By Deanna Isaacs
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Is there any venue so depressing as a suburban high school? A pall falls over you as soon as you enter. The stifling, familiar halls reduce you in an instant to the trapped child you were. Here you are again, they say, and what to show for it? I followed a maze of them to the auditorium. The best seats, nearly the entire center-front section, had been cordoned off with masking tape. Reserved for patrons (and freeloaders like me) by some deluded official, they were nearly empty. Weather and the price–$60 for a series of four lectures, no single tickets–had conspired to depress attendance. The sparse crowd that did show up moved compliantly to seats in the rear. A woman in a purple suit read a perky introduction and Theroux took the stage. “I’ve been to Patagonia, but I’ve never been here,” he said, peering out across a moat of empty, gold plush seats to his distant audience.
Theroux turned out to be not only taller than expected but taller than he should have been: too tall for his persona. He had a long, deadpan face, square-jawed and heavy-browed, with a wide slash of mouth, the kind of face you would carve into a pumpkin if you didn’t want it to smile. One strand of thinning, dark brown hair drooped above his tortoise-rimmed glasses. The whole package suggested a sort of hulking, Waspy Woody Allen: incongruous but unremarkable. His clothes were too warm for the near-tropical night–itchy tweeds over heavy wools, and unfortunate manure-brown pants. When his jacket opened, you could see that his midsection had begun to get away from him.
We moved to another room for the postlecture reception. There was the usual long buffet table with coffee and pastries, and a dozen round tables covered with white linen, surrounded by folding chairs. Theroux positioned himself at one of these for the last, most excruciating part of the evening’s ritual, and the fans queued up–gawky kids and gray-haired men in ponytails and eager women. For the price of a book, they got an autograph and a moment’s conversation. They wanted travel tips, writing advice, the secret of how to be him.
