Ghosting the Lost Generation: Geoff Dyer's Paris Trance

In the Acknowledgements he inserts at the back of his 1998 novel Paris Trance, (1) Geoff Dyer lists ten instances in which, using an analogy from hip-hop, he says he "sampled" The Sun Also Rises. Dyer did not choose to appropriate such familiar Hemingway lines as "It is awfully easy to be hard-boiled about everything in the daytime, but at night it is another thing" and "Isn't it pretty to think so?" Instead, he borrowed such banalities as "It was amazing champagne" (PT 120), "It was raining hard outside" (PT 173), and "He took a big gulp of coffee" (PT 218). The effect is to make a mockery of literary debt, to suggest that, even in the most insipid statements, we cannot help but echo others. Dyer presents himself as a self-conscious avatar of the Lost Generation, the disenchanted exiles who had already exhausted irony by the time that Gertrude Stein bestowed on them the famous epithet. But it is hard to be more arch than the arch-champions of modern angst. Quoting F. Scott Fitzgerald in the very first sentence--merely to affirm that twenty-six, the age of the protagonist, is "a fine age for a man" (PT 1)--Paris Trance is a study in belatedness, the story of young expatriates who arrive in Paris seventy years after it has ceased to be a moveable feast. Dyer's novel recounts the Parisian experiences of an Englishman whose name, Luke Barnes, brands him as a scion of Hemingway's Jake Barnes. Early in his Paris stay, Luke orders a beer at a cafe that posts a sign that reads: "Ernest Hemingway did not drink here" (PT 17); and it only serves to underscore how very difficult it is for an expat writer at the end of the twentieth century to avoid the spirits of the Lost Generation. Luke arrives in the eleventh arrondissement with vague ambitions of creating a novel about his own experiences abroad. A consummate slacker, he never does. "Why write something if you can live it?" (PT 219), Luke, described by a friend as "a complete waster" (PT 146), asks. He earns a living lifting parcels in a book warehouse but comes to life with conversation, drugs, films, food, and sex. Luke meets fellow Briton Alex Warren while both are hauling books, and the two soon become inseparable. Each acquires a lover, and the foursome forms a small community of expatriates intent on living in the moment. Historically, the cultural moment comes seven decades too late. "The ideal," explains Alex's lover, Sahra, "is to feel at home anywhere, everywhere" (PT 95). Sahra, who has been living in Paris for the past three years, grew up in Libya, Chicago, and Singapore, and her ideal seems indistinguishable from feeling at home nowhere. Luke forms a strong sexual bond with a Serbian emigre called Nicole. Not only does her name recall the character in Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night, but it also portends a parallel to the collapse of Nicole and Dick Diver's rapturous life in France. As narrator of Paris Trance, Alex is to Luke as Fitzgerald's Nick Carraway is to Jay Gatsby. Alex idolizes Luke. "It is his life--and not mine--which is exemplary, admirable, even enviable" (PT 1), insists Alex in the first paragraph of the novel. In another of many instances of life imitating life within Dyer's art, Alex emulates his inimitable friend. "You like imagining you're him" (PT 147), notes Sahra. But Alex also witnesses Luke's self-destruction and the disintegration of the ecstatic Paris trance that Luke tries to construct for himself and the other expatriates attracted to him. Luke disappears, and eight years later, when Alex tracks him down in a shabby London flat, he finds a listless, sottish recluse, a charismatic personality blunted by TV and beer. It is Alex who ends up writing the autobiographical novel that Luke never even started, which, in fact, is Paris Trance. He also sires a son, who, in yet another act of duplication, is given the name Luke. A mirror is said "to ghost" when the reflections it offers are slightly delayed. An ancient looking glass that Nicole has brought with her from Belgrade frequently ghosts. …