He's Got a New Drug

by A.D. Amorosi

Books

The drug tour. It's a popular bit of lit mythology for any writer who has lived through the Age of Aquarius — rolling from haven to haven, sampling psychotropic wares whose consequences of mind and body expansion are meant to seem limitless for writer and reader. But for Paul Theroux, it's just another trip for a writer whose obsessive visitations, real and imagined, have turned into travelogues and novels including The Old Patagonian Express, Hotel Honolulu: A Novel and The Mosquito Coast, characterized by their muscularity and overall zealousness. The hubris-filled Mosquito — with its archly etched characters driven to sedition, revulsion and delusions of godly omnipotence — would have been enough to assure Theroux's reputation even if he'd stopped there. For his newest novel, Blinding Light, the prodigious writer tucks into the inner worlds of sexuality, transgression and hallucinogenic drugs. There's also a tour to Ecuador, which functions to draw his central character, Slade Steadman — a Ralph Ellison-esque one-book wonder — out of his decades' old writer's block. Sounds fine. That is, until Steadman loses his sight, temporarily, after sampling the strange fruit of "the tiger's blindfold." While this, of course, heightens other sensory experiences — most especially the erotic ones he enacts with his travel companion, Ava — it also becomes a parable about testing the limits of power. Thus we find Theroux weirdly connecting the exploits of his protagonist to the rise and fall of President Bill Clinton. As tiny a misstep as that thin veiling might be, what's dashingly Herzogian is the lush gustiness of Theroux's portrait of jungle love, literal and figurative.

Paul Theroux reads Tue., June 21, 7 p.m., Free Library, Central Branch, 1901 Vine St., 215-686-5322.