This time, Theroux's travels are in the head

Paul Theroux, the prolific author of wide-ranging travelogues from around the world, takes another voyage for his latest novel, "Blinding Light."

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But this time the trip is inward, and the natives are smug, self-centered white people.

"Blinding Light," Theroux's latest stab at blending real life with real fiction and making the reader wonder where the boundaries are, is also his self-conscious attempt at soft porn. But sex in "Blinding Light," while prominent and graphic, comes off as foreign a territory to Theroux as Easter Island.

The main character, Slade Steadman, lives off the wealth generated by his one book, "Trespassing," which was published years earlier and recounts his travels through Europe, Asia and Africa without passport, visas or credit cards.

"Wishing to go where you don't belong is the condition of most people in the world," was the opening sentence to "Trespassing." It also opens "Blinding Light."

"Trespassing" spawned a mini-industry of fans, gear and a TV series, all of which fuel Steadman's lifestyle, hubris and inertia. But Steadman, having become a sour one-hit wonder, does what many of the people he mocks do: He seeks transcendence with a plane ticket.

"Blinding Light" opens promisingly with Steadman and his girlfriend, Ava, on a flight to Ecuador with a mix of travelers who would rather be called anything but tourists. Once there, Steadman is introduced to datura, a drug that blinds him temporarily but gives him other worldly powers of perception.

From there the story unravels in a swirl of trippy dreck.

"Turned inside out, he could think very clearly. He saw the blossom - he was inside the angel's trumpet. This is what the ayahuasca told me. He was blind in a powerful way, in the thrall of a luminosity he had never known before, so that blindness was not the shadowy obstacle of something dark but rather a hot light of revelation, like a lava flow within him, a river of fire, and he was euphoric."

Once back at his estate on Martha's Vineyard, Mass., Steadman continues to take the datura, enjoying the blindness and the attention it gives him. He writes another book - well, Ava, writes as he dictates it.

Together they role-play, dress up, hobnob and name-drop, partying with the Clintons, the Cronkites, Phillip Roth and William Styron. By the end there's enough sex, drugs and famous people in "Blinding Light" to have fueled at least a couple of issues of People magazine, but that's about it.