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Salvation Through Weight Control

Date: March 6, 1994, Sunday, Late Edition - Final
Byline: By Charles Johnson;
Lead:

MILLROY THE MAGICIAN By Paul Theroux. 437 pp. New York: Random House. $24.
Text:

MIDWAY through Paul Theroux's "Millroy the Magician," a character named Ed Veazie tells the novel's eccentric protagonist, Millroy, "You're selling one big package that includes God, food, weight control and regularity. I mean, who else has wrapped up Christianity and slimming? This is a dynamite product -- laxatives, Scriptures and weight control. We're talking salvation in all senses."

Like so many other characters in this unusual, often funny, dark satire of America's obsession with trim bodies and religious television, Veazie wants a piece of Millroy's "revolutionary" discovery that eating the foods mentioned in the Bible -- pottage, yellow bean salad, green melons -- leads to health and longevity. He sees vast profits to be made in Millroy's messianic belief that "fatsos must be found and saved," but because Veazie is a venal meat eater and a parasite, the magician and evangelist Millroy expels him from his Boston diner with the wrath Jesus reserved for money changers. "Millroy the Magician" is, if nothing else, a comic vision of the Second Coming, but this time around, the messenger of God (or Good, as Millroy prefers to say) uses methods indebted to "Hour of Power" and "Body Shaping."

Mr. Theroux's 20th work of fiction, which is narrated by the wizard's faithful 14-year-old assistant, Jilly Farina, begins at the Barnstable County Fair. Languishing among its many attractions -- acrobats and a former Harvard professor named Floyd Fewok who now rides his motorcycle on a burning Wall of Death -- is Millroy, a mysterious, middle-aged, bald carny prestidigitator who sprinkles his act with puns about nutrition (swallowing a sword, he says, "This is one way of getting iron into your system"). In his audience he discovers thumb-sucking, abused Jilly from Marstons Mills. "I'm nothing" is the way she describes herself at one point. Elsewhere she says, "Most days I did not believe that I really existed, and I felt like a harmless ghost haunting the world from behind a big window."

But her childlike belief in magic is exactly what the lonely, misanthropic magician needs to bolster his self-confidence. Shortly after their first meeting, Millroy persuades Jilly to run away from her drunken father and abusive grandmother. He talks her into disguising herself as a boy, then serving as his assistant and as the wide-eyed witness to his supernatural feats.

In little or no time at all, Jilly Farina comes to see that her mentor is not merely a country fair trickster. He has traveled over the world. He practices yoga exercises, regularly uses a stomach plunger to examine the contents of his own insides and matches the miracles of Jesus and Moses. However, Millroy was not always capable of magic. Once he was a fatso too. "I was trapped inside my huge body," he says. "I was blinded by the darkness of my body, in a limitless wilderness of insensible fat. I was miserable." He tells Jilly, "I had a vastation of the person I had been -- not recently but long ago, and I saw myself as a child of 6 -- healthy, happy, full of hope, able to work magic. Gifted. Innocent."

MILLROY becomes fascinated by the children's shows Jilly watches on television, and sees a possible medium for his message in "Paradise Park," a Boston show whose host is Mr. Phyllis, who, we learn, sees children as "monkeys with no tails." Millroy auditions and wins a small part on the hourly show. Then in a scene that recalls at least one real-life career disaster, Millroy turns on Mr. Phyllis's microphone at the moment he is hissing, "Hateful bratty children -- chop their goddamned fingers off!"

That one act of magic gets the host fired. Millroy replaces him, transforming "Paradise Park" into a popular show run entirely by emotionally wounded inner-city children who come under his spell. All goes well until his young disciples, imitating Millroy, lecture one day on the importance of stripping down to their birthday suits and reading the Bible when they go to the bathroom in order to "get control over your bodily functions." With that, Millroy's show is yanked off the air.

Notwithstanding this sensational defeat, Millroy starts over, this time with a diner he calls Day One. Help comes from a few of the former "Paradise Park" children, whom the magician entices to leave their homes and work for him, serving a menu of "Jacob pottage, Ezekiel bread, Daniel lentils, Nahum's fig bars, Bethel barley cakes." Millroy resurfaces with a new television show designed to promote his Day One ministry and fill the Boston diner with sinners. Now and then he pumps his disciples' stomachs to see if they have been eating junk food. If they have and they repent, Millroy sends them off to start new diners in other cities that begin running his show, but not overseas because "God has placed His hand upon America. This is the Promised Land. It will happen here."

Things grow wilder, as some Day One disciples begin worshiping Millroy, his critics call him "Gantry with granola" and Anal Roberts, every church in Boston denounces him, and Mr. Phyllis reappears with Millroy's wife to cause trouble. Yet for all the tangled plotting, and for all the toilet jokes and sendups of preachers from Jimmy Swaggart to David Koresh, "Millroy the Magician" may strike some readers as maddeningly predictable and aswim in stereotypes of Middle America, gay people, troubled children and people of color.

Only at the novel's end, after Millroy loses everything except Jilly Farina and flees to Hawaii, wanted for "kidnapping and fraud and tax evasion," does the love of the lonely magician for his apprentice emerge and something akin to fictional enchantment occur. One can only hope that the magical transformation in the final chapter may linger with readers long after too easily conjured biblical satire fades away, and that those who reach the end of Mr. Theroux's three-ring circus of a novel see its final act as worth the price of admission.