Theroux’s Ghost

Starting into Paul Theroux’s new book, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star.  He is retracing the Great Railway Bazaar trip he took in 1973 and it all makes me remember well how thrilled I was when I first read that book—it must have been around 1975.   I’ve read many of his books over the years, probably more of his travel books than his novels, so it feels indeed like settling into a comfy train seat and relaxing into a long, long journey.   He just published a good story in the New Yorker about a man who goes back to visit his peace corps post in Malawi—where Theroux had been stationed and where he started to become a writer.  Is he one of our greatest living writers?  As if that sort of phrase mattered, and yet one wonders if anyone would call him that and why or why not.  How is he regarded?  If you look up a movie director on IMDB it tells you just how high or low her star now sits on some invisible chart of regard and opinion but I don’t know if there is a similar site for writers, other than amazon’s sales figures, which are as suspect as all other such lisitings.  What really matters is how consistently, brightly and astutely Theroux delivers what you want, page after page, paragraph after paragraph.  He is superb.  Much better to my taste than Bill Bryson, for one.  Maybe even in his own category at this point.