Still, the essential fact about Dyer�s nonfiction is that it works beautifully when it shouldn�t work at all. Some of that work gets done at the level of the sentence, where Dyer excels. Listen to him on a hot day in Algiers: �Even the ants out on the balcony drag a little sidecar of shadow.� On Roman ruins in Libya: �All around were the vestiges of nouns�columns, stones, trees. No verbs remained.� On a saxophone solo by John Coltrane: �It�s pretty and then dangerous as he reaches so high the sky blues into the darkness of space before reentering, everything burning up around him.�What�s going on in these sentences is the fundamental business of nonfiction: the translation, at once exact and surprising, of world to word. Writers weight that ratio of exactitude and surprise differently; you can stay close or reach further, out toward the risky and weird. Dyer reaches. You can see it in those precise but strange sidecars, in that startling grammar of ruin, and finally in the sax solo, where, like Coltrane, he pushes so hard on his medium that it threatens to break. Note the word blues, pulling three times its weight�noun, adjective, verb, so much pivoting around it that all the referents go briefly haywire and it seems like the solo is still rising and what�s falling is the sky. And note, too, how the sentence itself is pretty and then dangerous: dangerous because it starts out too pretty (�pretty� is a pretty word; �so high the sky� is Hallmark stuff); beautiful because it ends in so much danger.
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