Rounding Up Coverage of Paul Theroux’s ‘Ghost Train’

We weren’t the only publication covering Paul Theroux’s new book, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, in recent days. (We published a review and an interview with Theroux.) The book earned rave reviews far and wide. In National Geographic Traveler, Don George described it as a “career-capping classic.” The Christian Science Monitor’s Matt Shaer called it “spectacular.”

Columnist Tim Rutten reviewed the book in the Los Angeles Times and observed of Theroux’s first travel book: “[I]t overstates nothing to say that his book turned the page and set down the beginnings of a new chapter in one of literature’s oldest continuous genres: travel writing. Without Theroux’s example, it is hard to imagine those authors—Jonathan Raban, Bruce Chatwin, Bill Barich and others—whose books we now savor as participants in a golden age of travel writing.”

It’s nice to see that Rutten, one of the L.A. Times’ most thoughtful writers, is still around, given the editorial purging that has gone on there of late.

The AP turned out a surprisingly nice story about Theroux, visiting him at home in Cape Cod.

NPR was on it.

One big exception to the Theroux love fest?  In the New York Times, Jennifer Schuessler called the book a “self-indulgent memory express.” I got the impression she wouldn’t care for any of his travel books (even though she described his first book as “rollicking”).

Bob Shacochis, who has written some of Outside magazine’s most memorable stories, reviewed the book for the Boston Globe:

From London to Siberia and back again, however, the core issue has consistently been self-addressed, and Theroux has not been shy about chewing on it: Why am I taking this trip? Who was I when I was young, and who am I now that I am old? Have I changed, and how? Good enough reason to fling yourself out beyond the boundaries of your life, restless and yearning for what simply isn’t there: a convincing, immutable answer.

The world remains marvelous nevertheless. And Paul Theroux owns it.

That feels like the right note to end on.

 

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