Finally, with epic vacillation, needless to say, and buckets of brilliant observation, as delicious as granita, on the comedy of life in Italy, Dyer goes back to England, gets down to Lawrence, and prepares to pull the rabbit of sublimity from the top hat of the ridiculous. It’s not the older writer’s novels that he cares about, not the poems, but finally only the letters: Lawrence’s notation of the daily flux of his own pence and peeves and indecisions, the last of which included, quite conspicuously, an equally relentless temporizing about where on Earth to live. But what is the alternative, Dyer wonders as he looks around himself in England, a country where “all anyone did ... was have children.” The alternative is self-deception, self-defeat. Christmases, in-laws, obligations: “People need to feel that they have been thwarted by circumstances from pursuing the life which, had they led it, they would not have wanted; whereas the life they really want is precisely a compound of all those thwarting circumstances.”

Better, at last, to burn. Nietzsche and Rilke are also guiding spirits here. The former tells him of “the dangerous privilege of living experimentally.” The latter turns him from anticipations of contentment, the capacity for which is in any case “diminished by the flight into adventure.” Like Lawrence, Dyer decides to renounce serenity and the desire for serenity in favor of a “bottomless capacity for change.” No yoga, no meditation, no Zen, no self-help or DIY self-reconstruction: no home, no rest, and no return. Instead of surrendering, like the parents, to the impedimenta of circumstance, Dyer will achieve his destiny by embracing his capacity for “energetic self-contradiction,” however much it hurts. “Let a man go to the bottom of what he is,” he quotes from Lawrence, “and believe in that.”

THE BOOK we are reading, Dyer tells us, squaring the circle of paradox, is “not a history of how I recovered from a breakdown but of how breaking down became a means of continuing.” And not just a history, but a record. From the failure to write his study of Lawrence he produces something much more interesting, something uniquely his own. More than that, he produces himself. Out of Sheer Rage is the work in which Dyer discovered his voice and his subject. His previous nonfiction books, the ones on John Berger, jazz, and the Great War and British memory, however fine they were (and the second two, But Beautiful and The Missing of the Somme, were very fine), had been studiously earnest and sober. The last, indeed, with its patient sifting of visual and literary materials and the insistent moral pressure that pervades its prose, was particularly Bergeresque. Now, having worked his way out of his spiritual impasse—or rather, jammed himself more firmly into it—Dyer emerged with his own sound and his own ethos: an informal, improvisational style that bespoke an allegiance to the impulsive and the quotidian. Desire, will, the follies of freedom, the way that intention goes missing in everyday life—these henceforth would be among his underlying themes.

After Rage came Yoga. The book appears at first to be no more than a collection of travel pieces, dispatches from a life of indolence and pleasure. But as we watch the author bounce around the globe—having sex in New Orleans, getting stoned in Paris, playing catch on the edge of a Balinese waterfall—something larger begins to emerge. (The effect is characteristic of Dyer’s disinvoltura. As you go through Rage it looks like notes and jottings, scattered stones; when you glance back, it’s a temple.) “Chances are,” the first piece finishes, “he has blown his brains out by now.” Near the close of the second we read, “it was already too late to do anything about it even though there was still time to do so.” The third one ends on the word “forever.” On the final page of the fifth, we find the following: “Everything was a memory, and everything was still happening in some extended present, and everything was still to come.”