White Sands: Experiences from the Outside World was published by Pantheon in 2016 and collects essays about visiting places that should be meaningful — Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty in Utah, Gauguin’s Tahiti, the Forbidden City in Beijing, Watts Towers in Los Angeles, Walter De Maria’s Lightning Field in New Mexico, White Sands itself — and discovering that the experience of being there rarely matches the expectation.
The recurring comedy of the book is the gap between anticipation and reality: Dyer travels to see the Spiral Jetty and finds it under water; he goes to Tahiti expecting Gauguin’s paradise and finds a French department store; he visits the Lightning Field and there is no lightning. The disappointment is both genuinely felt and genuinely funny — Dyer is a connoisseur of anticlimax, and his honest reports of underwhelming experiences are more engaging than the rapturous accounts of writers who always find what they expected.
But the book is not merely a collection of comic anticlimaxes: beneath the surface comedy is a serious meditation on what it means to seek meaning in places, and on the relationship between art (which transforms places into symbols) and experience (which stubbornly refuses to cooperate). Dyer’s question — why do we travel to see things when the seeing is almost always a disappointment? — is genuinely philosophical, and his tentative answers (because the disappointment itself is interesting; because expectations are more revealing than fulfillments) are characteristically honest.
Collecting White Sands
First edition (Pantheon, New York, 2016): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First US edition in dust jacket: $10–$25
- First UK edition (Canongate, 2016): $10–$25