Travel Blog

As the weeks went by, and Paul Theroux’s impressive new travel book On the Plain of Snakes: A Mexican Journey went unmentioned in The New York Times Book Review, I assumed the editors were going to put it into their holiday roundup of travel books. And sure enough, there it was yesterday, lumped in with How to Be a Family: The Year I Dragged My Kids Around the World to Find a New Way to Be Together and a "glossy, coffee-table edition" of 1,000 Places to See Before You Die. A few pages on, there appeared a full review of Hisham Matar’s A Month in Siena.

On the Plain of Snakes is an exhaustive exploration of our complex and misunderstood neighbor, by our preeminent travel writer, and one can only speculate as to why it got slighted, particularly at a time when Mexico is in the news (much more than Siena). Early on in the book, Theroux reflects on his age; he was in his mid-70s when he undertook his arduous journey, driving the length of the border and then deep into the Mexican hinterlands. And he notes how, in the U.S., his senior status makes him irrelevant, a person of no consequence. But I doubt he expected this loss of importance to carry over into the literary world, where, historically, longevity has been honored. But today that world seems to have become more political than literary.

In another sign of disrespect, this time for the genre, the Book Review’s roundup almost always includes a statement of surprise that none of the stories resemble in any way a vacation, a statement that reveals a stunning ignorance of the vast literature of travel, which is comprised of books, like Theroux’s latest, that are gripping accounts of dangerous journeys and/or penetrating examinations of peoples and cultures. Yesterday, it appeared in the second mini-review, of The Best American Travel Writing 2019: “The most striking aspect of this collection, though, is that nobody even remotely considers lazing about on a beach.” Though the intention might have been the opposite, this throwaway line, through its imagery, helps perpetuate the stereotype of travel writers as eternal vacationers.