Famous travel writers I don’t like
Posted February 22nd, 2008 by Antonia MalchikFellow blogger Steve mentioned in his post today that we’re not controversial enough on this blog. How true, I thought, and then wondered what on earth a person can say in modern times that would make them controversial. And I kicked myself, because twice today I had decided not to express some very peevish thoughts I’d had about well-known travel writers. Maybe not controversial in the way you were thinking, Steve, but I’ve listened, so here goes.
As I was trawling the Internet this morning, trying to find some interesting travel tidbits to write about, it seemed that the everyone’s recycling old news: Ask the Pilot is talking about the real environmental impact of airplane emissions; World Hum has an interesting blip of a blog post about semi-colon use in the New York subway (how I love the unloved semi-colon!); and on the same site Rolf Potts has posted a well-written falacy trying to subjugate readers of Eat, Pray, Love, and has completely lost my respect. Why couldn’t he just say it’s not a very good book, rather than trying to pretend its appeal is for emotionally desperate women? Emotional porn, he says, is for women what adventure porn of the Outside magazine type became for men. He calls Eat, Pray, Love “travel porn for women.” Come on, Rolf. It’s a sappy, sometimes sloppily written book that appeals to people because most people lack literary taste. Lots of bad books are very popular. Whether or not women are more attracted to emotion-laden literature is completely beside the point. At best, Potts’s post smacks of patriarchal pretentiousness.
And then there’s the hullabaloo over Paul Theroux’s new book, Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, due out in September, where he revisits the journeys made in The Great Railway Bazaar.
I haven’t been able to take anything Paul Theroux says seriously ever since I read Sir Vidia’s Shadow, his memoir about his decades-long friendship with V.S. Naipaul. This guy, I told myself two chapters in, is a complete ass. What’s more — as became increasingly evident later in the book — he understands absolutely nothing about women. And if you’re a traveler of any kind, setting yourself up as an authority on observations of the world, you have got to understand women. Because women make up the heartbeat of every culture: they raise the children, invent the food, spread the spirituality, and define communities. If you’re a self-absorbed asshole intent on having sex whenever possible, you just don’t get it.
In addition, Theroux has an extremely limited view of what makes good travel writing. In his introduction to Best American Travel Writing 2001, he says, “Travel writing at its best relates a journey of discovery that is frequently risky and sometimes grim and often pure horror, with a happy ending: to hell and back.” No, Paul, that is what turns guys like you on. “Any serious traveler can attest that horror journeys are the most memorable, the most valuable, the most instructive, and the most pleasurable to write because invariably the horror is recollected in tranquility.” So why is it that innumerable published horror journeys have never been able to even bump their heads against travel writing of the quality put out by, say, Colin Thubron? This view of travel is absurd. The most memorable journeys are the ones that change you or your outlook, which often has zilch to do with putting yourself in mortal danger. This idiocy is what has prompted otherwise good writers like Jeffrey Taylor to think they have to risk life and limb to write a decent book. So I am not looking forward to Paul Theroux’s new self-indulgent tome.
Call me a curmudgeon. I keep trying to like John McPhee, the New Yorker magazine writer who books never go out of print, but just find his work boring. Last summer I read his The Crofter and the Laird, about living for a year on a Hebridean island in Scotland, and could think of ten other books I’ve read about the Hebrides that were far better. But since they weren’t written by John McPhee, they’re out of print. Bill Bryson can sometimes win me over, but In a Sunburned Country was a travesty. The only good bits were made up of the wholesale (and frequently footnoted) lifting from a much more interesting and dramatic book of the founding of Australia called The Fatal Shore, by Robert Hughes.
Like any other genre, travel writing is prone to incestuousness. Publishers are afraid of new voices; they know the old ones will sell. People who are already published get published again and again. People who have an “in” (like poor Max, the subject of Steve’s post) get published whether they can write or not. Publishing is an industry, and industries like to play it safe. The real adventure is in admitting that readers have different tastes, and in finding the voices that will speak to them.
February 22nd, 2008 at 12:47 pm
Tell us how you really feel, OK? Nothing like a good rant to get us going for the weekend. I think you’re onto something with Theroux. He seems to be grumpy and irritated most of the time, so he probably loves stories where other people are miserable. Funny too that Under the Tuscan Sun and Eat, Pray, Love outsell the “bad trip” books several times over—unless you are talking about Krakaur’s.
February 22nd, 2008 at 1:48 pm
I haven’t actually read any Paul Theroux - how’s that for an admission by a working travel writer! I’m really enjoying Colin Thubron’s The Shadow of the Silk Road though, so I guess I can agree with you there.
February 22nd, 2008 at 2:47 pm
Sorry, Tim. Now I feel sheepish ;)
Why is Theroux so darn grumpy and irritable? I know someone who knows him, in a minor sort of way, and he’s evidently like that in real life, too. If it’s not a persona, it’s a hell of a way to live.
Caitlin, I’m glad to hear you’re reading Thubron’s latest. Some of it’s hard to follow, with the history, but I love it all the more for teaching me so much of what I don’t know.
I’ll tell you why those chick-light travel books sell so well. It’s because feminism is a very recent invention, and it mistakenly told women they could have it all. Just try, in America, being a really good mom and having a fulfilling career at the same time. Good luck. American women are plumb worn out, and they’re desperate for stories telling them that, somewhere out there, there’s a better way to live and love. Even mediocre books like that give them breathing space in a culture that tries its damndest to suffocate them. Between the US’s obsession with working people into the ground, and idiotic concepts like play dates and enrichment programs, women have very little room for a meaningful, restful life.
Not that men don’t have it hard, too; but once you’ve survived the hellish first trimester of pregnancy, gone through childbirth, breastfed every 3 hours or more day and night for 6 months, and then tried to get on with your life while hampered by a crying baby who really needs interaction and stimulation, it’s hard to be impressed with someone who can just take off and, say, risk his life traveling by train across Africa or rafting down the Congo.
That’s not to generalize that all women have children–but I think I’ve heard that the majority of the sales of those books are due to mothers.
I don’t know how he does it, but Krakauer manages to make adventure travel riveting without being self-indulgent. I stayed up all night reading Into Thin Air, although I have no intention of ever climbing Everest.
February 23rd, 2008 at 1:47 am
Krakauer is brilliant. Have you read The Wind in My Hair, by Brigitte Muir? She is the first Australian woman to have climbed Everest.
February 23rd, 2008 at 7:31 am
Personally, I can’t stand Bill Bryson - a bumbling middle-aged man who schtick seems to be that he’s a bumbling middle-aged man and can never quite understand what goes on around him… Gets old about halfway through a book!
And… I wish I was notorious and obnoxious enough to make your list of hated travel writers ;-)
February 23rd, 2008 at 11:57 am
I find Theroux’s tone is often xenophobic. Kowloon Tong comes to mind. He is, however, masterful at being descriptive whether or not you appreciate his point of view.
Speaking of Hong Kong, I read Into Thin Air on a 15 hour flight on the way there. The flight never went so fast. I took a flight by Mount Everest when in Kathmandu a few years back but am with you on no plans to ever climb it!
I haven’t read Eat, Pray Love but based on reviews and the premise it apears that it would appeal to those who haven’t or can’t travel much. Don’t get me started on the average 2 weeks vacation most Americans get… Barbaric.
February 24th, 2008 at 6:27 am
I haven’t read Brigitte Muir, Caitlin, but it sounds like one I’ll have to pick up. Why is it that we don’t see more widely published Australian travel writers? As a population, Australians seem to travel more and longer than Americans or Brits, but don’t seem to produce as many travel narratives. Or do we just not get them published in this hemisphere? I’m on a one-woman mission to spread AB Facey’s “A Fortunate Life” around the globe, though :-)
Jack, I’m kind of with you on Bill Bryson — I give him half a pass because there are sections of books like A Walk in the Woods that are really sterling writing. And hey, I wish I were notorious enough to make my list, too!
Wendy, that’s the thing that burns about Theroux — he really is a good writer, whether or not I like him as an observer. I had to grudgingly admire Sir Vidia’s Shadow, for example, even as the personality behind it made me cringe.
And about Americans’ vacation time — why would any sympathetic person, travel writer or traveler or not, begrudge people with so little free time a little escapism? I know we all make fun of the whirlwind “It’s Tuesday, it must be Paris” ten-day European tour that Americans of a certain age make, but with a maximum of two weeks a year holiday (which one would usually use spending time with family) they don’t really have many options. I’m very lucky in that a) I work for myself, and b) my husband works for an international firm that has a four-week minimum vacation allowance. Most people aren’t so fortunate.
February 24th, 2008 at 8:54 am
Caitlin, you need to read at least one Theroux book, preferably one of the earlier ones—or Kowloon Tong, which unlike the Wendy above, I thought was pure brilliance. (It’s shorter than most of his too.) Like V.S. Naipaul or Salman Rushdie, he may drive you crazy but there’s no denying the dazzling talent. Reading people like that make you a better writer. Plus Theroux gets kudos for truly changing the genre. Before he started, there wasn’t much dialogue in travel books and few had the permanence of a novel.
February 26th, 2008 at 5:37 am
Caitlin, Tim’s right that you should read at least one Theroux. I might not like his personality, but he is a great writer. Just one I think I’ve read quite enough of ;)
March 1st, 2008 at 8:15 am
I’ve had a rather rocky relationship with Theroux from the get go. I’ve always suspected he’s something of a misogynist, but I find myself suckered in by his skill in taking you somewhere. I read Hotel Honolulu recently and all the women in it, jeez, the pretty much fell into two categories, awful or sex objects, but the book also really made the seedier side of Hawaii tourism a real thing. Every time I read Theroux, it underscores both my suspicions of his misogyny and my respect for his skill as a writer. I hate that.
I enjoyed the first section of Eat Pray Love, after that, wow, I was SOOOO bored.
March 12th, 2008 at 8:10 am
Great comments, Pam! >>Every time I read Theroux, it underscores both my suspicions of his misogyny and my respect for his skill as a writer. I hate that.<< That statement of yours pretty much nails my relationship with his books, too.
I’ve been talking more with various neighbors of mine, who’ve all read Eat Pray Love, and the consensus is pretty much that they were disappointed in the quality of the writing and narrative, but what kept them reading it was that filling of a spiritual hole. Or maybe it’s exposing the spiritual hole, a new way for them of viewing their own lives. NOT emotional porn, though!