Abject admiration is the worst way to start a review. Isn’t it the blurbist’s job to kiss a writer’s behind, the critic’s to skewer it on the formidable barb of his or her literary intellect?

Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum has proven herself inimitable, capable of scavenging a universe of love and disappointment from the smallest crumbs of human experience. In Ms. Hempel Chronicles, a card trick, the slamming of a car door, can redeem twenty-odd years of unexamined existence. A kiss bears within it a quiet lesson, apprehended only by a shifting of muscle and skin, a change in physical and atmospheric pressure: “So that was what it felt like, someone making a decision.”

This is modest, patient, unrivaled work, which is terrific for Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum and terrible for book reviewers. Abject admiration is the worst way to start a review—surely one must have cavils, objections, clever observations. Isn’t it the blurbist’s job to kiss a writer’s behind, the critic’s to skewer it on the formidable barb of his or her literary intellect?

But what if the book is just that good? What if it doesn’t allow for complaints or cleverness? What if it leaves one with a sense of wonder, of loneliness, of renewed faith in contemporary fiction?

Ms. Beatrice Hempel teaches seventh grade. A late-twenty-something, she finds herself struggling with a career that had once “seemed to offer both tremendous opportunities for leisure and the satisfaction of doing something both generous and worthwhile.” While she’s been spending her evenings in front of the television grading papers, her friends, lovers, students, family members, even other teachers have begun to pass her by—they’re on their way to their own lives, of course. Bynum explores Ms. Hempel’s relationships with these other characters as they disappear into the distance, her sense of diminishment and loss, her fierce jealousy and even fiercer empathy.

Admittedly, this doesn’t seem like the sort of book that will revolutionize contemporary American literature. A book about a nice teacher—well,  that sounds nice. And it’s true that Bynum’s material here is not as imaginative or experimental as it was in her first book, the National Book Award finalist Madeleine Is Sleeping, a sinuous traumwerk narrative that followed the erotic fantasies of a sleeping young girl into and out of what you or I might think of as reality.

The truth is that most of the things that happen to Ms. Beatrice Hempel don’t happen to her. Her engagement to a long lost high-school friend brings a sharp new joy to what she perceives to be a faded life—but that promise is mysteriously erased by the last third of the book. Whatever happened to handsome Amit, who sang and danced and ran miles every day in a pair of spectularly thigh-baring shorts? Readers are given only a series of half-uttered regrets, conversational slips, another woman’s name spoken only once. This curious plot structure, threaded through eight episodic chapters, prevents the kind of angry emotional confrontation common to little books by young authors.

Ms. Hempel Chronicles doesn’t sacrifice accessibility or sense of humor for affect or style—it entertains. It is a friendly book, possessed, like its protagonist, of only the quietest rebellion. Ms. Hempel’s mother is Chinese; when another teacher suggests she call herself Ms. Ho-Hempel to emphasize her ethnicity she replies, “Won’t there be a lot of jokes?… You know, ho? As in ‘pimps and.’ As in, ‘you blankety-blank—’” She trails off. She is, as always, flustered and innocent and possessed of a forthrightness that is its own grace. This baffled candor—which is not simplicity, nor childishness—isn’t something one is used to reading these days. It isn’t exactly fiction: It is embarrassingly true.

Bynum’s descriptions of the young folk who make up Ms. Hempel’s universe are enough to make the book worth reading (twice). There’s Jonathan Hamish, a difficult student who murmurs, “Mercutio’s the man,” during a lesson on Romeo and Juliet; and “Harriet Reznik, precious artifact of another age! Her thick swingy helmet of hair, the bangs that looked as if they had been cut with the help of a ruler.” Anyone who has been a student, and loved a teacher or a mentor—and suspected they were loved in return—will recognize these portraits and delight in Bynum’s apt handling of the delicate relationships between such dynamic characters.

The young Beatrice has her own memories of teachers, such as the history teacher who “looked to her hopefully during a discussion of immigration. She scowled. Typical, she thought. She wrote a poem about it.”

Typical, she thought. She wrote a poem about it. Understanding why this is so funny, goes a long way toward explaining why Ms. Hempel Chronicles is such a wonderful book. Here we have an adolescent person doing something absolutely typical—feeling misunderstood or exploited, then writing a poem about it—because a grown-up person has done something absolutely typical—cast about him for the nearest human mooring in a discomfiting situation. That Beatrice Hempel, age fourteen or so, uses the word “typical” is, in itself, typical. Could one more adroitly depict the idiocy of the situation, while simultaneously—mercifully—humanizing both the insensitive adolescent and the insensitive adult?

Ms. Hempel teaches English, one should specify. Or, she teaches “reading and writing and critical thinking.” She assigns her students Tobias Wolff’s memoir This Boy’s Life, and asks them to discuss what it means to write from life. Later, she has to defend her choice at a parents’ meeting, since the book contains, among many thousands of others, the words “shit” and “fuck.”

Now, a book about books runs the risk of being obnoxious, and it’s easy to say, as Ms. Hempel does to the parents, that there’s something wonderful about Tobias Wolff—the “authenticity of the voice,” for example, or a certain omnipresent “shock of recognition.” But Bynum goes farther, demonstrating that a book isn’t good just because it contains a story: It must induce other people to tell their own. Ms. Hempel’s class insists that she tell them about her childhood, and what emerges is a half-told tale of lost promise, the book’s very heart.

Equally characteristic to her writing is a vividness of description and detail, a self-effacing verve to match Ms. Hempel’s lucid, if baffled, self-perception. One of her students is a “sad sack, hanger-on, misplacer of entire backpacks.” Her younger brother has “the personality of a dandelion or a patch of crabgrass.” And Bynum makes perhaps the best use of an exclamation point in the last several years of contemporary fiction; you’ll know it when you see it and it will move you more than you thought punctuation ever could.

Ms. Hempel has a style, too. She is called an “affable” teacher by one girl, but knows, unfortunately, that this is “not synonymous with good.” In Ms. Hempel Chronicles, learning to describe the world—and one’s place in it—furnishes a series of bittersweet revelations. During her childhood, Beatrice’s father often leaves the family for mysterious weekend camping trips. This enrages his wife and confuses his children, though they try to go about their routines—chopping vegetables, working on their science homework. But “Beatrice, confronted with the mystery of her father, the mystery of her mother, could only write repeatedly, in ever tinier cursive, Canoeing is a perilous outdoor sport.”

The perils of canoeing here are literal, and also figurative. The more Beatrice carves that tiny phrase into her notebook the more its obscurity becomes a sanctuary from her family, the screaming fights, the Saturday-Sunday silences. But her writing, to put it frumpily, also indicates a nascent understanding of the redemptive power of language. Beatrice intuits the power of that sentence, centered on the many—mostly grim—senses of the word perilous, and tinged with melancholy humor by the phrase outdoor sport. She writes in “ever tinier cursive,” delicately, self-effacingly, but with genuine, irrepressible anger and fear.

Which makes it seem, strikingly enough, that Beatrice would have made a good writer. She might have turned out something like Sarah Shun-Lien Bynum—one of the very best. For it is Bynum who shows us that there’s nothing better than a writer who teaches and a teacher who writes.

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A review of Ghost Train to the Eastern Star, by Paul Theroux

Photo by Daniel Cheong

Travel is nothing. Travel is a bit of a hassle, a frisk at the airport, a few hundred or a few thousand dollars. For the average upwardly mobile American citizen, travel is the chance to say, “I went somewhere,” and then maybe upload the trip photos so other people can say, “Oh, look, she went somewhere.”

But for some—for a dwindling few—travel is everything. Always has been, always will. Decades before The New York Times started sending 20-somethings to investigate the best way to spend a buck in the Arctic Circle (ice hotels, bien sûr!), Paul Theroux was wandering and worrying his way through the Eastern Hemisphere on a series of rickety trains in the company of Eurasia’s most garrulous and bereft. In 1975 he depicted this 

first, epic trip—from London to Japan and back via the Trans-Siberian Railroad—in The Great Railway Bazaar, now a classic of travel literature. Thirty-three years later, Theroux retraces his own footsteps, following that original careening, career-making quest as closely as he can, offering an account of this second effort in Ghost Train to the Eastern Star.

But why? To sell books? To stake a claim to continuing relevancy? Or is it because, as Theroux recently wrote, “fogeydom is the last bastion of the bore and reminiscence is its anthem?” Well, maybe. But not entirely.

Now in his 60s, Theroux has retaken that storied trip because travel is everything, his main source of inspiration and identity. And so it has been difficult for him to write anything really definitive about it, or to keep himself from trying. This compulsion, this traveling in search of the meaning of travel—instead of life experience, or knowledge, or even self—is Theroux’s hallmark and the ultimate value of his work, old and new.

This is not to say that Theroux is not interested in life experience, knowledge or self, or even that he is a consistently good writer. He is not. Ghost Train to the Eastern Star is packed with research, some meticulous, some facile, conclusions both clumsy and adept, and commentary sometimes deeply personal and just as often vacuous. But the book’s real engine, its raison d’être and the reason to read it, lies in a single question: What sets travel apart from the near infinite things a person might do and then write about? What does travel mean? Theroux may be the only travel writer who has not lost sight of this question, ever.

Theroux begins Ghost Train with several possible answers, all evocative, some slightly overwrought, none satisfying. “Travel is the business of being bone-idle,” he says. “A trip makes one “alive in a vision of hallucinatory difference.” Or, slightly less bafflingly, “The traveler is the greediest kind of romantic voyeur, and in some well-hidden part of the traveler’s personality is an unpickable knot of vanity, presumption and mythomania bordering on the pathological.”

Compare that last mouthful—mythomania, etc.—to a description of the traveling urge given by a younger Theroux early on in The Great Railway Bazaar: “I have seldom heard a train go by and not wished I was on it.” The older Theroux has, quite literally, much more to say, but what he’s saying is not so different. He’s still wandering around trying to figure out why he’s wandering around—picking at the unpickable knot—but his approach has become more involuted, more convoluted, informed especially by age and the fact that so very much has changed across Europe and Asia while he’s been away.

It’s impossible to revisit the long-ago, isn’t it? Well, yes and no. Theroux finds that some of his old destinations—for example, the frosty innards of Russia—haven’t changed so much. Others, like the newly skyscrapered Singapore, are testaments to the sheer gross speed of development and the irresistibility of global capitalism. Most places, like India, are lodged somewhere in between, busily exploding into the tech industry but unable to shake their old legacies: poverty, overpopulation, class struggle.

Since The Great Railway Bazaar, Theroux’s political engagement has grown alongside his volubility. At 500 pages, Ghost Train is the lengthiest discussion of what it means to be an American traveler written in the last seven disastrous years. Almost everywhere Theroux stops he ends up in a conversation about American politics, the American economy, America as refuge, America as hell and as avenging angel. The result is a sort of sprawling, anecdotal census of foreign opinion regarding our country in a time when it is very badly needed, especially from a prolific, popular writer—even as fodder for debate and debunking.

In general, Theroux’s interlocutors can be categorized as follows: sympathetic fellow travelers, members of the repellent middle/upper class (both natives and locals), nostalgic figures from the 1970s, kindly drivers/guides, and prostitutes/pimps/procuresses. Of particular interest is Theroux’s description of a meeting with a man in Baku, Azerbaijan. This gentleman is a fervent supporter of the war in Iraq, where his country has stationed 150 troops, and he hopes that Bush will manage to keep the ball rolling right into Iran and slay Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Armenia, too, deserves a good thumping. The man pumps his fists in the air and declares, “In football, Armenia is our enemy. In life, too.”

Theroux makes plenty of unreasonable arguments himself, resulting from his intense engagement with other writers and the art of writing. He has a lot to say about what he does and doesn’t like. Sometimes this can feel oppressive, or self-centered. For example, in Ghost Train he runs across a young girl reading one of his books, and caricatures her ignorance. She asks him, “So I guess – what? – writing’s your hobby?” “Were you influenced by The Poisonwood Bible?” etc. If this is bad taste, well, plenty of other writers have done the same thing (see, for example, “Northeast Direct” by Dagoberto Gilb).

In fact Ghost Train draws so generously from other sources that it sometimes reads like a book report: Georges Simenon, Wordsworth, V.S. Pritchett, V.S. Naipaul, Greene, Kurban Said, Leonard Woolf, and a score of others make their appearance alongside the Azerbaijanis and Cambodians, the Indians, the Russians, the Japanese. There are also several long conversations with living writers—Elif Shafak, whose beauty and brains give Theroux a case of the stuttering blushes, Orhan Pamuk, Haruki Murakami, the late Sir Arthur C. Clarke, Pico Iyer.

Theroux is a cataloger, a collector, as evidenced by his exhibition of other writers’ work and the stories of people he meets (on this trip he’s also hunting a few less abstract souvenirs, namely reverse-glass paintings and religious icons). Here one catches a glimpse of the traveling mythomaniac described in Ghost Train’s first paragraphs. Hoarding stuff—even stories—is startlingly easy to understand as a vain activity, fruitless and self-absorbed (“So I guess – what? – writing’s your hobby?”). As Jean Baudrillard, the astute observer of both Americans and postmodernity, put it: “What you collect is always yourself.”

Thus the moments in Ghost Train when Theroux acquires a new story can be doubly revealing, offering insight into both interlocutor and narrator. In Mumbai, Theroux sits in a restaurant with an older woman and the children she has impressed into prostitution. He wants the children to have a proper meal, but he also needs them to fulfill something other than his charitable urges. He needs to know about them, to add them to the stories he’s been piling up. After about an hour he suffers a fit of shame and self-consciousness and flees.

It’s difficult to tell how much Theroux intends to reveal about himself in such episodes, though they certainly contribute to the book’s richness. In other moments, he is remarkably direct. He details the circumstances that informed the writing of The Great Railway Bazaar: When he returned home to England in 1973, he found his wife had taken a lover. The rest of his work on the book was spent in a state of tightly-throttled rage and self-flagellation. First he exploded: “I told her I was going to kill her,” he admits, terrified by how sincerely he had meant it. Then he pretended nothing had happened, and he worked and worked and worked.

So what is about travel that brings on these confessions? The moments of unintentional self-exposure? Is it what Theroux calls “rubbing himself up against the world?” Not sufficient. These are problematic questions—and by problematic, one means the starting points for exploration and intellectual enrichment. They were in 1975, and they remain so today.

The older Theroux finds himself feeling diminished, however, more anonymous, more meditative than he was at thirty. Some of the trains, he feels, are just as old and rickety as he is, and no one pays much attention to a quiet, older gentleman—“it’s easier to be mistaken for a bum,” he says. He has become a ghost, thus the book’s title.

This is all very well and good, but one wonders if a book about diminishment should be an inch or two thicker than its predecessor. Ghost Train is in great need of a thorough edit, mostly for unnecessary repetition or bloat. On p. 468:

“Obluche was a place of wooden cabins and snowbound cottages, huts at the outskirts, like a scene of nineteenth-century settlement in a Minnesota winter – the small cabins, the picket fences, the thick icicles, and the chimneys sending up smoke, and beyond them a great emptiness of snowfields.”

Two paragraphs later:

“Most days were to be like that… hundreds of chimneys sending up white smoke, huddled behind flimsy wooden fences, many miles apart, birch groves, bare trees, a monumental emptiness of snow and sky…”

It’s easy to see Theroux’s aims here, but reiterating a monotonous landscape can make for a monotonous read. And the use of the word “monumental” to make one “emptiness” bigger than another? Puffery.

The older Theroux gets, the more his prose piles up, the more certain he is that he’s never going to find what he’s looking for. This is why Ghost Train to the Eastern Star was written, why Theroux took that second trip. He had no other choice. He doesn’t know what travel is (nor will he ever), so he’s got to keep traveling. In the meantime his observations on the self, knowledge, experience—the constituent parts of travel but far from the whole endeavor—give Ghost Train its shape. When the opportunities for observation are over, so is the book. Theroux finishes it on a train in the Chunnel, back to London where he began: “At the end of my day’s notes I wrote the one word, Done.”

Then he immediately contradicts himself in one long paragraph totally unnecessary except when he writes: “Arrivals are still departures.” Clichéd, yes, but also relevant. This trip is finished, in other words, but we’re still going to have to figure out what a trip is, what it means, even after he’s listed for us forty travel authors and analyzed their work at length, even though we’ve met some of them in person, even though we’ve visited forty cities, even though we’ve learned a surprising amount about Theroux himself. We still don’t know what travel means, or who we are when we travel, which is—good.

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