Fascinating Boredom

If some people spend their lives terrified of being bored, why are the distractions they seek out often tedious? This question is raised so provocatively by John Ralston Saul in Dark Diversions: A Traveller’s Tale that to call the book a study in boredom is not to condemn it but to identify its most interesting subject matter.

Dark Diversions features 18 linked stories and vignettes from the adult life of its fictional narrator, a peripatetic man of letters named Thomas Bell, who has certain playful resemblances to Saul, and whose life seems anything but boring at first blush. Bell spends much of his time among the world’s rich and powerful, from Haitian despots and murderous Arizona oilmen to octogenarian American expats in Tuscany. Some of these people cross Bell’s radar screen only briefly, granting him interviews or giving public lectures that he attends, while...