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By Greg Bottoms

July 12, 1999 | "Paris Trance," English writer Geoff Dyer's third novel (and his first to be published in the States), is nostalgia and happiness -- a simple, short season of love and friendship between two couples enjoying every idle moment as they discover the museums, cafes and movie houses of Paris' 11th arrondissement. No, there is not a missing preposition in the previous sentence. "Paris Trance" is not about nostalgia and happiness; it is an ambitious attempt to render in prose these very feelings. And much of it succeeds.

The story -- there is no plot per se, nothing even resembling dramatic complication -- begins when the English writer Luke relocates to Paris to work on a novel. He is lost and doesn't know the language. He moves into a wreck of a room in a bad part of the city. He desultorily masturbates after visiting the park and staring at women. He plays soccer with immigrants. He doesn't write a word, doesn't even think about it, and of course he gets good and depressed, as any young writer in a novel set in Paris ought to.

Soon, however, things change. He finds a better apartment. He meets Alex, the narrator and mediating consciousness of the story who, from the distance of many years, is piecing these episodes back together to figure out why this blissful time had to end. Alex introduces himself as narrator at the beginning, warning us, "What makes things into a story is entirely missing from what follows."

The action then slides seamlessly into third person and follows the largely static life of Luke, who eventually meets and falls in love with Nicole. Alex and Luke work at a dead-end job at a warehouse. Alex falls in love with Sahra. Luke and Nicole and Alex and Sahra talk, drink, ride bikes, have lots of rather kinky sex -- which includes but is not restricted to water sports and dildos (for the men) -- all of which is as convincing and as close to art as any scenes including dildos are likely to get.

If you're not dazzled by aestheticized surfaces, formal intricacy, moral complexity and depth of feeling, this isn't the novel for you. It's no page-turner. It's slacking as subject, an anti-thriller with an attitude. And of course the summary above -- expatriate bohemian young people in Paris taking drugs, talking hip, having torrid sex -- sounds a little familiar. But Dyer is a smart, accomplished stylist, and he understands this. He intentionally gives us characters and a setting that are familiar yet vibrantly alive. He sets us up. Then he gets to work rendering the microscopic details that somehow add up to a prose photograph of comfort and love among friends -- an accomplishment so original that offhand I can't think of another book that even attempts it. If Milan Kundera, whom Dyer admires and at least partially emulates, novelized a "Friends" episode, or better yet an early Richard Linklater film, the result might look something like "Paris Trance."

In his previous book, the 1998 "Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D.H. Lawrence," a hilarious exercise in self-consciousness and digression, Dyer writes, "Increasingly, the process of novelisation goes hand in hand with a strait-jacketing of the material's expressive potential ... The kind of novels I like are ones which bear no traces of being novels. Which is why the novelists I like best are, with the exception of [Kundera], not novelists at all: Nietzsche, the Goncourt brothers, Barthes, Fernando Pessoa, Ryszard Kapuscinski, Thomas Bernhard."

These sentiments pervade "Paris Trance." There is a rather rigid aesthetic philosophy at work here. Dyer, it is clear, is out to do something different, to break from strict convention and see where he can take the form, and this intention poses a few problems. For example, when Alex pokes his narrator's face back into the book toward the end, à la '70s metafiction, it's a little clumsily handled; and having Alex's son named after Luke approaches the corny. But most of the book's flaws arise from a surplus of ambition, and that's something that seems forgivable, even admirable.
salon.com | July 12, 1999

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