SOURCE: “Blocked Down Memory Lane,” in Times Literary Supplement, March 28, 1997, p. 32.

In the following review, Baker offers a positive assessment of Out of Sheer Rage.

“It will be about anything but Thomas Hardy I am afraid,” D. H. Lawrence wrote of his book on Hardy: “queer stuff—but not bad.” Geoff Dyer takes this as his epigraph for Out of Sheer Rage, a book which often seems to be about anything but D. H. Lawrence, and begins as a confession about the painful business of not-writing.

Dyer builds up an impressive stack of notes: notes which, “it is obvious to me now, actually served not to prepare for and facilitate the writing of a book about Lawrence but to defer and postpone doing so.” The Lawrence book is itself a way of putting off another book, and Dyer's shunting between the two projects results in no work being...