Paris Trance

Have been reading Geoff Dyer. He was on the panel for Adelaide Writers Week a few years back.  I read “Paris Trance”, which recalled the 90s to me. Lack of mobile phones and internet,  absence of 80s era greed. He writes of that time when you have shallow roots in new city, young and poor and a dead end job, friends to go out with but it’s only a passing phase. You don’t save anything, you go on road trips with friends and stay together in odd holiday digs where you invent odd ways to pass the time. Like Canberra at Jules Dad’s vineyard, the games of celebrity head, intense cooking sessions, walks on surveyor's hill, enthusing with Kinloch the hippie teen neighbour, reading Canberra Times cover to cover. The characters in Paris Trance talk a lot of tropes, such as man moves to small town where he knows no-one and starts dating a waitress in a diner (or single mum moves to small town where she knows no-one and meets a handsome local). The story where man moves to small town and no-one ever talks to him and he lives on the internet, is too dull.