SOURCE: “The Perils of Irreverence,” in New Leader, June 14–28, 1999, pp. 28–30.

In the following review, Brown offers an unfavorable assessment of Paris Trance.

It was D. H. Lawrence who cautioned readers not to trust the teller but to trust the tale. Perhaps, therefore, it isn't useful to hold a novelist's own words against him, or rather, to hold them up as his defining standard. Yet if they are in print, why not assume they were meant to be taken seriously?

A few years ago, British writer Geoff Dyer published a hybrid work that was neither biography nor criticism, and not quite a memoir, called Out of Sheer Rage. It chronicled his endlessly unsuccessful attempt to write a book about Lawrence, with whom he was nothing less than obsessed, and in the Lawrentian spirit he made some nervy assertions about a great many things, including the tediousness of the modern...