War & Peace Quote by Paul Theroux

Theroux’s line lands like a travel writer’s wink and a novelist’s knife: the Peace Corps, that mythic portal to worldly adulthood, is really just a chain motel on the road trip. “Howard Johnson’s” is doing heavy lifting here. It conjures reliable, brightly lit sameness; a place that promises “experience” without too much risk, where you can sleep off your confusion and still feel like you’ve gone somewhere. By calling it “on the main drag into maturity,” Theroux punctures the romance of service-as-rite-of-passage and replaces it with a more embarrassing truth: for many Americans, the Peace Corps functions less as radical encounter than as managed exposure to difference.

The intent isn’t to sneer at volunteering so much as to indict the way institutions package growth. The Peace Corps sells a narrative of hardship, humility, and global citizenship, but Theroux hints that it can also be a supervised detour that keeps the traveler comfortably American even while abroad. The “main drag” suggests inevitability: this isn’t a renegade path; it’s the well-marked route ambitious young people take to become interesting, employable, morally credentialed.

Context matters. Theroux served in the Peace Corps in the 1960s, when it was entwined with Cold War idealism and American self-image. His jab reads as a veteran’s correction to the brochure copy. The subtext is sharper still: maturation can’t be franchised. If the experience feels too familiar, it may be because the traveler brought the whole roadside economy of home along for the ride.