She Treads Softly: The Vanishing Point

Thursday, January 2, 2025

The Vanishing Point

The Vanishing Point: Stories by Paul Theroux
1/28/25; 336 pages
HarperCollins

The Vanishing Point: Stories by Paul Theroux is a highly recommended collection of 18 short stories with settings ranging from New England to Hawaii to Africa. As expected, the writing is excellent in the collection. These insightful stories are about men experiencing aging, reliving memories, longing for fulfillment, and the passing of time.

With any short story collection it is natural for some stories to resonate with various readers more than others. While I found the majority of the stories were compelling and insightful, others were less pertinent for me. It should be noted that the majority of the stories were really written for a male audience and in a few the situations were off-putting for me. This is a good, but uneven collection.

Thanks to HarperCollins for providing me with an advance reader's copy via Edelweiss. My review is voluntary and expresses my honest opinion.

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John Updike's six rules for reviewing:

1. Try to understand what the author wished to do, and do not blame him for not achieving what he did not attempt.

2. Give him enough direct quotation--at least one extended passage--of the book's prose so the review's reader can form his own impression, can get his own taste.

3. Confirm your description of the book with quotation from the book, if only phrase-long, rather than proceeding by fuzzy precis.

4. Go easy on plot summary, and do not give away the ending.

5. If the book is judged deficient, cite a successful example along the same lines, from the author's oeuvre or elsewhere. Try to understand the failure. Sure it's his and not yours?

To these concrete five might be added a vaguer sixth, having to do with maintaining a chemical purity in the reaction between product and appraiser.....Review the book, not the reputation.... Better to praise and share than blame and ban. The communion between reviewer and his public is based upon the presumption of certain possible joys in reading, and all our discriminations should curve toward that end.