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FICTION
The Vanishing Point
By Paul Theroux
Mariner Books
Published January 28, 2025
Where Ends Meet: Paul Theroux’s “The Vanishing Point”
The titular gem that begins Paul Theroux’s latest and perhaps last collection of stories, The Vanishing Point, is about a guy named Guy. Guy lives in rural Maine, where he works many jobs, including one as a handyman for a modern artist who paints colorful, crude shapes on large canvases. Guy is well-read (biographies, war histories), intensely patient (“Guy was never more silent than when someone talked a lot, and he nursed a hope that the person would become self-conscious and stop”), and admirably frugal (“he felt that in small ways like this, keeping things, fixing them, you could help change the world”). One cannot help but root for Guy as he bobs along the river of his life, often getting the short end of the stick but seemingly grateful to get a piece of it at all. The story’s question, and the source of its undeniable propulsion, is whether Guy’s goodness, modesty, and wisdom will lead him to an ending he deserves. What kind of shape will his life’s story take? For Theroux, the answer to this question requires vantage. It can only come at the end—the very end.
Theroux has written over sixty books. Before this collection, he was the kind of author who might be described as writing “with no end in sight.” His bibliography is too long for his Wikipedia page; it has its own Wikipedia page. He is best known for his novels (The Mosquito Coast) and travel memoirs (The Great Railway Bazaar), but he has also published more story collections than most short-story writers. If his long and winding body of work is primarily focused on “the journey”—wide-eyed meaning-seekers setting out abroad—The Vanishing Point marks a late-game shift in narrative emphasis. These are stories about the end: about death, about the isolation of old age, about the role of storytelling in memory and of memory in storytelling. And it is fitting that the best moments in the collection often come in the stories’ last pages—sometimes in their final lines.
Take “Dietrologia,” first published in The New Yorker and leading off the collection’s series of Hawaii-based stories. In it, an old man named Sal entertains a group of children who come by his house. They never respond exactly as he expects; they are amazed by the insignificant details and unfazed by the enormous truths. “They have just arrived on earth,” he thinks. “Time, which is everything to me, is nothing to them.” Sal struggles to come to terms with the typical changes in an elderly man’s life—downsizing, stale relationships, the wrong kind of solitude. But in the end, the locus of the story’s tension shifts somewhere completely unexpected, and readers realize that even as Sal’s life comes to an end, the world’s aches will endure.
The other gem is “Father X,” a story that originally appeared in an anthology of work based on Henry James’ notebooks. The narrator’s father, William Hope, has just died; he was a ghostwriter for pastors and preachers who didn’t have the time, energy, or insight to write their own sermons. But when Hope’s son receives a strange and unexpected piece of news, he realizes he may not have known his father at all. Theroux seems to believe that by old age, a person has lived many lives. Some we’re known for, even famous for—others only come to light after we die. And it is as impossible to predict our legacy as it is to predict our life.
But what will remain—certainly for Theroux—are the words we leave behind. In “Father X,” as in nearly all these stories, the plight of the focal character echoes the plight of the author. Hope pours his soul into his sermons only to send them into the void, trusting the words themselves to find their way to the right readers and listeners. And like Hope, Theroux prioritizes “the human parts” of literature. “People speaking. Those are real voices.” This is made clear in stories like “Camp Echo,” the tale of a child’s first experience at Boy Scout camp. The story’s achievement is its well-conducted cacophony of children’s voices: often hilarious, sometimes uncomfortable, and, in crucial moments, deeply moving. Here, the narrator’s near-the-end vantage gives him the unique ability to put memories in context, to demonstrate what lessons were learned and what questions still, after all these years, remain unanswered.
As with most full-length collections, a few stories in The Vanishing Point probably should have vanished before publication. The final three stories, for instance, pale in comparison to the openers. This might be because their narrators resemble Theroux too closely—including the recurring and obvious proxy, Andre Parent. Parent’s tone is less confessional than arrogant and defensive. He romanticizes his writing routine (several stories refer to an author writing longhand on a clipboard at the beach), plugs Theroux’s most recent novel, Burma Sahib (“I was planning a novel based on the early working life of George Orwell”) and tokenizes his cultural and romantic escapades (“I was in Central Africa, living all I could, and along with its excesses it gave me something to write about”). These moments feel less like autofiction and more like self-promotion; and there are even times Theroux’s stand-in attempts to jab back at criticism. “One of your novels was withdrawn from a course I was taking…[for] objectifying women,” Parent’s assistant tells him in “The Silent Woman.” “It made me want to read it.”
These self-referential winks work against Theroux. Patterns of bias quickly emerge, leaving readers wondering what is intentional and what is not. There are very few female characters in the collection, for instance, and even fewer whose primary role is not as the protagonist’s love interest or wife. Stories like “Adobo,” “Love Doll,” and “A Charmed Life” all perpetuate the same tired stereotypes, exoticizing, objectifying, and often killing off women of color. There are backwards attempts to break these patterns, such as when the narrator in “A Charmed Life” becomes infatuated with an “ideal” woman because of how good she looks doing manual labor. Readers with octogenarian family members may know exactly what it is like to listen, at length, to someone whose age and life experience lends them both a certain insight and a certain insensitivity.
But, as it is with our own elders, it’s worth parsing through the cringe to get to the nuggets of real wisdom—wisdom only they are capable of having. Theroux knows this, too, and if he speaks for his “Silent Generation,” they are grateful. In his prose, in his plots, and especially in his stories’ endings, there is a palpable undercurrent of appreciation—for his characters, for the patient reader, and for storytelling itself. After all, it is our stories that will outlive us. Take it from William Hope in “Father X,” a story that exists only because another writer, Henry James, jotted down an idea in a notebook: “This is the living word.”
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