'I had envied them sometimes,' Geoff Dyer writes in Out of Sheer Rage, his 1997 book about D.H. Lawrence. 'Those in work, those with jobs. Especially on a Friday night when, relieved that it was over for another week, they could down tools and look forward to two days of uninterrupted idleness.' He's sitting in hot sunshine outside a café in Taormina, supposedly researching his subject's 'savage pilgrimage' but actually getting on with what turns out to be the book's real business, which is to obsess at length about what he himself, writer, flâneur, free-floating stoner, is supposedly doing with his life. He envies them sometimes, 'those with jobs', because unlike him they have a structure to fit into, a way of staving off anxiety and depression; maybe, when the suitboys go to Taormina, they really can relax. Whereas Dyer can only sit there with his Coca-Cola, fretting about writing this 'half-arsed book'. If writers need to be 'interested in everything' - as Susan Sontag once said - when do they ever get time off?

LRB 11 June 2009 | PDF Download