I’ve had it with Robert James Waller. In fact, I had had it with him in 1992 when his first novel, “The Bridges of Madison County,” was published. I found that book trite, redundant, and deeply disconcerting as a national phenomenon.

As that book goes into its 136th week on The New York Times best-seller list, I remain shocked that so many readers are titillated by a love story that is nostalgic for a time worth forgetting — those good old days when men were men and women were receptacles.

But now I’ve really had it after reading Waller’s third and newest plod-on-with-the-details novel, “Border Music.” Another Wallerian love story, this book chronicles the relationship of Texas Jack Carmine and Linda Lobo, who meet when Jack takes a pool cue to a guy who grabs Linda’s G-string during her dance routine at the Rainbow Bar. Jack and Linda flee together in Jack’s pickup and light out for the Big Road.

For 248 pages, Waller reveals the private thoughts and actions of these hard-living people. Jack is 47, Linda 37, and they’re starting to sag a little, gray a little, but they get to go back to some adolescent freedom with each other.

Jack isn’t as mysterious as Robert Kincaid, the National Geographic photographer in “Bridges.” But he’s a Waller protagonist, all right. He loves country-western music — a format which might have better suited this sappy story — and he loves women, “not only in bed, but overall.” Such a respectful guy is Jack, he can stay in a hotel room on the first night with Linda, sit around naked and not pressure her for sex — if she can just give him a minute to get his thoughts under control. What a guy.

Linda is finally swept away by Jack and begins to see “herself as some incredibly female creature who could alternate between strength and submission. A woman who could rule men with her thoughts or her body, depending on the time and place and reason, or be dominated by them when it was of her own will and choosing.” As with “Bridges,” self-esteem and sexism are frequent bedfellows in this book.

The main story is interspersed with news of Jack’s Uncle Vaughn Rhomer, an Iowan supermarket manager who hero-worships his nephew and calls him “God’s only free-born soul, rider of the summer roads, traveler of the far places.” Vaughn longs to be set free, to be an adventurer, to be something other than decent and productive.

After his wife dies, Vaughn goes to New Orleans and indulges in fantasies about a black woman in a restaurant. In one of Waller’s more offensive moments, Vaughn reveals that he wants this woman and knows “she would taste and smell of Africa and chains and long marches to misery ships that sailed for de land of cotton.”

By the end of the novel, Vaughn takes off for Mexico — and his companion is a mutt he has picked up off the streets of New Orleans. It’s not Linda Lobo, this dog, but it gives Vaughn a sense of importance and adventure.

Jack gets dogged, too, as Linda eventually leaves him. She gets scared because he has spells when he recalls too much about hard times in Vietnam, and she finally wants more than the ranch can offer. Linda goes back to school where she finds another man who will both support her in her own career and straight out support her. He’s not as sexy as Jack, not wayfaring and fun, but he’s steady.

Who knows exactly what happens to Jack by the end? It’s all so deep, so extremely enigmatic.

And banal.

But it’s a combination that sold 10 million copies of Waller’s first two books, and probably will carry him through to another success with “Border Music.”