Blinding Light fails to dazzle, or even illuminate.
Theroux’s 40th book is the novel writers usually produce early in their careers: a Portrait of the Artist as Unregenerate Egomaniac.
He’s Slade Steadman, the 50-year-old blocked author of a single spectacularly successful book, an account of his world travels accomplished without passport entitled—ominously enough—Trespassing. We first meet Slade accompanied by his girlfriend Ava, a doctor who takes lengthy leaves of absence to serve as his companion, muse and imaginative sexual partner. They’re en route to the Ecuadorian jungle, where (along with two Babbitt-like American couples and sinister German freelancer-freebooter Manfred Steiger) they take a perilous “drug tour” and Slade discovers the visionary benefits of an indigenous hallucinogen, ayahuasca. Back home at his lavish Martha’s Vineyard mansion, Slade treats himself to daily bouts of drug-induced blindness, reasoning that he “sees” more deeply and truly without conventional eyesight—and luxuriates in the admiration of wealthy neighbors and numerous visiting celebrities, notably President Bill Clinton. Despite Ava’s warnings that his fabricated disability may backfire, Slade persists with his revelatory hallucinations, dividing his energies among Ava’s ministrations, the completion of “a sexual history in the form of a novel” (The Book of Revelation) and lubricious memoirs of his early sexual experiences. During a book tour, sans Ava, the Monica Lewinsky scandal erupts, Manfred Steiger reappears (threatening to expose Slade’s dangerous experiments), and the consequences of all his blindnesses lead him to a climactic confrontation on a Vineyard beach, a return to Ecuador in search of a cure and an ambivalent ending that’s either healing or final catastrophe. If Theroux’s latest aims to portray its protagonist’s solipsistic self-destruction, it’s of some interest as a sardonic cautionary tale. If (as seems likelier) it’s another preening semiautobiographical tome related to My Secret History (2000) and My Other Life (1996), it’s another illustration of its author’s increasingly bankrupt imagination.
Blinding Light fails to dazzle, or even illuminate.Pub Date: June 1, 2005
ISBN: 0-618-41886-5
Page Count: 448
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2005
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.
A lonely postman learns that he’s about to die—and reflects on life as he bargains with a Hawaiian-shirt–wearing devil.
The 30-year-old first-person narrator in filmmaker/novelist Kawamura’s slim novel is, by his own admission, “boring…a monotone guy,” so unimaginative that, when he learns he has a brain tumor, the bucket list he writes down is dull enough that “even the cat looked disgusted with me.” Luckily—or maybe not—a friendly devil, dubbed Aloha, pops onto the scene, and he’s willing to make a deal: an extra day of life in exchange for being allowed to remove something pleasant from the world. The first thing excised is phones, which goes well enough. (The narrator is pleasantly surprised to find that “people seemed to have no problem finding something to fill up their free time.”) But deals with the devil do have a way of getting complicated. This leads to shallow musings (“Sometimes, when you rewatch a film after not having seen it for a long time, it makes a totally different impression on you than it did the first time you saw it. Of course, the movie hasn’t changed; it’s you who’s changed") written in prose so awkward, it’s possibly satire (“Tears dripped down onto the letter like warm, salty drops of rain”). Even the postman’s beloved cat, who gains the power of speech, ends up being prim and annoying. The narrator ponders feelings about a lost love, his late mother, and his estranged father in a way that some readers might find moving at times. But for many, whatever made this book a bestseller in Japan is going to be lost in translation.
Jonathan Livingston Kitty, it’s not.Pub Date: March 12, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-29405-0
Page Count: 176
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 2019
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