Sunday, April 10, 2016

Paul Theroux, O-Zone ** 1/2

Around 1990, based on the one-two punch of Riding the Iron Rooster and The Mosquito Coast, I went on a Paul Theroux binge. O-Zone is one of his books from that time period, his only stab at science-fiction as far as I know. It didn't stand up too well to re-reading.

The story is a transparent allegory about class. A group of rich New Yorkers spend a weekend in O-Zone, a quarantined wilderness about which they have only heard rumors, and find themselves transformed by their contact with the natives. The characters are less well developed than the setting: except for the awkward young genius who falls in with the "aliens," everyone's personality is defined by a single oversimplified motive. The prose is needlessly repetitive, as if Theroux were expecting us to read each chapter individually.

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