Brian Dillon
The profound lightness of being: a moving, amusing first
memoir by Geoff Dyer.
Homework: A Memoir, by Geoff Dyer,
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 276 pages, $29
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“It needs to be emphasised: I did not grow up in poverty.” I recognize the need: all the while I was reading Homework—Geoff Dyer’s rich, comic, moving, but slightly reticent new memoir—I was troubled by chronology and class. Dyer, who was born in 1958 and grew up in Cheltenham, England, is eleven years my senior. Does his 1960s childhood resemble mine in the 1970s because my native Dublin lagged behind the times, trailing even a middling English town? Or is it because, for most people in these islands, once postwar austerity had passed, the still-straitened era Dyer describes actually lasted from the mid-1950s to some point in the 1980s? Dyer evokes it all beautifully: a world of basic comforts and meager ambitions, deference and gratitude for what one had, also a keen sense that luxury and liberty were elsewhere. The most plausible line of flight from this life lay in formal education.
As a first adventure in straight autobiography from a very autobiographical writer, Homework is not yet the story of how Geoff Dyer, the boy of modest means and milieu, became the curious, ironic, lavishly amusing writer of essays and fiction, smart and boisterous studies of jazz, D. H. Lawrence, photography, tennis, Andrei Tarkovsky’s Stalker, and much more. There is surely a second volume to be written about student days at Oxford, proto–literary life on the dole in 1980s London, the influence on Dyer of his friend John Berger. For now, the pre-prehistory: a book as much about the author’s class-constrained parents as about the son who would inevitably leave their timid outlook behind—thanks largely to educational opportunities provided by the postwar welfare state. Dyer’s mother, who worked in a school canteen, feared the world because of a physical fact about her that Dyer doesn’t reveal till the end. His father, a metalworker whose parsimoniousness is one of the saddest and funniest things in Homework, was chiefly concerned with not getting bilked out of his wage-packet at every turn.
When the great familial terror is overspending—for moral as well as monetary reasons—then small pleasures loom large. Homework is well stocked with the mundane, eccentric, or frankly lethal stuff of a British childhood in the mid-to-late twentieth century. Games of conkers, like a duel or gunfight, where the weapons are chestnuts on string; ten-speed racing bikes with only minimal braking power; comic books (G.I. Combat) and toys (Action Man: an anglicized G.I. Joe) that bequeathed to young boys a national obsession with the Second World War; the football—soccer, that is—at which young Dyer was somehow both skilled and useless at the same time. Schoolboy memoirs of this period are usually full, as mine would be, of physical violence from parents, teachers, classmates, and random older kids—but Dyer’s childhood was remarkably free of bruises and bloodshed. What fights and bouts of bullying did erupt seemed like proper scandals. Some cruelties, on the other hand, were ingrained and protracted; Dyer hated his boyish nickname so much that he will not reveal it even now.
In fact, there was not much psychic pain in Dyer’s youth, let alone trauma. His was, it seems, a happy childhood, occasionally troubled by embarrassment, boredom, and bad smells—things might have been worse. Embarrassment: among the most painful scenes, there is Dyer watching his father trying hard to claim an unwarranted discount on a new tennis racket—worst of all, he succeeds. Boredom: while visiting relatives and dreaming of escape, young Geoff wanders around the house, stunned by “the feeling of trapped or stale time.” Bad smells: pretty much everything in Britain in the 1960s and 1970s, including his mother’s terrible cooking. (Which was fairly palatable, one imagines, compared with school dinners and free milk that “tasted like something out of a cow.”) The “urinous” reek of school showers, changing rooms, and the class exhibitionist. Dyer’s grandmother, always with a cigarette in her mouth, “never not coughing. Coughing, in fact, was her way of breathing.”
As ever with Dyer, in Homework he shows an enviable knack for turning humdrum or low-key shameful details of his life into jokes that are metaphysical in both the philosopher’s and the poet’s senses. Abject details blossom into bold metaphors, flourishing but undercut in the same winking moment. “I am struck by how much rust there was in my childhood; was it, more generally, a rustier epoch or has it only become rustier in retrospect, part of the active corrosion of memory?” Such turns of thought belong to Dyer’s trademark light profundity, or his profound lightness: a style indebted equally to the likes of Proust, Barthes, and Berger as it is to a strain of English comic writing that runs from P. G. Wodehouse and Evelyn Waugh to the novels of Martin Amis. And stops there, with the possible exception now of Geoff Dyer.
“The personal and the generic are difficult to disentangle,” Dyer writes. One drawback to having such a ritzy facility for subliming life’s base matter into prose gold is that both pitiless introspection and larger context may suffer in comparison with the comic set piece or the small but knowing smile at one’s own expense. (Two routes out of this: turn to fiction or learn to use a historical “we,” like Annie Ernaux in The Years.) Dyer is hardly unaware of the ways his family’s comfortably frugal situation mark him off from the poorer kids around him, especially as the education system begins to stream and separate them before they’re even in their teens. He notes, too, the gleeful homophobia of his school days and the pitiful bragging of boys eager for “a bit of tit”—which swagger easily turns to contempt for any real-life sexually active girl. He is part of this world and not about to pretend otherwise.
An oddity of Homework, however: Dyer was a teenager during glam, punk, gay liberation, mainstream visibility of second-wave feminism, the rise of the National Front and racist politicians like Enoch Powell. But aside from an enthusiasm for sci-fi and prog rock, he seems blithely untouched by larger or more urgent cultural moments or movements. Could it be, with his literary awakening via Shakespeare, and his promising school grades, that the future ironist was somewhat conventional? It would be a good subject to commence any sequel to Homework.
Brian Dillon’s Affinities, Suppose a Sentence, and Essayism are published by New York Review Books. His memoir Ambivalence: An Education will be published in 2026.