Writing a review of Dyer’s book, Yoga For People Who Can’t Be Bothered To Do
It, has taken me several tries. I have come to the conclusion that although
I really enjoyed the book, it is difficult to come up with one genre and even
one good description of the book. But I’ll give it a try anyway.

  
This book is eleven travel essays starting in New Orleans when Dyer was in
his twenties and concluding twenty years later in the Nevada desert.
The words that would best describe his type of writing are humor, essays,
travel, and adventure.

  
One of the problems I had right away in my reading was that I wasn’t even sure
if the character was the same person in different chapters until well into the
book. Thus, transitional methods that should have made that clear are lacking,
which is immediately confusing to the reader. The reason this is the case is
because for Dyer, character and narrative are not as important as the
structure. However, the stories are not chronological and the narrative is not
straightforward.

   The tone, or voice, is the most important part of the
stories that stand out. They encompass comedy, lyricism, analysis, and
essayistic styles. Dyer conveys a sense of purposelessness in his life, which
he tries to overcome by going to different places, only to find the
purposelessness in those places. He never does what the tourists do, and seems
to feel that his destiny in life is to fail. So he writes about Detroit, and
the Roman ruins, as a way of writing about the ruination he feels within. Yet
he does this with a sense of humor that for the most part holds everything
together. He seeks peak experiences as a way to cope with his feelings of
despair. He also uses drugs to do this, and at times writes about this with a
real sense of humor. Humor as a defense mechanism is one of the best defenses
there are so this is not a bad thing; it just is the way he copes.

  
Dyer’s writing is allegedly nonfiction, but I think it is more creative
nonfiction. That is, I believe he went to all of the places he wrote about, and
had many of those experiences, but in the way of creative nonfiction, he adds
in what he feels will make a good story and leaves out much of the mundane. The
reader has a sense that much is not being said because there is so little
cohesiveness to the stories.

  
His offbeat view of the world is seen in not only what he says about places,
but the fact that he goes places and then essentially does nothing. He could
often be anywhere and be having the same experiences. The book is not an
accumulation of information, and his prose is better than his dialogue. Yet,
with everything I’ve said, I still feel the book is worth reading. I will even
be looking out for some of his other books to see if he has managed to capture
the same sense of humor in whatever way he chooses to tell his stories. 

    © 2003 Patricia Ferguson

Patricia
Ferguson is a freelance writer/editor/publisher, as well as a licensed clinical
psychologist. She is a co-founder and Editor-in-Chief of Apolloslyre, an online
magazine for and about writers of all genres. She is an editorial reviewer for
The Writer’s Room, and a book reviewer for several venues, including, among
others, Absolute Write and Metapsychology Online. Her most recent publication
was in Girl Wars: 12 Strategies That Will End Female Bullying by Cheryl Dellasega,
PhD and Charisse Nixon, PhD. She and her husband and son live in northern California.

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