Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D.H. Lawrence was published by Little, Brown in 1997 and is Dyer’s most celebrated book — a work of genius-level procrastination that turns the failure to write a study of D.H. Lawrence into something more interesting than any study of Lawrence could have been. The book’s subject is not Lawrence, exactly, but what it feels like to be obsessed with Lawrence: to travel to the places where he lived, to read and reread his work, to plan a definitive book about him, and to find oneself constitutionally incapable of actually writing it.
Dyer’s method is to follow his own attention wherever it leads — from Lawrence’s writing to his own inability to write, from Taos to Oaxaca to Sicily to Eastwood, from literary criticism to domestic comedy to existential despair — creating a work that is simultaneously hilarious and intellectually serious. The comedy derives from Dyer’s absolute honesty about his own laziness, irritability, and self-sabotage; the intellectual substance comes from the fact that his scattered observations about Lawrence are actually brilliant, more alive and perceptive than anything in conventional Lawrence criticism.
The book established the template for Dyer’s subsequent career: the book that is “about” one thing but is really about everything else, the book that celebrates distraction as a method of understanding, the book that dissolves the boundary between criticism and autobiography. It is one of the key texts of the 1990s literary essay and has influenced countless subsequent writers attempting to write personally about art.
Collecting Out of Sheer Rage
First edition (Little, Brown, London, 1997): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First UK edition in dust jacket: $30–$75
- First US edition (North Point Press, 1997): $15–$40