The Perils of Irreverence

...he bobs like a cork on the tides, willless, without ambition or motivation but in urgent touch with the esthetic of his generation: Endless finely observed shrieks on movie and TV conventions substitute for Luke's psychological center...

...How Luke managed to turn present happiness into the unrememberable past, how he "ruined his whole life," is never made clear, but Alex takes a stab at understanding: "In Luke's case, something took him away from the light, from what he most wanted and loved...

...What better fate than "to live in England and watch telly...

...Only Luke is bereft, having self-destructed...

...And this advertisement, she suspected, was also a come-on...

...The whole scene is self-serving: The author speaks, the character moves her lips...

...The daily presence of the photograph, its sheer obviousness, probably meant that the executive-husband became oblivious to it...

...And so on...

...Her personality hardly lends itself to the thoughts she expresses...

...There is a complex philosophical principle at work in Luke, but Dyer has decided, perversely, to indicate its existence without taking the trouble to flesh it out and make it emotionally coherent...

...But that statement somehow enhanced the chances of his being able to contradict it, to prove it wrong...

...He's overflowing with opinions delivered with great brio and certainty...

...Pictures like that didn't help you to remember people, they helped you to forget them, and having one on your desk like this was a conventionally coded declaration of status: I am in a position to have framed snaps of my wife and children on my desk...

...The feeling Lawrence gives of "expanded" potentialities "is now wholly absent from our reading of contemporary novels...

...Then, with very little preparation or what might be called outdated character development, Alex leaps into the future to show Luke as a husk of his old self, living alone in London, depressed, reclusive, barely energetic enough to stare at the TV set in his apartment...

...But Dyer's own words send up a warning sign...

...I have a wife and kids, the picture declared, therefore I do not try to sleep with my secretary or colleagues...

...Yet if they are in print, why not assume they were meant to be taken seriously...

...Out of Sheer Rage was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award...

...She and Luke each possess some characteristics the other regrets, but they conduct a passionate and satisfying affair...

...The first two are unavailable in this country...

...Lawrence's books themselves have so ceased to interest Dyerthat he dithers around forpages try ing to decide whether he ought to pack the inconveniently heavy Collected Poems when, in search of concentration, he and his girlfriend go off to Greece where yet again—surprise—he fails to come to grips with his subject...

...The bulk of the book, his love affair with a young woman from Belgrade, Nicole, parallels sometime-narrator Alex' affair with a multilingual interpreter, Sahra...

...Of course the chronicle of his difficulties—a catalog of hesitations, divagations and irritations—in a good postmodern sleight-of-hand, turned out to be the book he couldn't manage to deliver in the conventional linear way...

...The very dailiness and acutely observed detail of these lives has all the actuality of reality taken down by dictation...

...Sounds to me like the author's sensations novelized right before our eyes, but okay, let that be...

...Half aggrieved, half self-satisfied, Out of Sheer Rage is nothing if not idiosyncratic, a rant in homage to a ranter, to a writer who shares with Dyer and with a few others like Thomas Bernhard "the same wild misanthropy, the same loathing of their country and countrymen...

...He's lazy, he admits right off...

...While Luke casually leads Nicole and Sahra into drugs as a sport, sex is their true recreation—some of its particulars lifted straight from Out of Sheer Rage...

...Dyer likes to quote Camus as a strand braided into his own prose, with quotation marks...

...Initially miserable, with neither work nor friends to secure him, he quickly finds his little circle...

...TheSun Also Rises, or that Nicole is the name of Fitzgerald's creation in Tender is the Night...

...It is a triumphantly impolite cousin to Julian Barnes' Flaubert's Parrot andNicholson Baker's Vand I, which flickered around Updike with the devotion of a verbal mosquito...

...Reviewed by Rosellen Brown Author, "Before and After," "Cora Fry's Pillow Book" It was D. H. Lawrence who cautioned readers not to trust the teller but to trust the tale...

...For those readers who could not get enough Geoff Dyer in his Desperately Seeking Lawrence phase (check out amazon.com and you'll find quite a few), here he is, as contrarian and curmudgeonly as ever —only, in inconsistent fictional guise, made a bit more vulnerable by his love for Nicole...

...It wasn't the people in the photo she disliked, it was the executive convention of having such a picture on your desk...

...But neither that nor Dyer's clever diatribes is enough to make persuasive fiction...

...Having thus prepared us for a somewhat cynical, even narcissistic, view of the form, Dyer now sets before us his third novel, Paris Trance...

...Dyer's lack of narrative discipline is a refusal to abide by what he has called an irritating and outdated game...

...One gets so weary watching authors' sensations and thoughts get novelized, set into the concrete of fiction, that perhaps it is best to avoid the novel as a medium of expression...

...Respect them or not, novels—as Lawrence, who struggled with them, could have told him—are harder than that...

...In fact—back to where we started—he disdains the very form of the novel for making such demands, however flexibly...

...Dyer begs too much indulgence...

...The past is useless...

...His sensations floated a whole book of delightfully honest eccentricity...

...The floating narrator explicates in a sudden paragraph of comprehension: "Nothing in the past has any value...

...Ditto for his voyages to Taormina and Rome and Oxford and Taos...

...You cannot store up happiness...

...Nicole, still in Paris, also has a child...

...this time he challenges the expectations we bring to the novel, adhering to some, trashing others, and, like an actor who always plays himself no matter the demands of his role, not bothering to transform his voice...

...To be sure, Paris Trance has a certain hypnotic quality...

...away from the work, back toward the circumstances of its composition, toward the man and his sensations...

...Milan Kundera manages to remain interesting —note the contradiction here—because he utilizes the "freedom of composition" of pre-19th-century realism to create "work in which the bridges and the filler have no reason to be and in which the novelist would never be forced—for the sake of form and its dictates—to stray by even a single line from what he cares about, what fascinates him...

...The story, such as it is, begins with the arrival in Paris of Luke, a young Englishman whose intention is to write a book, specifically a novel he just can't seem to get into (sound familiar...

...It chronicled his endlessly unsuccessful attempt to write a book about Lawrence, with whom he was nothing less than obsessed, and in the Lawrentian spirit he made some nervy assertions about a great many things, including the tediousness of the modern novel...

...Aimless as ever, Luke is happier than he has ever been...

...the moment of the form's historical urgency has passed...

...One of them is that although "good, even great, novels continue to be written...

...Characters deliver or consider diverting set pieces on films, male/female relations and English television, whether they would realistically think such things or not...

...He is a working class bloke even while his Oxford education asserts itself on every page, a prose Nigel Kennedy...

...He doesn't even have to think about that damn book he isn't writing...

...You can dwell on it but not in it...

...Alex and Sahra have quite conventionally married and had a child...

...The adjectives he uses for Lawrence describe his own perpetual state of petty aggravation: "self-generating exasperation," "spiteful," "in a hell of a temper," and onward in a march of choler that he licks and strokes with the complacency of a cat cleaning itself in the sun...

...He succeeded in merrily breaking the rules in his unclassifiable grapple with Lawrence...

...Corroborating testimony from Lawrence is cited, minus the telly...

...A few years ago, British writer Geoff Dyer published a hybrid work that was neither biography nor criticism, and not quite a memoir, called Out of Sheer Rage...

...Dyer refers to "character and situation" as "distractions...

...A young woman seated in an executive's office, for example, eyes the photograph on his desk and is "surprised by how intensely she disliked this picture...

...Dyer finds justification for this selfindulgence in his reading of the relationship between the man and his writing, "the gravitational pull of his work, which is always...

...And what are we to make of the fact that parts of the book are direct quotes from Hemingway's-Fiesta, a.k.a...

...Maybe yes, maybe no, but his belief that the "truth" about his idol resides elsewhere than in tire writing generates an effective and amusing volume whose criticism and analysis are rendered indirectly, with only the kindest intent...

...By comparison the torn centerfolds, the oil-smeared nudes that mechanics stuck up on their workshop walls were images of felicity and integrity, faithfulness...

...I'm currently in a hyper-volatile condition, but at some point there must come an exhaustion which is very like peace," he says...

...Are we in the parched existential atmosphere that lent mystery to The Stranger...

...Dyer appears to disdain conventions like consistency of point of view until they serve his purposes, when he reinstates them...

...Whatever a reader wishes to make of all this paraphernalia, the desire to use it is a key to the problem with Paris Trance...

...This reader, who happens to like novels—who even likes some that play fast and loose with certain givens— found it less charming than infuriating to encounter laxness and a contempt for craft tacitly erected into principle...

...I'll be serene as a windless afternoon—and I got this idea, sort of, from Lawrence...

...The opinionated first person of Rage appears here sometimes as the narrator Alex, a friend of quasi-protagonist Luke, and sometimes simply as an omniscient voice (though since Alex seems to know more than a friend actually could, it's hard to find a rationale for the switch...

...Perhaps, therefore, it isn't useful to hold a novelist's own words against him, or rather, to hold them up as his defining standard...

...Dyer is an intellectual passionately enamored of pop culture, a writer withideas in love with an ideal of drift and a resistance to high seriousness...

...the same abrupt surges and reversals of intent...