Paris Trance: A Romance

Ian Sansom

A beautiful, remarkable book about sad, unremarkable lives.
— The Guardian

Publishers Weekly - Publisher's Weekly

"Whatever makes events into a story is almost entirely missing from what follows," claims the narrator of this alluring pseudo-memoir of a blissful interlude lost and remembered. Fashionable fin-de-si cle lack of faith in the cohesion of experience or the ability of language to contain it detracts nothing from the lyrical intelligence of Dyer's (Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D.H. Lawrence) wittily British "story" of two men playing expat in Paris--one of whom, Alex, is the unstated narrator, though he refers to himself in the third person. The story is this: 27-year-old Luke Barnes has left England for Paris in order to write a novel, but life overtakes his plans. He finds a friend in Alex, who shares his fascination with film--a medium with the capacity, like music, to repeat itself endlessly. Luke meets and falls in love with Nicole, a beautiful Yugoslavian finishing her studies in Paris; Alex's partner is Sahra, an interpreter also new to the city. The two couples spend their time in search of the ultimate experience, the eternal "now." They vacation together, experiment with sex and drugs and go to dance clubs where the trance-like music prescribes "no distance or direction." Inevitably, ecstasy loses its edge, and as if compelled to enact the ending of one of his beloved films, Luke moves away. When Alex encounters him years later, Luke has embraced a lonely anonymity. The book ends not with this hopeless finality, though, but with the description of a rapturous, timeless afternoon by the sea enjoyed by the four lovers in their heyday. Thus, by writing the novel that Luke should have written, Alex succeeds, to an extent, in conquering time, in giving himself "the chance to rearrange, alter, change; to make things end differently." Hypnotic and evocative, this complicated novel is a superb re-creation of an idyllic time, the dreamy druggy Eden of golden youth. (May) FYI: Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D.H. Lawrence is an NBCC nominee in criticism.

Library Journal

At 26, Luke leaves England for Paris, hell-bent on living the life of a dissolute wannabe writer. He produces precious little writing, preferring to spend his energy on his sexually inventive affair with the lovely Nicole and his friendship with best chum Alex and his lover, Sahra. The foursome vacation together, prowl the Parisian movie houses for must-see films that trigger (for them, anyway) snappy critical analysis. Drug consumption glues the four friends together until Luke's selfishness inevitably unravels their ties. A frustrating effort by a clearly talented writer (nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award for Out of Sheer Rage: Wresling with D.H. Lawrence) whose flashes of brilliance are more tease than enticement. Attempts to be clever by shifting narrator Alex's story back and forth from first to third person fall short. Ironically, the author warns his readers on the very first page that this is going to be a slog. "The events recorded here concerned only a handful of people and, quite probably, are of interest only to those people." Exactly. Not recommended.--Beth E. Andersen, Ann Arbor Dist. Lib., MI Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

Daniel Mendelsohn

...Dyer enjoys beginning his books in a state of more or less complete panic....Appropriately enough for a book that begins in Paris in August, the month when nothing happens and nobody's home, there isn't a great deal of plot here....Dyer's own hesitations and doubts and brushes with failure have usually ended up being constructive, furnishing the raw materials for some wonderfully interesting work. If they don't do so here, it's still true -- this will come as no surprise to longtime Dyer readers -- that even this relative failure is, in its way, entrancing.
— The New York Times Book Review

Richard Eder

...[A]n up-to-date social comedy with an implicit minatory shadow. The comedy, for the most part, is brilliantly handled....[The novel comprises an] intended generational message, but intentions aren't fiction and in Paris Trance they go awkwardly with the accomplished social comedy...
— The New York Times

David Bahr

Peppered with the kind of punchy, rapid-fire dialogue that one British critic called 'Tarantino-esque,' the book is sure to confound those expecting a more traditional narrative, one driven by, say, character and plot. But then, to classify Paris Trance as a novel may be a disservice; rather, it's an impressionistic verbal inkblot menat to capture the transience of ecstatic joy and its inevitable comedown...There's no denying Dyer's trailblazing talent, or his determination to push textual boundaries beyond limits.
— Time Out NY

Kirkus Reviews

English music- and literary-critic Dyer (Out of Sheer Rage, 1998, etc.) offers his first novel—a disappointing improvisation on the Parisian themes of Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Not so many years ago, at the age of 26, Luke Barnes moved from London to Paris to write "a book based on his experiences of living." In Paris, Luke goes to a lot of movies (especially action thrillers and POW films) and eventually finds work at the Garnier Warehouse, where he meets narrator Alex (also English). Luke and Alex become great friends right away and are soon spending all their free time together. Eventually, Luke falls in love with Nicole, who's from Belgrade—they meet on the street—and the two move in together. Not long thereafter, Alex begins dating Sahra, an American interpreter of Libyan descent, and the four of them become constant companions, taking Christmas and summer vacations together and hanging out over the course of long evenings of food and conversation ("That's how it was at that time: no evening was complete unless everyone had their say about Cassavetes, his directorial style, his limitations, his influence"). But this isn't exactly Jules and Jim: Despite all his talk of art, Luke writes next to nothing and comes nowhere near completing the novel he had come to Paris to begin. After a time, he leaves Paris (and Nicole) altogether and wanders for some years in America and Mexico. Much later, Alex (by now happily married and a father) sees Luke once more in England, but it can never be the same again: "What good does it do anyone, knowing that they once sat with friends in a car and called out the names of cinemas and films, that they ate lunch in a townwhose name they have forgotten? Pointless to a fault, pock-marked with cliches about expatriates and la vie boheme: a chronicle of squandered youth that would have seemed old-hat 50 years ago.