Paul Theroux, Blinding Light ** 1/2

I'm a fan of Paul Theroux's work, but it has been a while since I read one of his books. Unfortunately, the one I chose to end my hiatus wasn't very good.

Blinding Light tells the story of Slade Steadman, a writer who 20 years before had a huge success with a gimmicky travel book but has published nothing since. He travels to the jungles of Ecuador in search of inspiration, and he finds it in the form of a rare drug. The drug enables him to write again, ecstatically, but also renders him temporarily blind.

The first section of the book, describing the trip to Ecuador, is wonderfully full of Theroux's trademark travel descriptions and misanthropy. Once he discovers the drug and returns home to Martha's Vineyard, though, the book goes off the rails. Slade is an unlikable narcissist, but that's not what bothers me. I couldn't fathom his motivations or those of his girlfriend Ava, and their conversations were repetitive.  

My favorite character was an exceedingly minor one: a friend of Slade's first wife who appears for a few pages (starting on page 216) to contradict everything Slade says. Her dialogue is hilariously realistic.

Ray Oldenburg, The Great Good Place * 1/2

Let me admit up front that I skimmed this book rather than reading it in its entirety. This approach is unusual for me, but whenever I dove into a new section I quickly found myself bored or annoyed.

This non-fiction book extols the multifarious virtues of "third places," which are public places where people gather informally outside of work or home. The author is a sociologist writing in "plain English," although I would characterize the prose style as "academic abstraction drained of academic rigor or detail." To choose an example at random, here's the beginning of Chapter 3:

Precious and unique benefits accrue to those who regularly attend third places and who value those forms of social intercourse found there. The leveling, primacy of conversation, certainty of meeting friends, looseness of structure, and eternal reign of the imp of fun all combine to set the stage for experiences unlikely to be found elsewhere. These benefits also derive from the sociable and conversational skills cultivated and exercised within the third place.

Ray Oldenburg is well-named given that the book pines for the good old days when small-town Americans gathered on Main Street for practical joking and Protestants and Catholics lived in harmony (p 106 -7). For evidence that the book is a screed against modern suburban living, consider the amount of time it spends discussing topics unrelated to third places: cohabitation ("a far from ideal arrangement in a society that continues to value marriage despite its problems"), avarice ("salaries running to six and even seven figures are paid to Neanderthals named Bubba"), over-scheduled kids who can't play poker, and so on.

I started skimming the early chapters because Oldenburg didn't seem to have anything new to say about the hackneyed vision of suburban, TV-watching mall rats. Later, I grew annoyed at the oversimplified nostalgia. The turning point may have been when Oldenburg admits that he'll simply ignore any contravening data:

At the risk of sounding disingenuous, I would insist that any third place is pretty much as I've described it, or it is not a third place. The description presented in the initial chapters is not derived from speculation. It is built from observations, my own and those of others. Thus, it is not sanitized from life but based on careful observation of it.

Translation: Possible counterexamples are excluded by fiat. I know a third place when I see one.

Alain Robbe-Grillet, The Erasers ****

Robbe-Grillet's experimental fiction works for me in a way that the Oulipo writers' work does not. It's something about his approach, which Wikipedia describes thusly: "Methodical, geometric, and often repetitive descriptions of objects replace (though often reveal) the psychology and interiority of the character."

The Erasers is Robbe-Grillet's first novel. As such, it is more traditional than later novels such as Jealousy. For example, it has a plot. A man travels to a provincial city to investigate the latest in a series of murders. Who is the murderer? What's the motive for the string of murders? Why does the investigator buy several erasers during the day? The novel works as a thriller and as an experimental novel.

Michael Krausz (editor), Relativism: A Contemporary Anthology ***

I am fairly well acquainted with the philosophical issues considered in this anthology, having read a lot of pragmatism and Richard Rorty. In fact, I consider myself a relativist — an ontological or epistemological relativist to be more precise.

On the plus side, this anthology includes some classic articles on the subject followed by discussion of the issues those articles raise. On the down side, many of the newer articles rehash the same arguments in less colorful language than the classics; couldn't the editor find a wider range of reactions? For the most part, the most intriguing articles to me were written by philosophers I'm already familiar with: Rorty, Nelson Goodman, Hilary Putnam, Donald Davidson.

The book is divided thematically into four sections. My favorites were section II, "Relativism, Truth, and Knowledge," and section IV, "Relativism, Culture, and Understanding." I was less interested in section III, "Moral Relativism, Objectivity, and Reason," because the objectivity of morals is a dead philosophical issue for me.