Note: My review of Andrew Lipstein’s Something Rotten for Chicago Review of Books is linked here.
The Vanishing Point. By Paul Theroux. New York: Mariner, 2025. 336 pp. $30.
I happened to be reviewing a book on the novel in the twentieth century, Edwin Frank’s Stranger Than Fiction, while reading Paul Theroux’s new collection. Theroux, now 83, is really a twentieth century writer, though not the sort deemed worthy of Frank’s attention. After a childhood in Massachusetts, his teaching work took him to Malawi, Uganda, Singapore, and London, before he returned to split time between Cape Cod and Hawaii. In the tradition of Maugham, Waugh, Greene, and Burgess he has sent back stories from his travels, and like a couple of them, has done dedicated travel writing. The shared comic trope is of the mild, diffident white man, landed in the tropics, sweating and occasionally sotto voce swearing. A novel about George Orwell’s stint as a colonial policeman (Burma Sahib), which was presumably of interest in relation to Theroux’s time in the Peace Corps, arrived just last year. So, the stories in The Vanishing Point are already storied. As for style, the antecedents would include Maugham, and some well traveled Americans: Cheever, Capote, and Henry James, from whose notebooks Theroux was commissioned to draw the idea for the story “Father X”. As it is now the stage at which any publication could well be the last, and posterity is preparing to turn her gaze, the stories are taking on titles like “Finitude”, “A Charmed Life”, and indeed “The Vanishing Point”, and there is a lot of careful self-portraiture here, apologiae for the art and the life. These tend to affirm the idea of the man from an earlier time, not just aged out but born late. Interestingly, the words “vanishing” and “vanity” are related. I wonder if Theroux knows this. There are a good few stories one can enjoy here, along with another few that could have been cut or replaced, and as we get through the last section we are given the satisfaction of understanding, beyond plot and theme, what it is we have been reading, and whom.