On hallucinogens, he’s delighted and delusional

Slade STEADMAN’S last book was so enormously successful that it spawned a movie, a television series and a booming line of high-end travel accessories. The fictional travel writer became a brand, licensed and merchandised, and when he began to refuse the public appearances he had so relished earlier, “he was seen as grumpy, uncooperative, a snob.” The book was called “Trespassing,” an account of a year traveling the world without benefit of a passport. Now, Steadman, after 20 years of writing little more than hack magazine pieces, is set to demolish his writer’s block and seek stimulation on a small-group tour of Ecuador’s Amazon basin to ingest the hallucinogenic plant ayahuasca.

It’s an intriguing premise, and from his front-row seat in the overlapping worlds of travel and literature, author Paul Theroux gives us “Blinding Light,” a shrewd and cunning novel full of malleable personalities, psychedelia and considerable sex. What more could a reader ask for?

Steadman travels through Ecuador with “young overequipped couples -- rich, handsome, heedless, privileged, undeserving, and profoundly lazy in a special selfish way.”

“God, how I loathe these people,” Ava, a physician and Steadman’s traveling companion, whispers to him. A woman in the group whines that her cellphone won’t work in the jungle and notes that Amazonian Indians don’t accessorize their huts. “In the Third World you smile at the strangeness,” Steadman observes, “then you look closely and see ruin and misery.”

In a distant village accessible only by canoe, Steadman and others take ayahuasca. “[H]e left his body and now hovered over it, looking down at the nauseated sack of flesh that was wearing his clothes.” Egged on by Manfred, a mildly obnoxious German in the group, he also takes a far stronger mix, this time of the plant datura, which renders him powerfully, albeit temporarily, blind. “He had no eyes, yet his whole bedazzled body was an organ of vision.... Turned inside out, he could think very clearly.” The datura becomes the center of his life and, having taken some of the jungle plant to his Massachusetts home on Martha’s Vineyard, Steadman prepares the potent brew daily. He sees it as “benign and enlightening, healthful and productive.” He quickly becomes addicted and obsessed.

Once settled in, Slade marvels at his newly acquired drug-induced powers. He begins to write in earnest, dictating daily to the adventurous Ava, who leaves her hospital post and moves in with him. Her sexual voraciousness stimulates Slade’s writing. Their hyperactive love life involves role playing, invention and seductive wordplay. Ava alternates between playing the submissive and the dominatrix. “You’re in my power. I can do whatever I want with you,” she tells him.

Steadman’s novel, “The Book of Revelations,” reflects their life together: “In the glow of his sightlessness nothing was hidden.... [H]e had discovered through the drug’s blinding light that ... the source of truth was pleasure itself, fundamental and sensual.” Daily he wakes and blinds himself, then spends hours dictating his novel to Ava. He gives up sight for a heightened blindness, where arrogance and brashness govern.

Steadman, who affects black glasses and a white cane in public, accepts an invitation to a Vineyard party for Bill Clinton, then in his second presidential term. He could go sighted but, much to Ava’s annoyance, he chooses blindness, as if he were selecting a bright tie or a straw hat. Oh, what a grand party -- the Mike Wallaces and the Walter Cronkites, the Vernon Jordans and the William Styrons. Mike Nichols, Diane Sawyer, Alan Dershowitz, Beverly Sills. While others see his condition as an unfortunate deficiency, he sees it as a mask that gives him both sight and insight. A gregarious Clinton clasps Steadman, compliments him on his long-ago bestseller and promises to get him the finest eye doctors. “We can fix this thing,” the president boasts.

Theroux’s novel-within-a-novel is erotic. Yet if a little sex in a book goes a long way, the corollary must also hold -- that a lot dulls the thrill. (This, from the same author whose short fiction has included sexual play with Queen Elizabeth II.) Although it is surely to the author’s credit that he can describe the same gratifying basics with such a wide vocabulary, I found myself increasingly keen for the occasional clothed scenes.

Steadman’s book is published to lackluster reviews but phenomenal sales. Mid-book tour, however, he runs out of the increasingly unreliable datura and finds himself conventionally blind, a condition that terrifies him. Manfred, the ungainly German, reappears about then, and Steadman’s life begins to decompose.

Theroux maintains tight control over his novel’s twists and turns, although there’s a bit too much of both near the end. Still, his very funny accounts of the publishing industry, the travel writing phenomenon and life on Martha’s Vineyard -- in short, elements of his own life -- ring clear and true. Steadman, ultimately defeated, has come to personify everyone who has had a whiff of success. “He had been greedy, he had succumbed to temptation, he had wanted too much.” *