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 World Without End
by John Freeman
"People don't write about sex any more," complains Paul Theroux at 10 a.m. on a Saturday morning. America's best-selling travel writer has just finished talking to booksellers at Book Expo America and he's feeling expansive. He's wearing a white linen jacket, white polo shirt, and carrying a brown leather satchel. His glasses are round and heavily framed.
For all his sensible appearances, Theroux proves he's willing to get down and dirty in his twenty-sixth work of fiction, Blinding Light, a sexually charged novel about Slade Steadman, a blocked one-hit wonder who goes to Ecuador in search of a hallucinogen he's convinced will unclog his creative arteries.
The gambit succeeds, but it makes him temporarily blind. So he asks his ex-lover to be his transcriber. And when the novel that comes shooting out of him turns out erotic, well, they just have to act out some of its steamier bits.
Theroux has written sex in the past, and was even short-listed for England's coveted bad sex writing award in 2003. (His other awards include a Pulitzer Prize for his novel Mosquito Coast, and a Whitbread Prize for Picture Palace.) But Blinding Light goes further than he's been before.
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