“Deep South” by Paul Theroux, published in 2015, was quite an unsettling travel book. It is different, as the author himself admitted, from his other travel accounts. The other ones rely on him visiting a place only once, whereas in the case of this one he revisited various towns and villages, usually off the beaten track, several times within a year. He was able to see the improvement and development made, make friends with some people he met, and do a deeper research. He didn’t look for pretty sights, he didn’t romanticise the South. Instead he intended to discover the essence of what it means to be a Southerner from the perspective of local people. The result is a combination of a travel book and journalism. What I found unsettling - and what brought many memories from my own travels through, in large part, the very same regions visited by Theroux - is the enormous scale of problems Southern states are afflicted by. Squalor, destitution, high crime rate, unemployment, abysmal level of education, illiteracy, drug addiction, intolerance, racism, homophobia, xenophobia, lack of health insurance, resistance to change, you name it. As one mayor, asked by Theroux about the major problems, responded: “Our main problems? How much time do you have? A day or two, to listen?”. An attorney from Natchez said, something similar to what Katherine Boo wrote about the slum-dwellers of Mumbai in her “Behind the Beautiful Forevers”: “What we got now are the working poor, just keeping their heads above water. One medical problem can propel you down”. Many times the author compared towns and settlements he visited to the ‘Third World countries’ (he actually used this term and this is something I had a problem with as the term does not exist anymore and implies a certain level of superiority), only those countries in Africa or Asia receive way more aid from the US than the American South. I myself saw as much destitution in the US as in Bangladesh or Cambodia, but nowhere have I seen as much apathy and resignation mixed with curious nationalistic pride as in the US.

And yet, as Theroux stated at the end: “It goes without saying that the vitality of the South lies in the self-awareness of its deeply rooted people. What made the South an enlightenment for a traveler like me, more interested in conversation than sightseeing, was the heart and soul of its family narratives - its human wealth”. Human stories always interest me and Theroux, having talked to over 200 people, had plenty of conversations, which are included in the book. However, I found the book in bad need of better, more thorough editing. Some conversations didn’t add much to the overall narrative, some were quite repetitive and at times the book dragged a bit. With more laconic summaries of certain encounters “Deep South” could be 100 pages shorter and more engaging. At the end I was left not much wiser. I knew about still prevalent unofficial segregation of various places, I saw it with my own eyes. I knew about racism, I witnessed Christian fanaticism, but I also met extremely generous, helpful, kind people in the South, who literally opened their houses and hearts for me, despite my being a stranger and a foreigner. I saw how huge role history and slavery still play in human lives and this was deeply upsetting. Theroux: “At the Southaven gun show I saw how white Southerners needed to gather, to remind themselves who they were and what they stood for, how in the tribalism and monotony of their beliefs and the convulsions of their history they felt compelled to affirm that they were not like other Americans. They were more social than people I grew up with in the North, and families - fractured as they were - mattered more than the community. The whites felt like a despised minority - different, defeated, misunderstood meddled with, pushed around, cheated. Blood mattered, so did history and old grievances and perceived injustices - all the themes of Faulkner, who grew up near here, in Oxford, Lafayette County”.

“Deep South” is a good book to help people understand the mentality of many who, hurt by injustices of the past, devoid of opportunities, sometimes working hard or willing to work but unable to do so due to various circumstances, brainwashed by Christian propaganda, deluded by conspiracy theories and right-wing media, decide to vote for a person like Trump who promises pie in the sky. I only wish the book was better structured and edited.

I was born and raised in the South. Seeing it from a travelers perspective was interesting. I had to check the copyright a few times; I could not believe the conditions he wrote about in such recent past. Although it is a dense read and took me a while, the stories, history and his telling of the people will stay with me. I felt like I was listening to him as I read.

After five decades spent exploring and writing about the far-flung and exotic places of the world, Paul Theroux has looked to his home country for inspiration. America has always been a place of contrasts and there is none as stark as the differences between the rest of America and the Deep South. Unlike his other journeys, this is one difference; he can climb in his car and drive there. So he does, leaving his home and traveling to the area over the course of four seasons. Each time he catches up with friends made from the previous visit, dodges twisters, sees new places and experiences fresh things.

The American South has a long history, there are deeply ingrained attitudes and prejudices, widespread poverty, high unemployment and collectively some of the worst performing schools in the country. The contradiction is that he has some of the warmest welcomes, listens to some brilliant music and eats probably too much of the fine local cuisine. He will talk to anyone regardless of colour or status, the mayor, the homeless, authors, church leaders, gun traders and those that stood up to segregation. The stories that he draws out from these people in his return trips vary from the fascinating to the sad, there are happy moments and some frankly horrifying stories.

Theroux tells it as it is, not seeking to judge those he meets, but to let them tell their story in their own words. What comes across is a part of a nation that feels unwanted. The fantastic but equally melancholic photos by Steve McCurry show just how abandoned and derelict some of the towns are, haunted only by ghosts and echoes from the past. It is a poignant book, one that shows just how tough life is there. It is my first book by Paul Theroux, even though I have had a number of his books sitting on my shelves for ages, and it definitely won’t be my last.

"People Who Never Hit a Lick at a Snake and They Expect Help" I love that line, something somebody said to the author during his travels in the deep south, it is almost like poetry and makes little sense.

This is one of the densest books I have ever read, there is so much information and experience crammed into this book it amazes me how it all fits in so well. I was expecting this to be a travel book but it is so much more than that, you get a history lesson on slavery and the battles for freedom and an update on what the state of the country is in today. Most travel books are about somebody going to one place, saying "Oh look at that" and "Isn't is really hot", then they move onto the next place and briefly describe that. Deep South is so much better, Mr Thorax (as he is called by one person) travels in the south, visits places, meets people and then returns. He meets up with the people he met before and sees how the places have changed, he also spots things he missed last time, the way it is written, it's almost as if you have been there before.

After reading this I feel I've lived a sheltered life, I knew there was racism and the KKK, I knew the South was poor and a bit run down, I never knew just how bad it was, at times the place feels like a third world country. I've no idea how the government could let things get as bad as they are and yet they continue to leave things as they are. Hopefully this book will be read by people in the right places and changes will start to happen.

This book has inspired me to read more southern literature, top of my list is [b:Fanning the Spark: A Memoir|6380561|Fanning the Spark A Memoir|Mary Ward Brown|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1328809833s/6380561.jpg|6568460] by Mary Ward Brown, amazing sounding lady.

I do have a couple of issues with this book;
1. There is no spoiler alert at the beginning, Mr Thorax does talk about a lot of books and gives away their endings quite often.
2. Some photos to accompany the book would have been great, I read this on the kindle and there might be some in the hard copy, but nothing on the kindle, photos though would have gone down really well with me.

My first reading of a book by this author and I'm now hooked, will be picking up another book of his soon.

"That seemed to be the theme in the Deep South: kindness, generosity, a welcome. I had found it often in my traveling life in the wider world, but I found so much more of it here, that I kept going, because the good will was like an embrace. Yes, there is a haunted substratum of darkness in Southern life, and though it pulses through many interactions, it takes a long while to perceive it and even longer to understand." p. 10

I have lived in Virginia for more than thirty years. I have learned to live with my adopted states idiosyncrasies and I feel welcome here. Virginia has made a lot of changes and so have I. However, I would never claim to understand this region of the country. The South is still a mystery to me.

So when I was offered the opportunity by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt to read Theroux's latest travelogue, I jumped at the chance. It has been decades since I read anything by Theroux, but I remembered his writing as interesting and his topics as fascinating. I am intrigued by the South. Over the last year I have read a few books with Southern roots. They only whet my appetite for more. This is a confusing place.

The deep South is especially hard for me to grasp for a few reasons. I have not spent any time there. The racial politics are, in my opinion, a mess. Lastly, the poverty is overwhelming. Theroux did not change any of these things for me. However, I have now heard about some good things that people are trying to do in Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi. I have seen the deep South through the eyes of someone who pays attention, asks questions and really listens to the answers. It was well worth taking the journey with Theroux.

Once again, I get to encounter the world through a good book. I would have never taken the time to visit as Theroux did. I wouldn't have been comfortable, I wouldn't have talked to people and I don't think I could have tolerated the poverty. However, I now know a bit more about my country and as hard as it is to deal with the racial, political and other problems of these area, I need to be aware.

In a review somewhere on Good Reads, (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/1153544609?book_show_action=true&page=1) someone wrote that the opposite of poverty is not wealth, but justice. I think that phrase speaks to what Theroux found also. I believe that without these books that show us this dichotomy, we will never see the need to make changes.

I think that all readers should become more aware of the place they live. If you don't read this book, which I highly recommend, then read something about a part of your world that you know little about. This kind of writing and reading is good for the soul, the heart and the brain.


As always, thank you to Edelweiss for allowing me to read this e-book.

Other travelers might not have noticed it, but Paul Theroux did: Poverty in the deep South here in the USA is reminiscent of poverty in Africa. Sadly, Theroux saw not only economic poverty, but also a poverty of literacy and a poverty of real equality.

Over and over, Theroux asked people in the poorest areas of the south whether any of the American foundations who so often send aid to Africa ever offered help here in the US and over and over the respondents told him no.

It was a troubling read for me, here in a part of the US often grouped with the South.

I have been a fan of Paul Theroux's travel writing for a long time, particularly enjoying the way his work allows the reader to become so totally immersed in worlds that would otherwise forever remain a mystery. Via his books, I have traveled by train, boats, and automobile to places I am unlikely ever to see with my own eyes. And along the way, I've learned a lot about people, places, and myself.

But this time around, Theroux has written about a region of the U.S. that I know quite well, the section of the country that has come to be called the "Deep South." I was born in East Texas (a part of Texas that is far more Deep South than it is Southwestern United States), have extensive family roots in Louisiana, and have taken close, leisurely looks at the states the author travels through in Deep South. As a result, I wish that I could have a long, personal conversation with Theroux because, while I do not think that his assessment of the South is all that far off, I find myself wondering about some of his conclusions and wanting to tell him what he may have missed.

Theroux is largely sympathetic to the plight of the Deep South, its generational poverty and hopelessness disturbs him - and it should. He rightly lambasts charities like the one run by the Clintons for sending hundreds of millions of dollars to Africa when the same problems they are focusing on in that continent exist in their own back yards. He is particularly hard on the Clinton foundation because of the way that it ignores the problems so common in Bill Clinton's own home state of Arkansas. As he points out, most agencies working on domestic poverty and education issues have budgets in the hundreds of thousands, not in the hundreds of millions.

But at the heart of Deep South, as it should be, is the issue of race relations, and I think that Theroux nailed it here. From my own observation and interaction (as a white man not much younger than the author) in little towns in Alabama, Mississippi, Georgia, and South Carolina, I came to similar conclusions about the white-black relationship in those places. On the surface, based solely on the behavior that outsiders are allowed to see (and what Southerners want to believe about themselves) the relationship between the two races is better today than it ever has been. Scratch that surface a bit though, and there is still much hidden suspicion and animosity on both sides. Prejudice towards, and fear of, each other is very common to both whites and blacks in the region, something that will not be entirely overcome for decades to come, if ever. Such is the nature of human beings.

Where I think Theroux is a bit off in his observations is in his impression that the American South is home to few books and readers. This is a point that the author returns to several times, and it is one that, in my estimation, he over-simplifies. While I am not surprised that he found few readers and even fewer filled bookshelves in the homes of the Southerners he came to know, Theroux seems to have forgotten that he was most often spending his time with people who have little discretionary income to spend on luxuries like books - and that they have little ready access to books whether they want them or not. Books, after all, are seldom a high priority item for people living below or near poverty level. In only slightly larger cities than the ones Theroux spent most of his time in, I have managed to have casual, "bookish" conversations with the people I randomly met along the way. I have seen people dining alone and reading a book to kill the the boredom; I have visited tiny libraries and talked books with librarians and patrons; and I have visited many literary landmarks in the region.


This is a rather small quibble with Theroux's overall impression of the Deep South. But, as I say, I would love to sit down with him some day over a beer or two so that I could perhaps tell him some of the things that his Southern friends did not tell him during his four seasons of travel among them, things that I think would temper some of the conclusions he has come to.

From BBC radio 4 - Book of the Week
Paul Theroux's account of his car journeys through America's southern states is timely, and abridged for radio by Katrin Williams:

1. He's in Tusacaloona, in a car park, thinking about going to church. In a vehicle beside him sits Lucille, all black silk and lacey sleeves - "You lost, baby?" Her welcoming words are typical of the South..

2. In Greensboro he meets the impressive Rev. Eugene Lyles, aged 79, who has his own church, his own barber shop and runs the local diner on Main Street. So, time for a haircut, then some lunch.

3. The author stays at the 'Blue Shadows Bed and Breakfast' in Greensboro, and through its owner, Janet May, meets Randall Curb. And through Curb he will then encounter the legendary Mary Ward Brown, short story
writer, aged 96.

4. At Aiken's steeplechase event he meets well-healed locals, mainly horse people and cotton baron descendents. Then he visits a hovel, once inhabited by Melvin Johnson, who has stories to tell.

5. He takes to the backroads of Georgia and Alabama, which smell of sun-heated tar. The fields are full of cotton and the big rivers beckon.

Reader Henry Goodman

Producer Duncan Minshull.