Marcel Theroux - More than just a family affair

It's hard to make your mark when your father's a great writer, your brother an award-winning TV presenter. As his second novel is published, Laura Tennant meets the third Therou

Marcel Theroux is sexy. There, that's not something you can often say about young novelists. He is tall, over 6ft I'd say, and works out. In fact, he boxes, if you must know, and has that impressive triangular shape, the shoulders and waist thing, that fit men have. Plus, he is about to have his eyes lasered so he doesn't have to wear glasses. I foresee a Miss Jones moment. In fact, he is really quite handsome. Why did I not notice this when I was at university with him? Why? Now we're sitting in his light-filled flat in fashionable Westbourne Park and he is telling me all about how he wants to have children, and how he needs to make enough money to support a family one day.

"I feel like Bridget Jones, being single," he says archly. (Actually, there is a woman in his life but he is not married to her, so I suppose that technically he is single.) But this is not a dating agency, so I'll stop with the eligibility rating. The real reason I am interviewing Theroux is that he has a novel out, called The Paperchase, and also because his father is the novelist and travel writer Paul Theroux, and his brother is the Theroux off the telly, as in Louis Theroux's Weird Weekends. Dynasties are always interesting, and, in this case, especially relevant because Marcel's novel is, at least partly, a meditation on fathers, brothers and sons.

It tells the story of Damien March, who unexpectedly inherits his uncle Patrick's house on Ionia, an island off the coast of Cape Cod. He decides to leave his unsatisfactory job at the BBC, where he has been mouldering, and take up tenancy. As he sifts through his uncle's possessions, he discovers a disturbing short story written by Patrick, which leads him on the cleverly plotted paperchase of the title.

The story is narrated by Mycroft Holmes, the older brother that Conan Doyle created for Sherlock Holmes. The character of Mycroft, and the implicit sibling rivalry between the brothers, says Theroux, was the seed from which his novel was born, but "I couldn't face producing 300 pages of Sherlock Holmes pastiche, it felt like too much of a disguise", so he made Mycroft the catalyst for a family mystery of a more personal nature.

Confusingly, the novel contains three rivalrous sets of brothers, and of course, Marcel found much of his material in his relationship with his own brother Louis, who is close to him in age, and disconcertingly similar in looks, although very different, Marcel says, in temperament. "We grew up in a very competitive, ambitious family, and there was a premium placed on succeeding, so of course Louis and I did compete. But that's by no means the whole story of our relationship, because actually we're very close." He concedes that when Louis got his big break into presenting, and Marcel, then also working in TV, was still slaving at the coalface, it was "quite annoying, in an abstract way".

There are other autobiographical elements in the book; Paul Theroux is the model for elements of both Damien's fictional father and uncle (it's Marcel's revenge, he says, for his father's magpie habit of appropriating elements of his children's lives for his own fiction). He also sprinkled in a pinch of his uncle Alexander, also a writer, who himself has a problematic relationship with his brother Paul (he recently wrote a piece mocking Paul's "insistence that he's the friend of lords and ladies").

To my mind, some of the most interesting parts of the book deal with the dangers of depression, solitude and ennui. Will Damien follow his reclusive uncle's example and retreat from life? Or will he seize the day, return to grubby London and grapple with his significant others? Part of Damien's problem is that he has unfinished business with his own family, which has left him paralysed and alienated.

Marcel himself underwent analysis in the early Nineties, before he left his job as a producer on Channel One to write his first novel, A Stranger in the Earth, in 1995. "I was suffering from general feelings of lostness and confusion. I was scrabbling around wondering what on earth I was trying to do," he says. "The analysis gave me good space to think and reflect about my life." Does he feel overshadowed by his father? "The worst thing that could happen would be to not write because my dad is a writer. Then the shadow would have really hung over me and stopped me doing something that might feel risky, but is what I really want to do."

His father is apparently very good at giving pep talks. "He says, 'Now, you've done the hard bit, what you have to do next is stop, don't even think about writing, just wool-gather. Get a big notebook and start wool-gathering'. He rang the other day and said he'd heard someone talking about my book, and saying how good it was, and how proud he felt, and that was really sweet."

Theroux's parents met in Kampala, where his father was a university lecturer and his mother was working for VSO. By the time he was four, they had moved back to London where they lived first in Catford and then in Wandsworth. His father made his name with The Great Railway Bazaar, and the family became comparatively well-off, but Paul was frequently abroad. In a recent interview he said that over 35 years of travelling, he'd never been away less than six times a year. "I've been able to act on impulse. And my wife was very helpful, my first wife. We had little kids, and she didn't say, 'Don't go'. She said, 'That's your job. Do it'."

Marcel was sent to Westminster School, where he decided to board "Why is still a puzzle to me, but I think it seemed like a necessary, if at times painful, step towards independence. My mother used to write to me before exams saying, don't worry, we will still love you if you don't pass, but I don't think I believed her." Fortunately, Theroux was a very good student. He read English at Clare College, Cambridge, where he took a First, before winning a fellowship to Yale to study international relations. "You know how, when you leave university, after three years of reading novels, you feel you have to do something connected with the 'real world'? I really didn't understand even what international relations was."

Shortly after he left Cambridge, his parents divorced. "I was aware that there were tensions in my parents' marriage, but it seemed a strange time to divorce, when the children have left and the home stretch is in sight." Both his parents are now with new partners, and although he says his mother went through a horrible time after the divorce, she is now "happier than I've ever seen her". "Nobody ever asks me about my mother," he continues, "but I am very close to her and in fact see more of her than I do of my father."

It was during his time at Yale that he came across a novel by the Canadian novelist, Yves Beauchemin, called The Alley Cat. "It was a literary novel, but it was full of dialogue and action and so racy. It gave me the idea that it would be possible to write a literary book with pace and plot. Look at Anna Karenina – it draws you in like a good episode of EastEnders."

At this point, dear reader, you should know that currently resting on Theroux's bath is Helen Gardner's Notes to Eliot's 'Four Quartets', and Tolstoy's The Death of Ivan Illyich. Marcel wears his learning lightly, but he is actually Very Clever.

The germ of novel-writing had been planted. Marcel left Yale having rejected the idea of a career in the diplomatic service, and moved into television before, having saved up some money, he was able to stop and write. He still does TV work between the novels, and has recently come back from the former Soviet Union, where he has been making a programme for Channel 4.

"My plan is to have time to write," he says, "but also do other interesting work. The books are just books, I'm not going for the genius vote. It's important to keep a sense of perspective. And I don't buy the idea that your self-esteem should ride on what you do with your life."

Marcel returns to the area of marriage and babies. "I'm just coming round to the notion of being married. I've always liked the idea in the abstract, but I could never imagine how you would feel. But I think it's about feeling ready inside you. I feel I've set a course that I feel happy about. I've answered just a few of the questions in my life, and now, as my shrink would say, I've moved on to a higher order of problem."

'The Paperchase' by Marcel Theroux is published by Abacus, £9.99