Click here to listen to an exclusive podcast interview with Geoff Dyer
Geoff Dyer's new collection of essays, Working the Room, begins with a girl and ends with a girl. The first, pictured in a photograph by Jacques Henri Lartigue, is reading a copy of Nehru's The Discovery of India. Lounging poolside, decked out in a messy hula wig (a hula skirt for the head), white sunglasses and precise red lipstick, she soon has Dyer wondering about her identity. Who is she?
“But there I go, forgetting one of my own rules about photography, namely that if you look hard enough a photo will always answer your question. Well, whoever she is, she's beautiful. Actually, I can't really tell if that's true, for the simple reason that I can't see enough of her face. But she must be beautiful, for an equally simple reason: because I'm in love with her.”
Dyer keeps up this personal, personable tone throughout the collection, with idle, imaginative musings springboarding him towards wider ideas. Yet his anti-academic approach doesn't prevent serious insights into his subjects, from Rodin (whose male figures “show the agony of coming to life”) to Denis Johnson (“A writer of distinctly American graininess: a metaphysical illiterate, a junkyard angel”).
It is this personal approach to his subjects—telling us where he first encountered this or that work of art, referring to the author of A Gate at the Stairs as “Lorrie M,” dissing Susan Sontag's storytelling skills—that makes Dyer such a good essayist. As Alain de Botton says on the back of Working the Room (Dyer's books generally come wrapped in a tissue of queasy-making praise from fellow writers), Dyer is a master of the “art of the essay, understood as a piece of discursive, personal writing, in which great, often melancholy themes are raised with lightness and very dry humour.”
ADB is spot on about essaying and Dyer's mastery of the form, but that's not to say Working the Room is perfect. I needed a certain amount of willpower to get through the essay on jazz, for instance, while some of Dyer's personal pieces like 'Sacked' and 'Something didn't happen' lack the intellectual payoff of his best work, leaning perilously towards navel-gazing. But that's part of the difficult business of essaying—trying to find the “whole stamp of the human condition” within one's own personal experience, without slipping into self-obsession. And when a writer manages this tricky negotiation, the effect is extremely powerful: as in Dyer's moving piece about growing up as an only child in Cheltenham.
The end of Working the Room sees Dyer walking into the proverbial sunset with a girl—not the Nehru-reading nymph with whom he fell in love at the start of the book, but his wife, Rebecca. Here's how Dyer describes his memory of first seeing her: “I'd completely forgotten that first glimpse of her – but I had never quite forgotten it. The memory developed as I slept, its colours becoming deeper, more distinct: the ghost of a dream, but permanent, lovely.” A nice piece of writing, and something which applies to the best of Dyer's essays—themselves absorbed into one's thought, nestled in one's mind like the words of a friend.
Click here to listen to Dyer discuss his film obsessions, his love of lowly literature, and his “instinctive loathing” for Tony Benn.
This is part of a new series from Prospect called 'In conversation with...' in which we catch up with leading writers and thinkers in order to discuss their latest work. To subscribe to this podcast in iTunes, click here.
