Book Review

NEVER READY FOR LOVE

Wendy Lesser, the author of ''The Life Below the Ground,'' is working on a book about male artists looking at, women., WENDY LESSER

1989

Overview

A number of [Paul Theroux]'s previous novels could well have been called ''My Secret History.'' This title accurately conveys the tone of ''Picture Palace,'' in which a famous septuagenarian female photographer looks back on her long public career and thinks about her extremely private and unrequited passion for her brother. It also applies to the novella ''Half Moon Street,'' whose sleek Ph. D. economist moonlights as a high-class prostitute. It refers best of all, perhaps, to the variously anarchistic and troubled characters in ''The Family Arsenal,'' Mr. Theroux's updated re-creation of Conrad's novel ''The Secret Agent'' (and, to my mind, Mr. Theroux's masterpiece). The issue of prejudice - of judging people on relatively little evidence, of seeing their flaws writ unfairly large - is central to the novel, so it's not surprising that we're able to bring it into play against [Parent] himself. ''My Secret History'' has the courage of tactlessness. It is filled with ethnic and cultural slurs: descriptions of heavy Armenians, greasy Italians, stupid Africans, militaristic Israelis, constipated Britons, cult-following Californians and so on. Sometimes these negative prejudices are counteracted by positive ones -there's a good Italian to cancel out the bad, a good Irish priest to weigh against the idiotic ones - but Mr. Theroux does not feel bound by any Dickensian obligation to balance the scales. [Jenny] calls [Andre] on this, as she calls him on most things: ''It was so cruel,'' she says in response to his lewd remark about some naked Africans in the bush. ''You could have pretended you didn't see anything.'' Andre's best answer on this issue is his defense of another writer, an Indian named S. Prasad, who criticizes, among other things, the uncivilized Pakistanis in London. ''I said nothing,'' remarks our narrator in response to one of these slurs, ''because I knew he was only half serious, and he was at his best when he was allowed to range freely.'' In the world of Mr. Theroux's previous novels, this would be the invitation to doom, the moment when destiny, or coincidence, brings down the curtain on unavoidable tragedy. But ''My Secret History'' does not stem, as Mr. Theroux's other novels do, from the realm of Conrad and Graham Greene; it comes instead from the realm of 1930's screwball comedy. At this moment, when everything hinges on her response, Jenny behaves like one of those tough, smart dames from a Preston Sturges or Howard Hawks movie: she seems to acknowledge and at the same time transcend Andre's terrible misstep, and in doing so she raises the novel's tone to an unforeseen level of freedom and wit. Like those 30's movies, ''My Secret History'' is about the permanence of marriage in the face of mistrust and infidelity; it's about the wisdom of women and the foolishness of men; and it's about mature love as the necessary and sometimes successful antidote to youthful selfishness. If ''My Secret History'' lacks the careful artifice of the author's earlier novels, it nonetheless has a kind of artistry all its own. In it, Mr. Theroux has learned to relax and accept reality with a good grace. A NOVEL GIVES YOU A SECOND CHANCE

• Publisher: New York Times Company
• Subject: LESSER, WENDY / Putnam, G P / Theroux, Paul