2008-06-24 Insight or voyeurism?

There are some great features to Amazon: competitive prices, the chance to browse for a vast selection of books at any hour of the day, generally good service. Here is a bad thing: judging a book by its cover (or the reputation of the author). I bought this because I have enjoyed some of Theroux's TV programmes and it sounded a bit different.

Theroux's plan is to revisit subjects he had met during the making of a TV series on weird Americans and see how they have changed in the intervening few years. The problem is that it doesn't quite work and I think Theroux realises that quite quickly. The writing is engaging and honest but it's partly a story of tracking the people down and partly a story about what they said when he found them. Neither story is terribly interesting.

The story of finding the subjects again is fairly tedious, to be honest. Theroux tracks them through the internet, phone calls and visits to likely hangouts but there's no great detective work or suspense, just description. And this is ok - Theroux comes across as likeable and decent, you'd actually like to meet him, but there are limits to how interesting the story of him tracking people down can be.

Then there's the times when he finds his subject and draws them out. Again, it's hard to get very involved. Another reviewer calls the interviewees dreary and some of them are. Some are sad, as well, and neither feature makes for very gripping reading. You could wander into your local psychiatric out-patient clinic and have the same sort of chat, I suspect.

Louis Theroux is a talented journalist and author and his best work is ahead of him. You wish his weird subjects would grow up and get on with their lives (some of them have) and you wish Theroux would stop hanging around with them and get on to something that really matters. The Victorians used to visit asylums to gawp at the lunatics and this feels a bit like the same voyeuristic serving up of human frailty.