Geoff Dyer was born in 1958 in Cheltenham, England, to working-class parents. At the end of the 1960s he passed the eleven-plus examination, a test that, in those years, separated the few English children who would go to grammar school and (probably) university from the large majority who would go to secondary modern school and (probably) leave at sixteen. He went to Oxford to read English, graduated in 1980, and became a writer. He published his first book (Ways of Telling: The Work of John Berger) in 1986, and his most recent, the memoir under review here, this spring. In between, there’ve been twenty or so other books on photography, film, music, writing, memorialization, travel, and more, along with many essays and pieces of journalism. Dyer is now writer in residence at the University of Southern California in Los Angeles.
That’s a summary bio of the public Dyer—the butterfly pinned to the collector’s board. You can keep it in mind if you like. But it isn’t the Dyer who’s worth thinking and writing about. That one, or those (there are many), appears in the books.
Dyer has been a frequent literary companion of mine since I discovered him early in the new millennium by reading Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It (2003), which is about travel, procrastination, someone called Geoff Dyer, and, embarrassing though it is to say it, the meaning of life. Some of my other favorites are Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room (2012), on Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1979 film, Stalker; The Missing of the Somme (1994), on the memorialization of the slaughters of the Great War; Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi (2009), a novel about, well, what the title says (Thomas Mann lurks, you’ll hardly need to be told); and The Last Days of Roger Federer (2022), which is not only about endings, but endings-up, what it’s like to come to the end of something that has defined your life..
Homework is in some ways the bookend to Federer. It presents itself as a series of scenes from Dyer’s boyhood and adolescence as he remembers them half a century later. Beginnings, then: settings-out. The publisher presents the book as a memoir. Its cover is adorned with a photograph of a six-year-old Dyer with his parents and their car, and scattered throughout the book’s pages are signs of its connection to a world outside itself: several maps (town, county, and neighborhood), a photo of Dyer’s twenty-first-birthday cake, a photo of teenaged Dyer in his postered bedroom, photos of the houses he lived in, his father, his mother, a lawn roller (a character of some importance in the book), and so on.
Dyer always writes about Dyer. Not about himself exactly—that would be too simple—but about a figure sometimes called Geoff Dyer (in Jeff in Venice it’s Jeff Atman, which is not subtle) who tries to write the book he appears in, procrastinates, agonizes, travels, reads and fails to read, writes and fails to write, and throughout shows what it’s like to be engaging with this thing, this wonder of the world, which is whatever the book’s about. Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D. H. Lawrence (1997), for example, is about Dyer and Lawrence, as Zona is about Dyer and Tarkovsky, and Paris Trance (1998) is about Dyer in Paris. (There’s no character called Geoff, or Jeff, in that one, but he’s there nevertheless.) These various Geoffs and Jeffs are best taken, I think, as avatars: identities constructed out of words to make it possible for Dyer to play the writing game; or, as in the older Sanskritic sense, gods who come down (avatāra, “one who comes down”) from heaven for a while to advance the plot here below, as Krishna, an avatar of Vishnu, does in the Bhagavad Gita. The Geoffs in the book aren’t Dyer; they aren’t even his memories. They’re his employees: they work for him, and the work they do is good.
The work done in Homework is lovely, loving, and perceptive. It is, like most of Dyer’s writing, peculiarly attentive to the surface detail of things. He observes, for instance, that his fifteen-year-old avatar experienced a “shiver of silent excitement” on reading some sentences from Michael Moorcock, which it is perhaps worth quoting as Homework gives them: “Through the murky dusk a black shape moved. It was the sword, Stormbringer. Elric had called it.” This is the shiver of a new horizon opening. It opens onto literature and into beauty. Shakespeare begins to play a part. Dyer the writer, temporarily leaving behind the avatars for an editorial comment, notes that the “invectiveness and curiosity” of schoolyard insult is resonant with, and good preparation for, Shakespeare.
On the streets of London now, overhearing a gang of kids as they barge each other around the pavement, you sense that same bottled, aggressively abbreviated linguistic energy. Put the two together—Shakespearean expansiveness and London guttural—and you have a kind of yob oratory, the volatile low-soar and high street-speak that fuelled Martin Amis’s prose.… After shooting dead a wounded Taliban fighter in Helmand in 2011, a British Marine followed up the execution with a terse farewell: “Shuffle off this mortal coil, you cunt.”
Dyer approves the expression—and is careful to note that this is not the same as approving the execution itself.
There’s some of this style in Homework and in other works of Dyer’s. Demotic but exalted; precisely pointed but also pagan-sacramental; close to the quick. In The Missing of the Somme, Dyer identifies the style of the working classes who wrote out of, and about, the Great War as one of “deadpan resignation” and “the piss-take.” And in Homework, he writes that he feels most at home in “the idiom of the ironic switchback,” which belongs under the heading of banter. This is illuminating about his own style: it’s what allows him to provide the shiver he mentions to others. As the shiver gets more pronounced for his avatar, schoolwork begins to become not work but life, what he lives for. Hence Oxford. And thence Dyer the writer, who uses the avatar of Homework to explain himself to himself.
Though Homework has a good deal to say about what Dyer—the Dyer-of-the-book—read as a teen, it doesn’t have as much to say about the content and feel of that reading. The books he mentions are more often shown and treated as physical objects than as texts, and, as he puts it, “reading literature in these [Penguin] editions doubled as a training in visual art.” He rhapsodizes about the painters (Hopper, Bell, Facetti, de Chirico, among others) whose work he first saw on book covers, and about the strangeness and delight of later discovering these same works on gallery walls. But no, that’s not quite right. In characteristic Dyer mode, he writes: “Seeing the works themselves revealed exactly what had been lost [by seeing them on book covers], though I tend to see it the other way around, with the painting an expanded version of the Penguin original.”
This interest in surfaces rather than depths—the cover of the book rather than what’s in it—is evident in much of Dyer’s work. I suspect this tendency is related to his fascination with photography, about which he’s written well both early and late in his career, most recently in See/Saw: Looking at Photographs (2021). It affects the way he writes about sex, which is of course present in Homework (how could it not be when one of its avatars is an adolescent from the 1970s?) and in several of his other works—most prominently perhaps in Paris Trance, which contains some of the best writing about sex I know. This isn’t clinical writing, exactly; but it also isn’t overheated with longing. He describes the lover’s desire to caress as “a form of intensely motivated curiosity”: strongly moving, yes, but not so different in its way from interest in record-album covers or collectable football cards found in packets of Brooke Bond tea—which are, like the lawn roller, among the more important inanimate characters of the book.
That the sex in Homework isn’t so much about sehnsucht as about curiosity doesn’t mean there’s no love in the book. There’s an intense and almost overwhelming example of it, but it’s about parents rather than romances or friendships. Dyer-the-writer uses this book to work out what his passing the eleven-plus and his departure to Oxford meant for his relationship with his parents, Mary and John, both a decade dead by the time this book was being written. The book is dedicated to them.
Dyer was an only child. As he describes them here, Mary and John, born in 1925 and 1919 respectively, were of a generation and a class for whom the burgeoning abundance of the 1960s in England—the opening up of the world, the endless stimulation of appetite, the characteristic attitude of those born in the 1950s that one should go everywhere, do everything, let no book go unread, no music unheard—was both incomprehensible and dangerous. Of his father, he writes, “his interests were so tightly bound up with a kind of subsistence-level relation to the world…that there was nothing left over for the extraneous realm of culture or even leisure pursuits.” And he writes that his mother often said she’d have liked to be a seamstress without it ever having occurred to her that she might have been. Their basic attitude to life is acceptance of things as they are, with an undercurrent of fear that they might get much worse, along with a dislike of appetite. “You don’t want that,” was a refrain of theirs, and Dyer speculates that they might have meant—following the older sense of “want”—that he neither lacked nor needed whatever it was. And yet, of course, he did want it, we all did, we all still do, those of us of that generation still living.
Dyer’s cleverness, his passing of examinations, his time at Cheltenham Grammar and then at Corpus Christi, took him far away from the attitudes of his parents. They became effectively, if not affectively, irrelevant to him. He wanted to leave. He left. But here, in Homework, he shows the pain of that as it seems to Dyer-the-writer now, a pain produced by the deep love he now wants to show for his dead parents. That’s part of the work an avatar can do for you. He can help you show that the careless adolescent, the one on his way up and out, wasn’t the whole truth of it, that there was love, too. Perhaps there was; perhaps there wasn’t. Memory is the rewrite team, not the recording angel, and what we can know is only, imperfectly, what we’d like to say now. What Dyer would like to say now about his parents is that he loves them, that hurting them pains him, that they are the ones who, in the 1960s, will always have been good to him by the time the 2020s get here, and that their lives will always have been lovely and full of pathos. This reader was moved by the power of his saying it, no doubt because I’d like to say the same about my own dead parents and can muster neither the literary power nor the conviction to say it.
I borrow this application of the future-perfect tense from Dyer himself—not from Homework but from The Missing of the Somme, where he applies it memorably and perceptively to depictions of Great War soldiers made even before the great slaughters of 1915–1916. Those soldiers were, he writes there, being represented as those who will have uselessly died before they were machine-gunned and gassed into their mass graves. It’s a useful conceit, even a profound one. His parents are, in let’s say 1963, that annus mirabilis, those who will have been the ones who didn’t see the point of their son reading things that would get him to Oxford and make him a writer, and at the same time those who will always have preveniently loved him.
But noting this excellent use of the future perfect provides occasion for a critique of some things about Homework, and perhaps of the way we use memoir now as a label for a literary genre. One thing we want from memoirs, as the publisher’s presentation of this book very much suggests (the maps, the photographs), is that they have to do with something outside the text, something in the world that, had we been there, we could have seen and grasped as the writer of the memoir shows it. There was, this view of memoir suggests, a little boy called Geoff Dyer living with Mary and John in Cheltenham between 1958 and 1977 or so, and this is the story of his doings as recalled by the selfsame Geoff Dyer fifty years later. The writing may not bear quite the same relation to that little boy as the cover photograph does, but the two relations are alike. And readers, or at least publishers, want them to be: they want to be able to say, “Yes, yes, I see how it was.” That’s why memoir is marketed and sold as something other than fiction. And there are signs in the text that Dyer-the-writer also wants his memoir to be not only about his past as it seems to him now, but also about the people and places of his past as they were then.
Item: “Can one’s childhood memories, which are in some ways the most firmly embedded parts of one’s consciousness, be so wide of the mark, so wrong? Ah, easy to check.” Dyer does check a particular memory (it has to do with the name of a British actor) and finds that yes, he has it right.
Item: “I remember this—and the confusion it generated—quite clearly. I’d testify in court, stand up to a cross-examination by fact-checkers at the New Yorker—can’t memory be a species or form of fact?—but can’t prove it because the cards are long gone.” This one is trickier. Dyer is writing about a collection of bubblegum cards of stills from the 1965 James Bond film Thunderball (which I remember watching with my father in a movie theater when I was nine years old, though I am sure that this is not very likely, and that my remembering it has almost nothing to do with whether I watched it with him or not). In this case, Dyer can’t confirm the memory hors-texte because evidence is lacking. But the verb “to prove” suggests he’d like to. Then again, maybe not. The phrase “species or form of fact” can bear a lot of readings.
Item: There are three or four places where Dyer perseverates about how old he was in the book’s two photographs of him in his bedroom. He can’t quite tell. There are contradictory signs. Sixteen? Fourteen? The question isn’t a bad one. It has an answer, even if one fails to find it. But it isn’t a question whose answer is relevant to the literary work of memoir. To think that it is relevant is like thinking that, when Nabokov writes oh-so-gorgeously in Speak, Memory of the leather of Colette’s shoes and gloves, and of the pattern of her stockings, it matters whether her shoes really were leather or her stockings patterned. It doesn’t. What matters is that this is how Nabokov remembered them when he was writing Speak, Memory. This, one could say, is a phenomenological matter—a description of a memory more than a record of the thing remembered. It is not like a piece of evidence in court. But both the text and presentation of Homework sometimes suggest otherwise. It would be a still more pleasing book if they didn’t.
I hope it’s clear that, despite these misgivings, I delighted in this book. It served me as a kind of madeleine de Proust. This is a kind of work a memoir can do for readers, especially when it’s as wittily, ironically, piss-takingly, and precisely written as this one, and even more especially when a reader, like me, is close in age to the writer and comes from the same country, social class, and even university. Then the memoir can seem to conjure a whole world of taste and sight and sound and touch, the sensations of a time and place long gone: of first kisses, of smooth shiny-brown conkers, of opening the pages of a grimy Penguin edition of Camus’s The Plague, of finding two front teeth embedded in my bleeding forehead after a head-butting playground fight, of kissing and being kissed by a girl for the first time on a fairground in a small town in Bedfordshire in 1969.
Conjure, perhaps, but not recover. I read Homework at the age of sixty-nine over two late-spring days in a small town in the southeastern United States. The world of the boy I was that the reading conjured for me is long gone, as is the world of the boy Geoff Dyer was, as, indeed, are both boys—not just gone but unavailable—and the men those boys have become will die soon enough. William Faulkner’s famous obiter dictum (which Dyer quotes) that the past hasn’t died and isn’t even past can be defended only if it’s taken to mean that the only mode of life the past has now is memorial, and that what memory gives us is never exactly the past. The important work that a good memoir does is work done now, not then; here, not there.
Homework
A Memoir
Geoff Dyer
Farrar, Straus and Giroux
$29 | 288 pp.
