Best of 2005: Lest Any More Money Be Spent On Snark

D'yer Mak'er

Geoff Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage is an odd book purported to be concerned with the life of D.H. Lawrence. The blurbs on the back cover give away the secret that the book is instead the story of Dyer's failed attempts to write a scholarly book on Lawrence, the writer that got him writing in the first place. The joke stays fresh for 50 pages (1/4 of this quick-as-eggs read) as Dyer and his girlfriend frolic and fuck their way around Europe, full of the exile dread that supposedly kept Lawrence fresh and productive. The highpoint comes when they crash their scooter on a Greek island, resulting in this passage in the words of Dyer and D.H.:

At one point Lawrence says that the 'Italians are really rather low-bred swine nowadays'. He should have gone to Greece, should have hired and crashed a moped on Alonissos before making such an insulting generalization - insulting to the Greeks, I mean, for they pride themselves on being swine.

I'm all for a non-scholarly book on D.H., but the skimpy Rage falls flat and feels cheap. The amazingly hurried, reckless, and brief life Lawrence led does not emerge as Dyer attempts to mimic his wanderlust. The author of Sons and Lovers and The Rainbow deserves better comic treatment than Dyer can muster, and it's clear after finishing this book that no one will match the matchless wit of Harold Bloom, who in his brief essay on Lawrence in his Genius tome stated the following, presumably with a straight face:

Fashions change; the current neglect of Lawrence will not prevail. We are governed, in academic and journalistic circles these days, by feminist Puritanism. Lawrence, incorrect culturally and politically, is not acceptable to these archons. He concealed his homoeroticism, deprecated the female orgasm, and favored heterosexual anal intercourse. Yes, and also he wrote...

If Bloom decides to pen a stand-alone Lawrence bio, I'll be camped out in front of Barnes and Noble for a first copy.