White Sands

February 1, 2016
“What a certain place—a certain way of marking the landscape—means; what it’s trying to tell us; what we go to it for”: these are the themes that loosely connect the nine essays in Dyer’s (Another Great Day at Sea) scintillating new collection. In “Where? What? Where?,” Dyer discovers a village soccer field while retracing Gauguin’s peregrinations in Tahiti, and reflects that “much of geographical travel is actually a form of time travel.” In “Space in Time,” while visiting the lightning-rod studded landscape of Walter de Maria’s The Lightning Field in Quemado, N.Mex., he writes that massive outdoor art installations of this sort “have more in common with sacred or prehistoric sites than with the rival claims and fads of contemporary art.” Dyer’s essays are more than simple travelogues, and are about deeply personal experiences in which he serves as both a distant observer and active participant. This dichotomy is especially evident in the title essay, which recounts his unsettling encounter with a creepy hitchhiker on the road from Almogordo, N.Mex., to El Paso, Tex. Most of these pieces are distinguished by Dyer’s humorous insights and caustic wit, but the book’s concluding essay, “Stroke of Luck” (which recounts his temporary loss of vision after he suffers a slight stroke), is more evocative than the others, leaving the reader to appreciate the author’s trained eye for details of the world’s more far-flung locales. Color illus.

Starred review from March 1, 2016
In a slender volume that contains multitudes, the award-winning critic and novelist details his travels in such far-flung places as Tahiti and the Arctic Circle. In the author's note, Dyer (Writer-in-Residence/Univ. of Southern California; Another Great Day at Sea: Life Aboard the USS George H.W. Bush, 2014) proclaims the subsequent "chapters," for lack of a better word, are "a mixture of fact and fiction...the figure at the centre of the carpet and a blank space on a map." Prefacing each chapter with a brief anecdote relating to a physical landscape of memory--e.g., a rock formation called Devil's Chimney at Leckhampton Hill that his uncle climbed--Dyer creates a pictorial framework for his digressions on place and culture. (There are also photographs throughout.) Referencing D.H. Lawrence's use of the term "nodality" and how certain places feel "temporary" and others "final," the author inflects his musings on place with a mystical quality as he recounts experiences tracking Paul Gauguin's footsteps in Tahiti, a trip to upper Norway to see the northern lights, and a pilgrimage to Theodor Adorno's Brentwood, California, house, among others. The two standout chapters focus on Dyer's adventures experiencing Walter de Maria's The Lightning Field and Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty, both landmarks of the land art movement. Though the author's travels are diverse, he has an outsized fascination with the vastness of the American West. However, his interest in landscape goes beyond a sacrosanct connection to the Earth. With philosophical incisiveness, Dyer extols the virtue of landscape to conjure in himself the tangible and the mirage, the real and the illusion, the possessed object and the desired object. There is an undeniable joy throughout Dyer's writing, an affirmation that travel and the experience of place--not merely being someplace, but being present in it--is a gateway to the humanity of past, present, and future. A mesmerizing compendium that reflects on time, place, and just what, exactly, we are doing here.

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May 15, 2016
Reasons to read Dyer, a critic, novelist, and creative nonfiction writer with a clutch of prestigious awards: he is an exhilaratingly superb stylist who uses his literary might and artistic and cultural erudition to express irreverent and irascible opinions and philosophical musings. And when he is in travelogue mode, as he is here, his observations are stunning in their candor about disappointment (his heart, he tells us, is prone to sinking ) and acidly hilarious. Dyer interleaves brief tributes to natural places that shaped his young British self with accounts of far-flung pilgrimages in which he brazenly mixes fact and fiction. His journey to Tahiti on the centenary of painter Gauguin's death engenders a ruefully funny dismantling of the myth of paradise. A quest to see the northern lights is another extravagant exercise in smashed expectations. A retina-scorching trip to White Sands, New Mexico, turns into a tense tale about a hitchhiker. Wherever he goes (Watts Towers, the Forbidden City), Dyer reports on the glorious complexities of both outer and inner worlds with acerbity, delving intelligence, and disarming and profound wit.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2016, American Library Association.)

December 1, 2015

Where do we come from, where are we going, and when we get there, what, specifically, defines a particular place? These are the questions Dyer asks in what are ostensibly travel essays but go much deeper--not surprisingly, since he's a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature who's won an E.M. Forster Award, National Book Critics Circle Award, and 2015 Windham-Campbell Prize.

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