SOURCE: “Off His Moped,” in New Statesman, June 6, 1997, pp. 47–48.

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

Readers will do well to get past [Out of Sheer Rage]'s first sentence. It is eight lines long, its wheels spin in a swamp of commas, and its gist is as follows: Geoff Dyer has attempted a biography of D. H. Lawrence to make himself feel better. Over the next 20 pages the implications of this become haltingly, horribly clear. Lawrence barely surfaces. Instead, Dyer's neuroses reveal themselves: he wants to write a novel but cannot face starting it: he has resolved to write a biography instead: but he cannot start that until he decides where to live—and he cannot decide where to live.

He considers Paris. He considers Rome. It is all too difficult, he lengthily implies, for such a sensitive and exotic...