Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D. H. Lawrence

Christopher Lehmann-Haupt

In the spirit of Julian Barnes's Flaubert's Parrot and Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life, Mr. Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage keeps circling its subject in widening loops and then darting at it when you least expect it to . . . a wild book." -- The New York Times

San Francisco Chronicle

"Dizzying fun... Dyer is several kinds of good writer."— David Kipen, San Francisco Chronicle

Stephanie Zacharek

As most writers will tell you, writer's block isn't all that interesting when it's happening to you. Basically, it amounts to a lot of hand-wringing, feelings of worthlessness and the sensation of having a large black hole where your brain should be. So it's a supreme mystery why a writer as talented and perceptive as Geoff Dyer -- whose 1996 novel But Beautiful is one of the loveliest, most lucid books about jazz ever written -- would choose to fill up a whole book with his own tail-chasing, self-indulgent observations about what it's like to be unable to write.

Dyer's book was originally supposed to be "a sober, academic study of D.H. Lawrence," but within the first few pages he's talked himself out of actually embarking on the project. That's the big novelty of Out of Sheer Rage: Surprise! It's not about Lawrence but about Dyer's laziness and indecision, allegedly a far richer and more fascinating subject. The poor guy just can't rouse himself to write about Lawrence, and it's little wonder. For one thing, it's tough to begin such a project when one doesn't know where one wants to live (Paris? Rome? London?), and that's a huge problem when one can live anywhere, as Dyer, the devil-may-care writer without a day job, keeps reminding us he can. Then Dyer and his girlfriend, Laura, are invited to spend a holiday in Greece with some friends, and he thinks he might do some reading up on Lawrence while he's there. But he can't get any work done -- all he can do is complain about the local snakes and the jellyfish, and about how he and Laura have nothing to do but scoot around the island on a moped (which they ultimately wreck). When Dyer decides to buy a flat in Oxford, he explains, with all the precision of a village idiot, why he cannot possibly write about Lawrence in Oxford: "If there is one person you cannot write a book about here, in Oxford, it is Lawrence. So I have made doubly sure that there is no chance of my finishing my study of Lawrence: he is the one person you cannot write about here, in Oxford; and Oxford is the one place where you cannot write about Lawrence."

Out of Sheer Rage is full of prose like that: drivel that, to paraphrase Truman Capote, isn't so much writing as typing. Dyer spends the whole book -- all 230-odd interminable pages of it -- carping and complaining, basically making himself out to be nothing so much as a spoiled, unpleasant, condescending, childish individual. Once in a while he shows a flash of brilliance, as when, while spending time in Italy, he observes that "opera begins in the market where ... stall holders have to convey the colour and taste of fruit in their voices." But mostly Dyer is just a royal pain in the ass, and by the time he actually gets around to talking about Lawrence's ideas, somewhere around Page 100, it's way too little, too late. Out of Sheer Rage is about as rational as a toddler's tantrum -- and it's not even as entertaining. -- Salon

The New Yorker

A potently distilled treatise on literature.

Library Journal

There are well over 1,000 books on D.H. Lawrence, but this one has an unconventional angle. On the first page, one is disabused of the notion that this will be yet another critical analysis or biography, perhaps brilliant, perhaps jargon-ridden, but destined to join all the others. Instead of his planned academic "Lawrence Book," Dyer (But Beautiful: A Book About Jazz) gives us a splendid study on procrastination, denial, rationalization, and writer's block. As he travels around Paris, Greece, Oaxaca, and other locales, he agonizes over such things as what books to bring along and which to leave behind; either way, they become excuses for not writing. There is the irony that the self-admittedly undisciplined Dyer did indeed manage to produce this book, even if not the learned tome he had intended. It deserves to be called his "Lawrence Book," and it's probably all the better for the manner in which it was written. -- Janice E. Braun, Mills College, Oakland, California

Library Journal

David Hughes

He inhales anarchy on a nudist beach, maddens his brain with paradoxes that put Wilde into the wilderness and, hardly bothering, throws together this masterpiece. -- Mail on Sunday

David Hughes

To avoid work, [Dyer] roams the world in Lawrence's footsteps. Taos and Taormina earn his condemnation as do children, lit crit, DIY, seafood, and 'the lies people lead.' He inhales anarchy on a nudist beach, maddens his brain with paradoxes that put Wilde into the wilderness and, hardly bothering, throws together this masterpiece.
— Mail on Sunday

Ian Hamilton

I doubt this year will produce a less academic or more entertaining work of literary biography. -- The Sunday Telegaph

Patricia Duncker

I couldn't put it down and then had to ration myself to a couple of pages a day so that the pleasure would not end... This book, illuminating and compulsive, reminded me why writing matters and why I write. -- The Guardian

Richard Eder

Out of Sheer Rage is about something other than Lawrence or Not Lawrence... Its real point is Dyer's roundabout, tricky, discursive and often witty ramblings on what it means to make a work of art or even an artistic statement in a postmodern culture.— Los Angeles Times

Steven G. Kellman

"A categorical tease and a manic meditation on the nature of biography and on human nature, blithely razzing readers who seek a conventional reconstruction of the life of D.H. Lawrence."— Steven G. Kellman, The American Scholar

Tim Hulse

If there was a prize for the year's funniest book, then Geoff Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage would win it hands down. -- Independent On Sunday

Viola Von Harrach

An intriguing, magnetic, genre-rattling book. -- The Sunday Times

William Boyd

I powered through Geoff Dyer's book about his inability to write a book about D.H. Lawrence, Out of Sheer Rage. Funny and self-laceratingly candid but with a nice Nabokovian spin on the fatal and irrestible allure of procastination. -- The Spectator

William Scammell

"I enjoyed this uncategorizable minor masterpiece so much that I swallowed it in two or three hours and wanted to send the author a telegram saying Hooray! when I'd finished it."— William Scammell, The Spectator

William Scammell

I enjoyed this uncategorizable minor masterpiece so much that I swallowed it in two or three hours and wanted to send the author a telegram saying hooray! when I'd finished it. -- The Spectator

Kirkus Reviews

Dyer writes two books at once, his own life and a challenging life of D.H. Lawrence, in this unique performance. This wrestling match with Lawrence reveals the author and his subject as finely matched opponents who ultimately shake hands on the nature of life and art. Dyer's record of his time spent exhaustively studying Lawrence is both tormented and comic. He "rages" at his very goals and against the compulsion to write, while also tracing, intermittently, Lawrence's own life's itinerary. In a sense, the project is a doomed undertaking. For could there be any less auspicious literary pursuit than formalizing the process of going "from making notes on Lawrence to making notes for my novel, by which I mean not working on my book about Lawrence to not working on the novel because all of the to-ing and fro-ing and note-taking actually meant that I never did any work on either . . ."? Chagrined by his ambivalence, seduced by his indecisiveness, Dyer aspires to the "floaty indifference of contentment" and comes to prefer Lawrence's manuscripts to the final texts. He longs for freedom, yet his gateway into Lawrence comes in a moment of raging indolence. Convinced that Lawrence's "writing urges us back to the source," Dyer traces the other writer's footsteps. Taos and Oaxaca, Sardinia and Eastwood are important backdrops along the way. Such scenery lures Dyer into a dialogue with Lawrence's mentors and tormentors and into the heat and chill of the arguments they waged. Larkin, Brodsky, and Julian Barnes are poetic referees in the ring. The push-me-pull-me here of the text and the sub-text, of biography and autobiography, turns up the volume on this fascinating symbiosis, which casts a newlight on creativity and the importance of destiny.