“You have but two subjects,” growled Samuel Johnson at James Boswell, “yourself and me. I am sick of both.” The first great modern biography, Boswell's The Life of Samuel Johnson reveals as much about its author as about its subject, and readers sick of both Johnson and Boswell are sick of life.

A human interest in the lives of other sustains the health of the publishing industry. Abraham Lincoln alone has sold enough books to put a smile on every copper penny he has fronted. Books about the lives of saints (and sinners) are endlessly fascinating, not so much because of the lives but because of the books—because, bound and stitched, experience is endowed with a shape and weight not found in life. Packaged with tidy beginnings, middles, and ends, the biographies, memoirs, and autobiographies of actors, athletes, politicians, royals, and tycoons that populate the best-seller lists are written and consumed in blithe disregard of Virginia Woolf's discovery that “in or about December, 1910, human character changed.” In fact, last year, in a biography that filled 893 pages (98 of them endnotes), Hermione Lee supplied Woolf herself with a solidity and continuity that the innovative novelist withheld from her own fictional creations. Readers of popular lives continue to turn pages with undiminished faith in the integrity of the essential self. And scholars continue to amass and arrange information undeterred by the taint of subjectivity. Most life-writing throughout the century has ignored the Gnostic revelation, from Marcel Proust and Franz Kafka, that character is fluid and elusive—that the quest to know another is always sabotaged by the slipperiness of the other and the clumsiness of the quester.

In Jean-Paul Sartre's first novel, Nausea (1938), Antoine Roquentin spends three abstemious years researching the life of the obscure nineteenth-century Marquis de Rollebon. His problem is not a dearth of data. “On the contrary,” he complains, “I almost have too much of them. What is missing in all this testimony is stability, consistency.” Abandoning his biographical project, Roquentin resolves at the end to compose a novel, probably one that, precisely because of its stability and consistency, no modernist would write.

But design is deadly in nonfiction; we murder to biographize. In Vladimir Nabokov's Pale Fire (1962), Charles Kinbote quite likely kills John Shade, the poet whose life he appropriates as subject for his prose, and Nabokov's biographical fiction The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941) concedes that no real life is ever captured—real or alive—in a book. Even after the death of Orson Welle's Charles Foster Kane, “Rosebud” frustrates Jerry Thompson, the magazine reporter, in his attempt to assemble all the pieces of the enigmatic tycoon's jigsaw puzzle. “I don't think any word can explain a man's life,” concludes Thomson.

That a person's life cannot be reduced to any word—or, rather, to any words, even several hundred thousand of them—is the burden of much recent biography. Acknowledging the impossibility of life-writing, several metabiographies have adopted the futility of the biographical project as their very theme. In 1934, frustrated in his efforts to track down the echt Frederick Rolfe—the late-Victorian eccentric known as Baron Corvo—A. J. A. Symons produced The Quest for Corvo, a book that is as much about his unsuccessful venture as it is about its subject; the subtitle, An Experiment in Biography, foregrounds the book's failure. In 1988, after a court injunction denied Ian Hamilton use of unpublished texts by the Greta Garbo of American novelists, he changed the title of his work in progress—which is largely about why the work made so little progress—from J. D. Salinger: A Writing Life to In Search of J. D. Salinger. In 1983, when Maximilian Schell attempted to make a documentary about Marlene Dietrich, the octogenarian actress refused to cooperate. “I've been photographed to death,” she tells Schell, through the door she slammed in his face. Marlene is an obstructed documentary, a film that records its director's failure to catch his subject on camera and in film. “The truth about Marlene will not be found,” Schell confesses, echoing the exasperation common to many recent metabiographers, for whom the definite article in the title of Boswell's portrait of Johnson is hopelessly naive. …

By contrast, Geoff Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage is a categorical tease and a manic meditation on the nature of biography and on human nature, blithely razzing readers who seek a conventional reconstruction of the life of D. H. Lawrence. Dyer derives his title from comments Lawrence made about a book he wrote on Thomas Hardy in 1936: “Out of sheer rage I've begun my book on Thomas Hardy I am afraid—queer stuff—but not bad.” In Thomas Hardy, Lawrence strays far from the madding crowd of sober Hardy scholars, and Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage is most Laurentian when most tendentious. Dyer's subtitle promises that he will be Wrestling with D. H. Lawrence, but neither is pinned.

Dyer explains that he intended to produce “a sober academic study of D. H. Lawrence” as homage to the writer who inspired him to write. But Out of Sheer Rage is to a sober academic study what Hunter S. Thompson's Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas is to a scholarly treatise on the tourist and convention industry in Nevada. Dyer's petulant persona expresses fear and loathing for academic writing (“it kills everything it touches”), as well as for much else, including seafood, children, and Greeks. About the illustrious university town in which he perversely chooses to reside, Dyer rants that “Oxford has the highest concentration of dull-witted, stupid, narrow-minded people anywhere in the British Isles.” Eastwood, Lawrence's birthplace, “is an ugly little town in an ugly little country,” and about his New Mexican resting place, Dyer declares, “There were more terrible artists living in Taos than anywhere else on earth.” Other locations that the author visits, sometimes in a desultory effort to retrace Lawrence's footsteps, include Paris, Rome, Greece, Taormina, and Oaxaca.

The question of where to live perplexes Dyer, but the question of how to live animates his prose, which is less about Lawrence than about Dyer, and less about either than about living life deliberately. Out of Sheer Rage bears a family resemblance to other deflected biographies, including Saul Bellow, Drumlin Woodchuck, Mark Harris's comic account of his anxious attempts to befriend and biographize Saul Bellow, and U and I: A True Story, Nicholson Baker's record of his obsession with John Updike. But in its passions and piques, Dyer's volume of impertinencies—which “aspires to the condition of notes” because, he explains, “Lawrence's prose is at its best when it comes closest to notes”—is more faithful to the Laurentian spirit than a methodical report on the novelist's life could ever have been.

In analogy with Stanislavskyan actors’ immersion in their stage roles, Dyer coins the term “method criticism” to describe his manner of conjuring up Lawrence. He admits, even boasts, that he has not read all of Lawrence's novels and has no desire to reread those he has—not merely because he much prefers the letters and the nonfictional Sea and Sardinia, Studies in Classic American Literature, and Twilight in Italy. In his passionate irascibility, the itinerant Dyer aspires not merely to study Lawrence but to stimulate him. Out of Sheer Rage is worthy of its subject precisely because it is so sassy.

Ultimately, though, the target of this bitter-sweet mock-biography that mocks both biographer and biographee is something even larger than D. H. Lawrence. In its final pages, Dyer confides that “the real subject of this book, the one that writing it was an attempt to evade, is despair.” Beneath the frantic bluster is utter despondency. Suffering from severe depression, from what he calls “this rheumatism of the will, this inability to see anything through,” Dyer sees his Lawrence project as a reason and a means to keep living. And like the Sisyphus of Albert Camus, whom Dyer seems to admire as much as he does Lawrence, each of us must push a boulder, take up cheerfully a pointless task that reconciles us to the absurd. “One way or another we all have to write our studies of D. H. Lawrence,” writes Dyer at the end of his book. “Even if they will never be published, even if we will never complete them, even if all we are left with after years and years of effort is an unfinished, unfinishable record of how we failed to live up to our own earlier ambitions, still we all have to try to make some progress with our books about D. H. Lawrence.”

“The intellect of man is forced to choose,” wrote Yeats, “Perfection of the life, or of the work.” In truth, neither is possible. The lessons of the masters, of those who write or pose for biography, is that life-writing is as flawed as life, but just as compelling.