Most book writers only have one story to tell; it is the one that wraps a piece of emotional wisdom that the author has made his own. If the writers are good at what they do, the story deepens with each book that is written. If they are less than good, history will simply repeat itself on the same level it originally took shape. In time, the work of the better writer will come to feel enriched by the distinct renewal of lived experience, while the work of the lesser will come to seem increasingly reduced. I take this truth to be self-evident to fiction and non-fiction writers alike.
For more than 30 years, Geoff Dyer has given us book after book dominated by the sound of a conversational voice wildly stimulated by his own neurotic moodiness: depressed one minute, galvanized the next; on the one hand, in love with pathological inertia, on the other, crazy about pursuing sensory satisfaction. Whatever the putative subject of these books, it is this voice, or rather this person, that produces the joy of reading that has kept thousands of readers around the world coming back for more. To a very considerable degree, this person it is the subject of Geoff Dyer’s books.
I can still remember the time I picked up a copy of out of sheer rage in a bookstore a few years after it was first published and stayed there reading until the store closed, so amazed was I by the brilliance of the writing, by which I don’t mean just the sentences. I mean the strong literary quality that seemed to bind the person and the material together. Dyer had put on the page humanity’s deepest dilemma, its own self-dilemma, and he had done so through the classic misery of the author who dares not write the scholarly work he intended, in this case on DH Lawrence, when all while he can’t get away from it.
The intelligence, the pathos, the desperate humor inherent in the condition: Dyer had captured all of this; he had squeezed it to such an extent that his achievement seemed not only original but almost unique. At the time, perhaps like most of his American readers, I assumed out of sheer rage it was Dyer’s first book, and he received it as a magnificent introduction to a writer who was clearly going far. I didn’t realize that it was the sixth of hers and that it represented an already developed modus operandi, one that was destined to animate the countless books that followed. out of sheer rage.
The most recent entry in this amazingly productive company is the book in hand, The last days of Roger Federer. It had been years since he had spent time with Dyer’s work, and he was eager to see how this delightfully remembered person had progressed. To my great surprise, I have left more puzzled than pleased. There’s plenty here to enjoy: the familiar spirit of digression, the sharp wit, the angsty obsession, coupled with those dictionary-sized amounts of information about it—you name it, Dyer has something to say about it. Yet somehow the pages fail to accumulate into something greater than the sum of its discrete beings. The book is advertised as being about the lives of creative people nearing their end, and to the extent that aging anxiety runs like a thread through the prose, it is, but that anxiety provides only coloration, not an organizing principle. Over time, the reader realizes that there is no organizing principle.
The last days of Roger Federer it is not made up of traditional chapters, but numbered segments that, quite purely, accommodate Dyer’s characteristic predilection for associative thinking, and do so by way of goodbye. Dyer rambles as superbly as ever on whatever comes to mind after he’s written the topic sentence, but like a Möbius strip, the segments loop over and over, making room again and again for one of those all-too-familiar obsessions of his. (sex, drink, music, tennis) or by one of the many figures he writes about with the awe reserved for heroes (is it usual for a man over 60 to have heroes?), among the that are Bob Dylan, Friedrich Nietzsche or Roger Federer. . Especially Nietzsche. He finds his way into almost everything..
There’s a long piece of nostalgia based on trains and the nasty world we live in now that their use has declined (it takes up four numbered sections). Here Dyer invokes the work of many poets: Philip Larkin, Thomas Gray, Oliver Goldsmith, Wordsworth. There’s a bit about the time he, Dyer, missed the last train to Oxford when he was a student; we also have a reference in “this meandering milk train of a narrative” to Nietzsche, who, on a train journey, as the Romanian philosopher EM Cioran described it, “always asked for a mirror” because he no longer knew who he was. he kept looking for himself… he had no instrument at hand but the most clumsy, the most pitiful… ”; we also have two and a half pages on the use of the train in the 1945 film Card meeting.
I couldn’t help but remember how, in out of sheer rage, whenever Lawrence, the hero of the moment, was mentioned, however casually he slipped into the prose, his presence enriched the book. Here, Nietzsche seemed to appear automatically, somewhat like Zelig, simply to demand attention to his presence. Instead of being gratified by the appearances of the great philosopher, I felt, Than?
Shy comments scattered about The last days they indicate Dyer’s own discomfort with this book, while at the same time displaying a certain defensiveness. For example, halfway through she observes, somewhat dryly, “so many little things that make up for the lack of a larger goal that keeps coming up in the course of one’s journey through life.” I thought she was about to address this terse idea, but no; right after that comes a few serious pages about her passion for stealing little bottles of shampoo from hotel rooms. Elsewhere he actually writes: “Is it useless to add that this book is a diary of what the writer was doing during the period of its composition?” Daily, indeed. If ever there was a plea from a writer to be let go for assembling the book you’re reading instead of writing it, I think this is it.
There is a significant distinction to be made between writers who have been forced to build a working life around a single lived experience—the one that gives them their story—and those who have been unable to do much more than flash. the experience, not really stay with it. Dyer, I believe, is one of the latter. To have seen so early in his career the anomie at the heart of the boredom, the stasis, the inertia, was a great gift. But then came the task of disciplining himself in intuition, gathering real information around him, putting meat on the skeleton of him. Ah, that was too tiring!
But what if Dyer hadn’t created a professional identity out of the lack of cohesion? What if insecurity and vanity hadn’t stopped him in his place (“Wouldn’t it be wonderful if it were possible to be a serious writer without taking yourself seriously… I mean, while he actually does the work”)? What if what he had understood 25 years ago could it have grown and deepened to the point where today it would have something to say about aging, instead of skimming (as it does) a surface that reveals nothing more than the banality of diminishing physical powers on the pitch? tennis? That tennis court! You have a lot to answer for.
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