I WAS TRYING TO FIGURE OUT what struck me as odd, at first, about Geoff Dyer’s new memoir, Homework, when it dawned on me: it isn’t odd. The book, that is. Formally and in terms of genre, a Dyer book almost always represents a novel (so to speak) hybrid. His scholarly projects have a way of turning into memoirs and novels. Out of Sheer Rage began as an attempt to produce a study of D. H. Lawrence but became a book about his own inability to do so (even as it remained, in the words of The Guardian, a “very strange, sort-of study of D. H. Lawrence”). But Beautiful was conceived as a work of nonfiction jazz appreciation but became, in Dyer’s own description, “as much imaginative criticism as fiction.” His works of ostensibly pure fiction, meanwhile, have tended toward the auto-fictional, to such a degree that a reader could easily forget, at least for spans of pages, that they aren’t memoir. Take, for instance, the indelibly titled Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, concerning the adventures of “Junket Jeff,” a Dyer-like avatar who moves through the world of freelance-writer assignments and celebrity art profiles (the auto-fiction gets meta-meta when you encounter a distorted-mirror story involving a character named: Geoff). Dyer has written two essayistic travelogues: Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It and White Sands, each of which involves, again in his own unapologetic words, “a mixture of fiction and nonfiction.” There are also two books about movies, each having to do with an individual picture—Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room (on Tarkovsky’s metaphysical masterpiece Stalker) and Broadsword Calling Danny Boy (on the World War II action flick Where Eagles Dare)—both of which are so essayistic and at the same time hyper-focused, consisting entirely of Dyer’s digressive and ultra-personal responses to those films’ every scene, that they resemble neither “cinema studies” nor general-interest film crit. One could go on. James Wood put it well, writing about Dyer in The New Yorker, when he described the books as “so different from one another, so peculiar to their author, and so inimitable that each founded its own, immediately self-dissolving genre.”
And yet, here is Homework. It’s a memoir of Dyer’s school days in England. It’s about his family and friends and hometown and what he can reconstruct, via autobiographical reflection, of his youthful inner life. If I find out that any of it is made up, I will feel violated as a reader—it has not been written in the cheeky tone and spirit that made those genre transgressions forgivable and fun in the earlier books. It moves through time in a reassuringly linear fashion, starting with the author’s birth in 1958 and ending with a trip home that he made just a few years ago. It’s coherent, or maybe stable is a better word, free of the comical overstatement and fictional swerving that characterize Dyer’s other books. It’s formally recognizable in pretty much every way. It is also extremely good. So good, in fact, that it makes me want to quote an obscure couple of lines from Paul Valéry’s Monsieur Teste that have been stuck in my head, at times self-reprovingly, since I encountered them in college: “Au Romantiques Teste dixit: ‘Les extrêmes sont pauvres.’”
To the Romantics, Teste says: “The extremes are poor.” In more prosaic language: the experimental forms can be thin. I don’t always agree with that, of course. One would never want to side with it too completely—to the extent, for instance, of wishing that Dyer’s previous books had been different, had lacked their impudent brilliance. Here, though, is an example of what I think Valéry’s great character meant. Sometimes we fear the conventional—not in the pejorative sense of banal or bourgeois, but literally conventional, as in, the things we do by convention, including the conventional genres—precisely because the wood can be so thick there. Either drill deep or go home (or have your shallowness exposed). The other, more “extreme” modes are forever offering outs. Come up against the most painful and difficult parts, the places where you are required to reach down and really say what you mean? There is always another formal trick to pull. Hit the genre-shift button. Or break the whole thing up and call it a “lyric essay.” Pray that formal game-playing will somehow generate the meaning from which you had shied and shirked. Whereas, when you commit to the major, conventional forms, “the only way out,” as Robert Frost wrote, “is through.”
Early in the book, on a page where Dyer sets down his memories of the (overly?) familiar phenomenon of boys “playing at war,” we encounter this sentence: “We wanted to be killed, to roll over and (briefly) die, felt cheated if denied this ultimate proof of full participation in the life of combat.” And then, farther down the same page: “To be at war was to be in a state of actively maintained peace, steeped in the contentment of a shared love of all things martial.” Both sentences seem fairly effortless, yet they manage to evoke fine-grained sensations that I (as a one-time war-playing boy) would have thought almost impossible to recapture. Both achieve their effects via subtle paradox: to be at war was to feel most at peace. To be killed was to feel most alive. I can’t say exactly why I believe that neither of these sentences could have appeared in any of Dyer’s previous books, but I do believe that. Both of them have a quiet exactitude, which lends a weight. Neither is in search of a joke or about to turn into one. The latter achievement can be more fully appreciated when you remember that Dyer is one of our funniest writers, when he wants to be. “I’m never happier,” he said in an interview, “than when I see gags taking shape.”
Dyer grew up in the ’60s in a provincial English town—Cheltenham, not far west of Oxford—where, he tells us, World War II still seemed “close to home.” If you have heard of Cheltenham, that may be because it is near the place where the English do the sport (event? ritual?) that involves rolling a wheel of cheese down a steep hill and chasing it to the bottom, in the literal course of which they frequently injure themselves. Dyer, thank goodness, does not withhold from us this excellent swatch of local color:
We talked about cheese rolling, how [my uncle] Daryl had come third in 1962—almost accidentally, he said now. His main concern was not to win but to make sure he didn’t sprain an ankle. . . . If he’d won he’d have been presented with the runaway cheese everyone was chasing after, but cheese rolling is not about the cheese at all. . . . As it was he’d given me the half-crown he’d earned for coming third.
Dyer points out that, paradoxically or counterintuitively, the crude and bizarre nature of the game offers a more direct and authentic connection to the region’s particular history than more seemingly “traditional” British sports can provide. Or, as he puts it: “As is not the case with golf or cricket, it’s easy to picture the shire’s rat-arsed peasantry hurling themselves down the ankle-breaking hill in the age of Shakespeare.”
An intriguing passage comes midway through the book, one that appears deliberately cryptic on its face. “Much that is here is written round the edges of what is missing,” Dyer writes, “but everything is framed by the working title, rejected late in the day, after the manuscript was complete: A Happening.” He gives us nothing to clarify this curious remark in the main body of Homework, but in one of the book’s two after-graphs, which appear on the final page (I’m not sure what you call an epigraph when it follows the text rather than precedes it . . . literary post scriptum?), we find a strong clue, a quotation from the great left-wing historian E. P. Thompson (pioneering practitioner of “history from below”), whose 1965 essay “The Peculiarities of the English” contains this paragraph: “Class is a social and cultural formation (often finding institutional expression) which cannot be defined abstractly, or in isolation, but only in terms of relationship with other classes; and, ultimately, the definition can only be made in the medium of time. . . . But class itself is not a thing, it is a happening.”
So, the book is about class in some hidden or coded sense. And about a particular vision of class that sees it as strictly relative and relational, having purely to do with the way one group treats another, with how intra-group affiliation and exclusive social practices are used to accumulate and wield power, and what this does to an individual’s psychology or that of a family. I don’t know how else to read those two passages, Dyer’s and Thompson’s, or rather the vibration of meaning between them. But having made that connection, we are left in a position only slightly less confusing, because Dyer’s attitude toward class in this book is surprisingly blasé for an English person. I was braced for manifestations of the famous English obsession with class, the way you so often, as an American, feel that burning in them. The scrutiny, the anxiety. It can be so alienating. One often has the sense that they are driven slightly insane by it. Dyer seems downright American by comparison. He mentions class explicitly in a few places, but tends to situate himself and his family in a sort of unvexed in-between. The Dyers live in a terraced house—rows of houses connected to one another, an enduring symbol of the respectable British working class—but they lived in the last one in the row, an end-of-terrace house. Therefore, in the mind of his mother (a “dinner lady,” or what we Americans call a lunch lady), they really lived in a “semi-detached” house. Middle class. After all, one side opened onto a bit of yard. Perhaps this was weird English dreaming, on her part, but it showed an instinct and ability to adapt to a constrictive system while maintaining her own sense of inalienable self-worth, and she passed that down to her son.
Most every other time that Dyer mentions class by name, in Homework, he does so through the lens, or metaphor, of tennis (Dyer has long loved and played the game and returns to it repeatedly in his books). His father was a sheet-metal worker, a man handy with tools, who also faithfully tended a subsistence “allotment” (a small patch of rented land for growing vegetables, a sort of postindustrial survival of the old common fields). Dyer mentions the irony that his father’s allotment abutted some private grass tennis courts. In another book, this coincidence would set the stage for a scene of class trauma, some thoughtless act of scarring snobbery. Not here.
There was, to be sure, no class-based animosity, no urge among those who toiled voluntarily on their plots of earth to tear down the fence, dig up the courts and extend the allotments in the name of forced collectivisation so that more potatoes and radishes could be grown. And my dad liked tennis, had played in his youth, would take up his racquet again in a modest way when I became interested in playing in the early 1970s.
Years later, father and son play at a private club. Dyer’s father dresses in a slightly idiosyncratic way (creams as opposed to whites), but although he is approached and questioned, the staff allow them to continue playing, and the father is unruffled. On yet another occasion, years after that, Dyer brings a Black friend to the same club as his guest. They play a rough, raucous game, full of cursing, to which a member on an adjacent court, “in a remarkable display of plummy tolerance and proto-inclusiveness,” shouts: “That’s the spirit!”
What is it, then? Is social class what Homework is about, on some level, or was class just never all that big a deal for Dyer, growing up? Somewhere between the two options, or in some conceptual framework that harmonizes them, will no doubt lie a proper reading of the book. It is possible he wants us to understand that, although his personality was shaped by class, his fate has not been determined by it. Perhaps we can locate here the source of the marked insider/outsider quality that grants Dyer an unusual degree of negative capability, at least socially. He has the gift of losing himself in whatever he’s writing about while remaining an arm’s length observer, even a world-class seer (he has written extensively on photography). He is among the most un-fraught of writers, even when he’s being bratty or neurotic. This partly explains why his books, which contain some of the best English prose of the past few decades, feel so harnessed to the force of his personality.
Ordinarily, a coming-of-age narrative like Homework, in the hands of a literary artist like Dyer—one of our true stylists—would follow a narrative of how-I-became-a-writer, but if that is happening here, it is slithering beneath the surface. Apart from a few stray paragraphs in which he mentions writers who had an impact on him intellectually (Nietzsche, mainly), he steers away from the theme. It was not a bookish household. “My dad was not just uninterested in reading,” he tells us on one page, “his refusal even to consider it as something to do was so steadfast as to seem almost principled.” I was struck by the fact that Dyer makes no mention in this book of Jane Austen, struck because of what he remarked not long ago to a Guardian interviewer: “I was being changed on a weekly basis by what I was reading from O-levels onwards. I could single out Jane Austen’s Emma as the starting point, but more important than any particular book or writer was the acquired habit of reading, the solace of interiority.” No Jane, and no Emma, in Homework. One of the great English novels of provincial class anxiety (although the distinctions drawn there are mainly between high and higher). Dyer seems not to want to play that note. Too expected, it may have seemed? The business about the “solace of interiority” does appear:
For someone in troubled circumstances [reading] might have become an escape (from quarrelling parents, brothers involved in crime). For me the escape was not from poverty or circumstances and it wasn’t even an escape so much as an alternative to boredom and alone-ness. . . . The new phenomenon of reading books was, in some ways, the latest increment of the old, long-established habit of solitary collecting: cards, Airfix soldiers and so on. The irony is that books would increase my alone-ness, separate me from my parents.
Those parents, Jack and Mary, who died about fifteen years ago, the father not long after the mother—it is in Dyer’s description and evocation of them that this book finds its crescendo and triumph. I do not think that Dyer has written anything finer than the paragraphs in which their bodies and lives are closely considered. His mother, we learn, had a lot of moles and birthmarks on her body. She was deeply self-conscious about them. “Even mentioning my mother’s birthmark is a betrayal,” he tells us, and we believe that he believes this. But the pages he spends on this subject, on the birthmarks and the various ways in which they affected his mother’s life, are astonishing in their artistry and, for me, could hardly be read except through tears. One night, not long before her death, she collapses in the bathroom, and the ambulance is called. “I added a few final words to the female paramedic,” Dyer writes.
“My mum has a very large birthmark on her arm,” I said to this over-worked woman who had seen everything, who was unshockable. “It’s been the most important thing in her life.” I couldn’t go on. I was crying. I forced myself to continue. “Can you please do everything you can to make sure that she is covered up in the hospital, that no one sees it?”
“Of course we will, lovey,” she said, with her Gloucestershire accent, the accent of my uncles Eric and Daryl, that, to me, will always be the lilt and expression of kindness itself.
To write this may have felt like a betrayal, but it was a tribute.
A few years ago, the great American writer Vivian Gornick published in The Atlantic a very critical—some thought rather unfair—review of Dyer’s The Last Days of Roger Federer (a self-proclaimed “meandering milk train of a narrative” in what could be considered the classic Dyer mode). Gornick accused Dyer of “arrested development,” and argued that, although she remained a sincere admirer of his earlier stuff, his style, over many books, had ossified around its least admirable tendencies: “the desperate humor . . . distressing obsessiveness . . . anxiety [that] provides only coloration, not an organizing principle. . . . Self-conscious remarks . . . a certain defensiveness . . . a writer’s plea to be let off the hook for having stitched together rather than written the book . . . unable to do much more than flash on the experience, not really stay with it . . . insecurity and vanity.”
I was skeptical of Gornick’s review from the start, in part because of a single point: she takes Dyer to task for a passage in which he mentions the “many little things that substitute for the lack of a larger goal that continue to crop up in the course of one’s journey through life.” She writes that she’d “thought he was about to address this pithy insight, but no; immediately afterward come a few straight-faced pages on his passion for stealing tiny bottles of shampoo from hotel rooms.”
I had read the moment she had in mind, however, and knew that it goes like this in Dyer’s original:
I realise that there are so many little things that substitute for the lack of a larger goal that continue to crop up in the course of one’s journey through life. I put it ponderously like that because what I have in mind is something like the ambition, conceived as I turned sixty, of never buying shampoo again. I don’t mean giving up washing my hair; I mean not paying for shampoo.
In other words, it was funny (at least I thought so). Certainly not “straight-faced,” unless in the sense of, well, straight-faced humor. Gornick had missed it. Or the joke had been too wet and juvenile for her taste.
Now I have come to see Gornick’s “takedown” differently, and strangely, it is Dyer’s beautiful new book that has caused me to do so. I have no idea whether he cared about Gornick’s opinion, or even read it. But if he did—and if he took it as being in good faith (as in retrospect I think it was)—what an honorable and convincing response he has returned with, to the implicit challenge that she laid down. For a writer who has, in Gornick’s words, “made a professional identity out of not cohering,” he has cohered. Although there will be readers of Homework who miss his enjoyable tricks and tics, the book’s more subdued gaze turns out to provide a different kind of strangeness. We find here not the high jinks of Jeff (or even of Geoff), but the sustained introspection of a writer whose style continues to evolve.
John Jeremiah Sullivan lives in Wilmington, North Carolina, and is a contributing writer for the New York Times Magazine.