Paris Trance

Geoff Dyer's novel achieves the improbable by enticing the reader into caring about a callow, shallow character named Luke Barnes. Could Hemingway and Fitzgerald and their ilk have been as repellent in the Paris of the 1920s as Barnes and his pleasure- and love-seeking cohort are in the Paris of the 1990s? Possibly, but the earlier group was more colorful, literate, and creative. Dyer's crew is gray. He carries off, nonetheless, several striking scenes, including the death of a deer and a gang beating. And there is the sex. In Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, Dyer achieved the near-impossible by writing sex scenes that were neither pornographic nor laughable. Here his scenes are similarly intense and graphically descriptive but in no way gratuitous or titillating -- just meaningful.