Blinding Light

Not to be confused with Blinding Lights.

Blinding Light is a 2005 novel by Paul Theroux.

The novel had a mixed reception, with many reviewers not seeing it as entirely successful. The novel depicts an American writer on his trip to Ecuador and its backcountry, where he has an affair with a local.

Themes

AV Club reviewer Scott Tobias notes that the novel follows in the tradition of Theroux's other travel writing and novels, taking the principal character to an exotic location to explore social and moral conclusions. The New York Times notes that the novel explores the "texture of psychologically plausible character, real places, and so on" under a "contemporary naturalism". For The Guardian, this writing reminded them of Theroux's travel writing, saying that the novel includes a "luxuriant and uncomfortable jungle setting, and nasty characters made up of inky national stereotypes and lists of commercial products."

Critical reception

Complete Review called the novel "generally lively and entertaining", and described the consensus of reviewers as having "varying degrees of enthusiasm, with no one thinking he really pulls it off". For example, The New York Times concluded that cultural insensitivity and tone "blot what is otherwise an enjoyable and worldly allegory of the pitfalls of literary success, which retains some of the grandeur of its model." The Guardian reviewer James Buchan described the novel as needing "a journeyman editor [who] would have cut out the repetitions, quotations, boasting, name-dropping, purple passages, dreams, hallucinations, score-settling, bombast and sex fantasies."