In his 40 books Paul Theroux has become our laureate of world travel. He is also one of our most worldly writers. “Blinding Light” (Houghton Mifflin, 448 pages, $26) is a novel about writing, reduced to its most material components. Slade Steadman – who somehow keeps a straight face whenever his name is used – is the fictional author of “Trespassing,” a cult classic memoir about illegal traveling. In the 20 years since its publication, it has been relentlessly promoted, and now Steadman sets off on a new quest surrounded by ecotourist buffoons in Trespassing-brand outfits.

This is a writer’s most self-indulgent nightmare: to suffocate in his own fame. Mr. Theroux’s delight in skewering ecotourists and other upper-class lifestyle trendies is smug and cheap. Although “Blinding Light” is ostensibly a tale about writing and inspiration, Mr. Theroux seems most interested in his middle-aged hero’s crabby pride. Steadman is traveling to Ecuador to locate a wonder drug that will revivify his career. He finds it, and it works wonders, but it also blinds him.

For Mr. Theroux, too, the drug is an inspiration. Much of the prose in “Blinding Light” wilts in a purple haze: “As they kissed, this darkness lifted and became smoldering light. But the act itself came much later, for they struggled, choking in a hallucination of desire, teasing, delaying, relenting, beginning again, two strangers becoming acquaintances, uttering the desperate half-laugh of lust.” And this is before Steadman even finds the drug he’s looking for.

Dictating like the blind Milton, Steadman composes an erotic novel and, at night, enacts his fantasy scenarios with his amanuensis. This is a boring notion of writing – that it requires drugs, and equals sex – but Mr. Theroux is no novice. At times, the poetry – such as it is – of Steadman’s drug-induced visions makes a poignant contrast to the relentlessly contemporary world Mr. Theroux insistently satires (even Vernon Jordan is a character). “Blinding Light” is ultimately more about a stylish midlife crisis than about writing.

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At one of his most hubristic moments, Slade Steadman claims he writes blinder than Jorge Luis Borges. In “Borges and the Eternal Orangutans” (New Directions, 135 pages, $13.95), Brazilian author Luis Fernando Verissimo presumes to make Borges a fictional character. Vogelstein is a sheltered academic who travels to a conference on Edgar Allen Poe held in, of all places, Buenos Aires. Borges attends the opening cocktail party, at which the arrogant Rotkopf insults several colleagues, only to be murdered that night. Vogelstein and Borges are drawn into the investigation.

“I will try to be your eyes, Jorge,” writes Vogelstein at the start of the novel, which is written as a letter to Borges that summarizes their adventures. Vogelstein is almost craven. To see him refer to Borges as “you” throughout this otherwise normal narrative lends a creepy aspect to Vogelstein’s humility.

Their methods are unusual. Borges and Vogelstein do not look for clues; instead, they remain in Borges’s library, where they mull over wild bibliographic theories. “Solutions can always be found in libraries,” counsels Borges. The Necronomicon and the cabala come in for extensive ransacking, but Mr. Verissimo’s novel is no dry dialogue: indeed, he grants Borges a great deal of humor and common sense, while Vogelstein is mawkishly erudite.

Mr. Verissimo even gives blind Borges a speech on the importance of worldly experience. Discussing the murder weapons at hand, he discourses on the difference between the theoretical knife, called “the blade,” and the knife actually used in the killing, “the slicer.”

“I’ve always felt that in order to be a great writer, one should have experience of life at sea, which is why Conrad and Melville and, in a way, Stevenson, who ended his days in the South Seas, were better than all of us, Vogelstein. … But I think that having experience of ‘the slicer’ would give a writer the same sensation as going to sea, of spectacularly breaking the bounds of his own passivity and of his remoteness from the fundamental matters of the world.” The surprise ending of this mystery upends Borges’s equation of fine writing and killing.

Borges’s influence on Latin American writers cannot be overestimated; it is remarkable that a book like Mr. Verissimo’s, which depends directly on the cult of Borges, is consistently entertaining to a reader less obsessed with Borges. Indeed, the South American conference on Poe brings a number of interesting regional prejudices to light. Charmingly, Mr. Verissimo’s Borges describes New England as “a land of witchcraft and gloomy valleys, the only American equivalent to the dark forests of Europe.”

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If John Wray’s second novel has it right, all of America is one great dark forest, Kansas included. “Canaan’s Tongue” (Knopf, 341 pages, $25) is a highly original, overwhelming novel, comparable in its imagery to Cormac McCarthy’s “Blood Meridian,” although it does not have that novel’s poise.

In “Life on the Mississippi,” Mark Twain wrote of an outlaw whose ambition put Jesse James in the shade:

Murel projected negro insurrections and the capture of New Orleans; and furthermore, on occasion, this Murel could go into a pulpit and edify the congregation. What are James and his half-dozen vulgar rascals compared with this stately old-time criminal, with his sermons, his meditated insurrections and city-captures, and his majestic following of ten hundred men, sworn to do his evil will!

Mr. Wray, whose Murel is most often called “the Redeemer,” has written a history of this apocryphal character. From the start, the author’s imagination runs warped circles around Twain’s reportage. The Redeemer’s camp-meeting swindle is not a matter of simply distracting rubes from their horses; it is a satanic distraction, in which onlookers are hypnotized by Murel’s hatefulness. Wray’s chief narrator, Virgil Ball, feels afterward a “thick, oily throbbing of my brain, as though I’d spent the last hour drinking mash.” It is an inspiration drawn from the age of television.

The Redeemer’s very evil trade is the retail of runaway slaves. Virgil Ball, a young reader of Descartes whose left eye was permanently disfigured by the bootheel of his Methodist father, becomes the Redeemer’s right-hand man, only to assassinate him as the Civil War makes the slave trade impracticable. The remainder of the Redeemer’s gang holes up in an abandoned mansion in Kansas, where they gradually begin to fester and kill one another.

Virgil Ball slowly discovers a plot to resurrect the Redeemer – this is that rare Western that leans heavily on cabalism – whose manipulations continue to haunt the party. “This nation was founded,” the Redeemer had explained, “of belief – credulity pure and simple – just as the great French Republic was founded on skepticism.” The Redeemer appeals to the gullibility of each of his henchman – for example, he convinces Virgil that he can see visions in his trick eye.

Mr. Wray takes full advantage of the convention whereby every backcountry villain’s head can be crammed with exquisite idiom. Sometimes the effect is Shakespearean: “Colonel – How did you sleep last night, Asa? Trist – Flatly. Straight and flatly as a plank.” Elsewhere it is simply color: “Fry me for a chitterling! […] Those are my little mollies,” declares the Redeemer, who is more camp than ecclesiastic, upon the discovery of his missing boots.

If Ambrose Bierce were alive today, he would be gratified to read “Canaan’s Tongue,” although he might wonder at its general excessiveness. Evil is a superficial and impatient muse, and no character here maintains moral interiority for long. But this novel is an achievement, easily one of the best by a young American to appear this year.