Frozen in Time and Youth in City of Light

For sheer fun, few books published last year could beat the Englishman Geoff Dyer’s “Out of Sheer Rage.” The most hilarious example of indecision since “Waiting for Godot,” Dyer’s book told of a multiyear hegira while the author wandered among France, Italy, Greece and Mexico, trying to decide whether to write a novel or a big book on D.H. Lawrence, and ended up writing neither.

The novel, though, has finally seen the light of day in “Paris Trance.” And while indecision is the alternating current that drives the novel, there is a delicacy and a charm--and, of course, a humor--to Dyer’s account of the love affairs of two pairs of golden youths in contemporary Paris, that brings the ‘20s and the ‘90s together in a decisive unison.

Like many an Englishman before him, the 26-year-old Luke has arrived in Paris with the vague intention of writing a novel--a project that quickly “assumed the status of a passport or travel visa: something which, by enabling him to leave one country and pass into another, had served its purpose and could be, if not discarded, then stored away and ignored.” The country he passes into is the 11th arrondissement, that newly chic faubourg between the Bastille (once a prison, now an opera house) and Pere Lachaise (once a cemetery, now a memorial to Jim Morrison), where he finds a mindless job (in a warehouse), a best friend (another young Englishman, named Alex) and a stunning girlfriend (the Yugoslav Nicole).

Alex, as narrator, records Luke’s wanderings with the faithfulness of a Sancho Panza, while Luke and Nicole connect with an insouciant mixture of romance and realism that is nothing if not Parisian. Less adept, Alex has more trouble finding companionship. But eventually he conjures up enough drunken courage to capture the American Sahra (smart beyond Alex’s wildest dreams), by nudging colored magnetic letters on the fridge door into the scrabbled, “I WANTO GO BED WIV U.”

Parties, dinners, dancing, ecstasy (both Francophilic and pharmaceutical) follow. The couples drive into the French countryside, smoke pot, snort coke and walk out into the snow. Coming upon a deer caught in a trap, horror turns to hysterics. In response, the deer breaks free, abandoning its hoof in the trap, “leaving ghastly pink holes where it went--and that was the most terrible thing of all,” Alex contemplates, “to have it demonstrated so plainly that mutilation and pain were not the worst things that could be suffered, that it would endure these in order to evade whatever was represented by the four humans who watched it disappear.”

A year passes, then another. But time, like a steel trap, allows these two couples only a short trance of indecision between university and their 30s. And it is the impulsive Luke, as beautiful as Peter Pan, who finally hobbles away from the three other humans. “I think now that certain destinies are the opposite of manifest,” Alex muses, years later, thinking back on his lost friend, “ingrown, let’s say. Hidden, rarely revealing themselves, probably not even felt as a force, they work like the process or instinct that urges a seed in the soil in the direction of the light: as strong, silent and invisible--as imperceptible--as that. . . . As if the seed’s impulse toward the light becomes warped or damaged so that it takes itself deeper and deeper into the soil. . . . Eventually the urge toward the light withers because, as if through the workings of some last-ditch, built-in-fail-safe, only by ceasing to struggle can it hope to survive. At some very late stage it senses that it is its longings which have condemned it. And so it remains where it is, a faint pulse of life in the darkness, directionless, not moving.”

Beckett might have said it shorter, but hardly better.