Dyer will 'rage' into Shaman

All of this, bound together by the author's constant, acute, self-reflexive fretting.

In the beginning, Dyer set out to write an academic exploration of the life and works of his literary idol David Herbert Lawrence, who is most famous for his novel "Lady Chatterley's Lover."

Awed by Lawrence and his work since adolescence, Dyer thought such a study would be a pleasant labor of love. Although "conceived as a distraction, it ["Out of Sheer Rage"] immediately took in the distracted character of that from which it was intended to be a distraction, namely myself."

Geoff Dyer records, in compulsive detail, the rambling thoughts and actions of a man whose compulsiveness turns inward and thus comes apart like a laundry folding machine trying to fold itself, gears squealing, throwing out bolts and cogs with every wrenching fold and tuck.

"The more I ponder these questions the more I am persuaded that the real subject of this book, the one that writing it was an attempt to evade, is despair."

In the midst of Dyer's autobiographical obsessing and compulsing, one finds his semi-aborted study of D.H. Lawrence, somehow more accurate to Lawrence and his life for its lack of sobriety.

One might not be naturally inclined to read a book about D.H. Lawrence, but Geoff Dyer is like the syringe-wielding doctor who says "let's count to three" and then plunges the needle in at "two." He is always a step ahead and to the side, leading his readers by almost ditching them at every turn.

Dyer has a great talent for effectively playing across two or more situations, effortlessly meshing unlike times, places and lives by the similarity of their thoughts and feelings. A commute on British Rail intertwines with Dyer's lost wanderings in Taormina, Italy; Lawrence's poor health with Dyer's hyper-self-consciousness.

The book is all tangents and tangents from tangents - an odyssey because where Dyer ends up isn't nearly as important as the path he took to get there.

"I'll be glad that this little book turned out how it did because I will see that what was intended to be a sober, academic study of D.H. Lawrence had to become a case history. Not a history of how I recovered from a breakdown but of how breaking down became a means of continuing."

Dyer's fast and loose writing style complements his bizarrely compelling topic. He is earnest, but by no means dry. Dyer depicts events and persons honestly, allowing the ample situational absurdity to display itself.

The book's conclusion is a little weak, but that is the risk one takes with nonfiction. Life rarely gathers itself into the clean denouements of fiction, especially when the central, depicted person survives the events being related.

"Out of Sheer Rage" is writing in the tradition of David Foster Wallace's travel essays and Hunter S. Thompson's semi- and fully autobiographical narratives. Dyer evenly matches observation with insight, tying it all together with a manic wit. He'll be reading at Shaman Drum on Thursday night and is definitely worth checking out.

-David Erik Nelson

05-05-98