Geoff Dyer spends a goodly part of his In Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D. H. Lawrence writing about not being able to write about his chosen subject. He does write reams about travelling in Europe and the States, but his is not a travel book: I think. How did I get to Dyer's book? Well, round about. Back in December I went to see Jonez and Kaufman's film Adaptation, and that sent me back to reread Nicholson Baker's funny U and I: A True Story. Tooling around the web revealed a review of Dyer's book. Dot dot dot. It also mentioned Adaptation and some other books, one of which, I'm currently reading.
Dyer's is an Oblomovian kind of story told near the end of the universe, the end of writing, the end. He's a misanthrope, but not quite as talented as, say, Paul Theroux. Just kind of grumpy. Where Nicholson has his skin condition, which he at least shares with the object of his narrow desire, Dyer sits on a nudist beach contemplating masturbation. Now, I've not read any Lawrence, though I was exposed to Ken Russell's Women in Love back in the late '70s. (Watching Alan Bates and Oliver Read wrestle nude was enough to scar me for weeks.) I never even got around to Lady Chatterly's Lover, and -- truth be told -- I only read Catcher in the Rye a few years back. (It was a strange read at 40, and I cannot reconstruct what it would've been at 16. Helas.) Anyway, Dyer doesn't share anything with Lawrence, except maybe meeting an old lady who as a child used to deliver Lawrence's mail in the villa he rented from her family. He doesn't say aything to her, beyond "Buon giorno," he doesn't despair, but he does write about it. Sort of.
Posted by jim at January 30, 2003 09:29 AM