The keynote of this collection by Paul Theroux is sounded when the narrator of a story set among U.S. Embassy members in London observes, “Ambassador Noyes had another trait I had noticed in many slow-witted people: he was tremendously interested in philosophy.” In another story, an American schoolteacher in Africa, proudly ignorant of everything but the right way to ingratiate himself with the local women, hastily puts on a shirt that hasn’t been ironed, that is, a shirt laden with the eggs of a certain insect whose “larvae hatched at body heat and burrowed into the skin to mature. Of course, laundry was always ironed—even drip-dry shirts—to kill them. Everyone who knew Africa knew that.”

Theroux’s refusal to shrink from the physically disgusting, accompanied by a vaguely sadistic delight in the varieties of human self-deception and self-importance, coexists with a resolutely old-fashioned desire to entertain. He does not often make the reader laugh, but he dazzles us with his powers of mimicry, linguistic brilliance, and—something extremely rare in contemporary fiction—a strong tendency to aphorism: “There is something athletic, something physical, in the way the most successful people reach decisions”; “There is a personal tone in some poetry that is so intimate it gives nothing away—so private it sounds anonymous”; “English is perfect for diplomats and lovers.” Some of Theroux’s aphorisms merge with their fictional settings, often transmuting themselves into effective dialogue: “‘When English people go to California,’ I said, ‘they either come back the next day or stay there for the rest of their lives.’” Others rest uneasily on the fictional surface, striking the reader as detachable wise sayings.

The collection is divided into five parts. The first three are pleasantly eclectic, taking in betrayed husbands; aged alcoholic writers victimized by bustling young publishers (“Miss Bristow”); various academics, mostly American and all objects of pronounced authorial dislike; and a smattering of artists, some real, some charlatans, all martyrs to uncontrollable vanity. The acrid quality of Theroux’s imagination meshes nicely with the subject matter of a story entitled “Biographical Notes for Four American Poets.” The four in question are convened at Amherst as participants in a seminar entitled “Poetry: Meaning and Being.” One, Wilbur Parsons (who pops up in other stories here), is not vice president but president of an insurance company and makes no bones about comparing himself to Wallace Stevens. As the poets wait for the seminar to begin, he explains how he “works”: “My secretary, Martha, takes my first draft down in shorthand, and then types it up with wide margins, triple spaced. I work like blazes on that, penciling in words, crossing things out, adding new stuff. It’s a beautiful mess when I’m through with it, like one of Balzac’s galley proofs.” The purity of contempt here is reminiscent of The Dunciad, and one enjoys it in the same way one enjoys Pope: avidly, yet with a degree of fear, as one enjoys high-cholesterol food.

The most satisfying parts of this collection are the last two, both of which are long enough, and almost coherent enough in their settings, to count as novels. They both center on the career of an unmarried American diplomat known only as “the consul.” The salient fact about the consul, who does eventually marry, is that, whether enduring a “hardship post” in the Malaysian village of Ayer Hitam or shepherding American interests in London, he is extremely good at his job. He knows, for example, how to expedite or postpone the issuing of a visa (“The Honorary Siberian,” “Gone West”), and how to deal tactfully with Americans such as the anthropologist Dr. Smith, who descends into the Malaysian bush to study the polygamous Larut tribe and ends up as the chief’s ninth wife (“The Butterfly of the Laruts”). Back in London, he knows that it is worth his embassy’s while to cultivate a rich, eccentric American poet named Walter Van Bellamy, who is one of Theroux’s most terrifying comic creations. A mixture of the worst parts of Ezra Pound and Robert Lowell, Van Bellamy has the gift of unreadability that Theroux very credibly suggests is at the heart of many successful twentieth-century literary careers. “He was famous for the sounds in his poems, what he called ‘my throbs and gongs.’ It was possible that people were so persuaded by him beforehand that there was little need afterward for them to remember anything.” Van Bellamy figures in two of the collection’s best stories, “The Odd-Job Man” and a kind of literary horror story entitled “The Exile.”

In his short, strangely impassioned Introduction to these stories, Theroux makes the plausible assertion that his sizable body of work—novels, travel books, and all—can be taken as so many linked short stories: “In a novel I try to make each chapter as complete and harmonious as a story. My travel books are a sequence of traveler’s tales.” Confirmation of this is not hard to find: see the brilliantly, savagely self-contained chapter on Anthony Burgess in his recent novel My Other Life. (Or is it a memoir? Like Philip Roth, though far less self-consciously, Theroux has recently been undertaking to detonate, or at least gravely disturb, the barrier between fact and fiction). His concern with the nature of fiction is not pedantic or boring enough to make him a postmodernist, yet even these highly traditional stories show that a degree of postmodern convolution is not totally alien to him. He has a dark mind, and is at his abusive best when dealing with characters who happen to be writers, whether real ones like Burgess (whom he appears to admire) or imaginary ones like the unspeakable Walter Van Bellamy, who as we leave him (in “The Exile”) is housed in a private madhouse where he has just completed a poem entitled “The Jewnighted States.” My advice to living writers, especially poets, who happen to know Paul Theroux personally: spend as little time as possible in his company.