... vividness runs through the 'selected essays' of The Bad Side of Books,...As Geoff Dyer stresses in his penetrating introduction, Lawrence ignores genre straitjackets as he blends travel writing, memoir, philosophical musings, storytelling and a novelist’s flair for portraiture and description ... No matter what he writes about, though, Lawrence generates — in language crackling with passion and conviction — an intensely reimagined experience. Jonathan Swift, when challenged, could produce a brilliant essay about a broomstick; Lawrence outdoes him in his tour-de-force Reflections on the Death of a Porcupine.
Most of this material was new to me, and I enjoyed this book enormously ... Reading Lawrence’s writing about sex, in general, leaves you suspecting that he walked around with perpetual rugburn ... ends with Rebecca West’s remembrance of Lawrence, published shortly after his death in 1930. Lawrence would have admired her refusal to lapse into panegyric ... Lawrence’s deadline excursions nearly always hit their mark.
... the selection of essays reads like a long conversation with a mentor at the end of his career, still rabidly devoted to the acts of thinking and remembering ... the more engrossing chapters are those in which he makes urgent arguments about the craft of writing in particular, especially the writing of novels, and about art and what it should mean to be an artist, in general. These are delivered with incredible clarity, foresight, and passion.
The jacket copy makes the strange and symptomatic claim that this edition of marginal writing is a good introduction to Lawrence, but anyone making first acquaintance with the author via these writings is likely to find him something of a raving maniac—not an altogether incorrect impression, though perhaps not a full one. I would instead recommend The Bad Side of Books either for those readers who already have a context for Lawrence, be it a bad affair or something else, or who are serious students of the essay form ... Re: the essay, there is much to learn here, though nothing, I am sure, that could be imitated with any success. As an essayist, Lawrence is blazingly opinionated, confidently erudite, incapable of staying on subject, tediously philosophical and abstract, marvelously precise in his descriptions, almost disturbingly sensual in his evocation of place, and breathtakingly, thrillingly prone to sweeping generalizations. His beginnings are very strong ... We shouldn’t read Lawrence in spite of his ideas, but because they can teach us how such ideas come to be.
Editor Dyer’s selections reveal Lawrence at his most pointed and well reasoned as well as his most absurdly woolly ... if Lawrence’s ideas about fiction and gender are debatable, his writing is often pure pleasure. He writes exquisitely about the flora of Tuscany, the sunlight in New Mexico, and the resurrection of Christ ... A quirky, wide-ranging compendium, revealing Lawrence’s character and debates over life, art, and faith between the world wars.
... an uneven but fascinating array of essays ... demonstrates Lawrence’s mastery of multiple genres, from philosophical tract and book review, to memoir and nature writing. Dyer edits with a light hand, presenting the essays in strict chronological order ... Occasionally, his editorial presence proves too recessive, with minimal footnotes. The wide variety of topics—one stretch of essays considers, in turn, Cézanne, pornography, Christianity, and the mines of Lawrence’s home county of Nottingham—makes it likely that any reader can find something of interest, but unlikely that the entirety will appeal consistently to those new to Lawrence. Such neophytes will also find that some of Lawrence’s thoughts regarding race, ethnicity, and gender jar discordantly against modern norms. Nonetheless, it’s an impressive example of a curious mind grappling with big issues, and samples the work of a writer of great intelligence and wit.
