Paul Theroux:  Deep South, with photographs by Steve McCurry, 9780241146729, Penguin Random House (Hamish Hamilton), hardback, paperback out in April 2016

Just having finished this 441 page doorstopper of a hardback, I can safely say this is literary travel writing at its best. Paul Theroux is a great storyteller and observer of the human race, his language is exquisite and a joy to read, his vocabulary so rich that I came across words I had never encountered before and had to look them up in a dictionary but then I am not a native speaker.

Holding a special fondness for Southern writers myself, especially Carson McCullers, and places like Savannah, Charleston and Cape Hatteras, I was very interested to hear that Paul Theroux had turned his attention to his home country and the Deep South in his latest book.

Never having been to Mississippi, Alabama and Arkansas, I was really curious about his road trip and encounters, spanning over four seasons.   But I was not prepared for the level of poverty, desperation, racial issues, poor housing, dying communities and unemployment pouring from these pages. I had thought this was a thing of the fifties and sixties maybe.   As Paul was to discover repeatedly, many towns he visited would have qualified easily for financial aid from the US government had they been a Third World country where the US spent millions of US $. Yet nothing was being done at home in the South, it was simply being ignored.  The Clinton Foundation is also turning a blind eye to obvious issues in Arkansas, Bill Clinton’s home state, focusing their attention on more PR worthy activities in the Third World. 

If it were not for the perseverance of black and white farmers and some idealist not to give up on their communities, large proportions of the southern countryside and towns would soon be looking like deserted ghost towns in the Wild West. 

I could not grasp how some people would want to continue to live there under the circumstances he describes. Most towns and villages seem still dominated by big landowners, being at the mercy of banks issuing loans for crops and agricultural machinery and the big farm up the road is still called “The Plantation”.  

He finds many of the people he talks to in the typical Southern meeting places, churches and guns shows. He receives invitations to homes of ministers, mayors, social workers and dirt poor farmers, black or white, writers or laborers and paints a very colorful portrait of his visits. Paul Theroux hears of the still bad quality of many schools and universities, some of the racial stories he reports are very depressing and seem incomprehensible in this day and age.  The Klan appears to be alive and well. 

But there are also the joys of his Southern travels:   the Blues, the friendliness, warmth and culture of being welcome almost everywhere as a stranger, the Southern cuisine and the beautiful countryside.  Some of the funnier episodes are his stories about sleeping in almost derelict, dirty motels in wayward towns, all owned by immigrants from India who miraculously are all called Patel.

The beautiful, atmospheric photographs taken by Steve McCurry who did not travel with Paul Theroux but taking his own road trip, give the people in this book a face.