SOURCE: “Look! He Has Come Through!,” in Spectator, April 19, 1997, p. 44.

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

To everyone else on the island it looked like I was in deep thought, wrestling with philosophical problems, when all I was doing was trying to bear the awful weight of my head—which, on reflection is what all philosophical thought comes down to anyway: how to bear the awful weight of your head.

What Geoff Dyer was doing on this idyllic Greek island, apart from nursing an injury and having a thoroughly bad time, was reading Lawrence, notionally in order to write the book about him that he had been planning for years, actually to put off writing it for as long as possible. He's with his girlfriend Laura, who

has a good attitude to life and that, even more than her ability...