by JULIET WATERS

I was travelling alone the week I read Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It. Thus I found myself sitting in a hotel restaurant laughing out loud again and again and again, while my fellow diners assumed I was on drugs. They weren't that far from the truth. I was reading "Hotel Oblivion," Geoff Dyer's essay about being kicked out of a café in Amsterdam just after eating mushrooms with his girlfriend, Dazed, and their friend, Amsterdam Dave.

Eventually they find another café, but only after getting stuck in the rain long enough to become entirely wasted. Dyer spends the next eternity in a tiny bathroom trying to change from a pair of wet jeans into a pair of dry jeans, only to discover that he has actually changed back into wet jeans again. Finally, he emerges in his dry jeans, inside out.

I laughed because it reminded me of a similar experience I'd once had stuck in the rain on mushrooms with nowhere to go. I could practically taste the terror and delusion that Dyer, Dazed and Dave feel as they discover they can't find their hotel. My experience, however, was part of my drug-drizzled youth. Dyer is 40-something when this happens, and has eight critically successful books under his belt. That this belt is on a pair of inside-out jeans makes him especially pathetic, but somehow it doesn't diminish one's respect for his intelligence. It's a rare intellect that recognizes the necessity, from time to time, of oblivion.

Dyer is not living an extended youth. Nor is he a relic gonzo journalist, a Timothy Leary type flake, or a Ram Dass type spiritual traveller. Dyer is your run-of-the-mill, middle-age skeptic. He is also a provocative, entertaining intellectual who is finding it increasingly impossible to write the kind of books he "should" be writing. He's tried his hand at academic writing in Ways of Telling and at fiction in Paris Trance. A few books ago, with Out of Sheer Rage, he created his own unique brand of nonfiction about his failure to write nonfiction.

That was about his failure to write a book about D.H. Lawrence; this book is about his failure to write a book about ruins. These essays taken from his travels through South-East Asia, Europe, the Middle East and the U.S., are about ageing in the age of agelessness. They are so readable that I held nothing against Dyer when later I read an interview in which he confessed to having stolen the Amsterdam bathroom experience from a friend. To be fair he does include a sort of disclaimer: "Everything in this book really happened, but some of the things that happened only happened in my head: by the same token, all the things that didn't happen didn't happen there too." I expect any minute to hear that one of his books is being adapted to film by Spike Jonze.

Another good title for this book might have been Drugs for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do Them. One suspects that the idea of altering consciousness may actually appeal to Dyer as much as the practice. It doesn't matter. What matters are the walls he manages to demolish between old and young, past and present, east and west, philosophy and entertainment, home and elsewhere.

As for his self-help advice? It might best be summed up in this epiphany: "At some level I knew that I had been kidding myself: that all the intellectual discipline and ambition of my earlier years had been dissipated by half-hearted drug abuse, indolence, and disappointment, that I lacked purpose and direction and had even less idea of what I wanted from life now than I had when I was twenty or thirty even, that I was well on the way to becoming a ruin myself, and that that was fine by me."

Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It by Geoff Dyer, Abacus, hc, 257pp, $33