.Z. Sheppard

MY SECRET HISTORY by Paul Theroux; Putnam; 512 pages; $21.95

Paul Theroux is the writer whose novels read like travel books and whose travel books read like novels. It is not surprising, then, that he has given the matter some thought. For example, in The Great Railway Bazaar, his 1975 best-selling account of rattling through Asia, Theroux concluded that "the difference between travel writing and fiction is the difference between recording what the eye sees and discovering what the imagination knows." He added wistfully, "How sad that I could not reinvent the trip as fiction."

Fourteen productive years and thousands of dusty miles later, My Secret History does that and more. Theroux, 48, reinvents not only his great train odyssey but other chapters of his exotic autobiography as well. The result is the most consistently entertaining of the author's more than two dozen books, a serial portrait of the artist as a young stud that will undoubtedly cause the usual confusion about what is fact and what is fiction.

This is never an easy question (autobiographies frequently contain more fancy than novels), but so far as one needs a guide to the free state of Theroux's imagination, it is this: like the author, the novel's hero, Andrew (sometimes Andre) Parent, was born and reared in Massachusetts, spent a good part of the '60s teaching and traveling in the Third World, and eventually made his mark as a London-based writer.

Beyond that, Theroux's randy adventurer has a convincing, if not necessarily reassuring, reality of his own. Parent is a droll reminder that nature adores deception. His admission that "in order to be strong I needed to have secrets" sounds no more or no less deceitful than the call of any unhousebroken creature who relies on stealth to catch a meal, a mate or juicy material for a novel.

Parent's secrets are mainly sexual, a subject that arouses an immediate interest but can be hard to sustain for 500 pages. Happily, Theroux's hero is a man of ironic intelligence and amusing self-awareness. He believes that comedy is the "highest expression of truth" and, conversely, that the funniest things are frequently the truest. This makes for considerable humor arising from grim situations. Moreover, Parent's wanderlust means a frequent change of scenery and a liberating sense that, as the playwright Tom Stoppard put it, every exit is an entrance somewhere else.

Young Parent can barely wait to break out of Medford, Mass., during the late '50s. Outwardly he appears to have been quite ordinary: an altar boy who liked to plink at bottles with his .22-cal Mossberg. Yet his mind has been jump-started by books, especially Dante's The Divine Comedy. "It was not just the blood and gore," he tells a friendly parish priest, "but that the people in Hell seemed real; the ones in Purgatory and Paradise were wordy and unbelievable."

Dante's swingers spend eternity in pitch darkness and buffeting winds. The consequences of 19-year-old Andy's passions are more prosaic. Having got his girlfriend pregnant, he is forced to borrow abortion money from a 50-year-old matron who has been trying to seduce him. Keeping one woman from knowing about the other foreshadows a more elaborate predicament in Parent's early middle age.

Chapter 3, "African Girls," is as close to Paradise as Parent gets. It is a recollection of his years as a Peace Corps teacher in Nyasaland, soon to be the Republic of Malawi. The time is the early '60s, a period between the end of colonialism and the beginning of home rule. Like the budding writer, the emerging nation is enjoying a brief moment of freedom without too much responsibility. Dictators have yet to arrive in their Mercedes-Benz, and the girls have gonorrhea not AIDS.

By the late '70s Parent is a successful author and world traveler whose secret is that he has a house and wife in London and a vacation cottage and mistress on Cape Cod. He is a man with two of everything, including, as he tells a U.S. Customs agent who suspiciously inquires about his lack of luggage, two toothbrushes -- one in each house.

Theroux's divided man may not win any popularity contests, but he is the author's best creation, a character who is honest enough to know that he wants it both ways: to be the lover and also the solitary observer who betrays his loves by turning them into stories. Domestic contentment is not an end in itself, but a respite between difficult journeys. It is a necessarily lonely life, one meant to protect a secret that is more than sexual: Parent has no fear of flying; he is afraid of landing.