No misery here — this memoir will have you giggling for pages at a time

Times

6 days ago

It's amazing that it's taken so long for Geoff Dyer to write a memoir. Most of his wide-ranging, thought-provoking and entertaining books are as much about him as what they're supposed to be about — whether he's visiting war memorials (The Missing of the Somme), watching Where Eagles Dare (' Broadsword Calling Danny Boy ') or failing to write a book about DH Lawrence (Out of Sheer Rage).
Perhaps this man with 'a willingness to share and display all the psychological nooks and naked crannies of my life' thought there was nothing more of himself to cover. But of course there is, and after a book about endings (The Last Days of Roger Federer) comes a book about beginnings: Dyer's own. Where did this smart, funny man come from? The short answer is . . . Cheltenham, and Homework covers Dyer's childhood and adolescence there. (The long answer is . . . read the book, or at least this review, and find out.)
On the face of it Dyer's upbringing was nothing special: he was born in 1958, an only child to a lower-middle-class family, and his youth was filled with 1960s and 1970s cultural touchstones, from Eagle and Beezer comics to The Generation Game and Stingray on television. But it's the way Dyer tells his story of 'England, my England' that sets it apart.
He riffs on everything he remembers, from the never-used front room of his childhood home — 'because of its unused-ness there was no point in staying in it (nothing to do there) and so its strange negative power was reinforced' — to the footbaths in swimming pools that were 'intended to prevent the spread of verrucas but it was difficult to avoid the suspicion that this was where we caught them'. The era is evoked not just by the events and objects but by the language we no longer use. 'What's a homo?' Dyer asks a knowledgeable schoolfriend. 'It's a double spastic,' comes the reply.
A good memoir needs to be both particular and universal, which Dyer achieves by applying his idiosyncratic world view to experiences many of us will recognise. This means his characteristic blend of frivolity and profundity — he is 'most at home in the idiom of the ironic switchback' — enables him to go from a funny anecdote about his inept diving skills to a reflection on how we construct our lives around things we choose not to do as much as what we do.
His ability to entertain can seem effortless. When he works up a routine about his childhood love for sugar — 'And the extraordinary thing? It did us no harm!' — and then develops it into a rant about how the 'slop' served at school dinners was even worse than the slop served at home, I was more or less constantly giggling for pages at a time. (The closest thing I've read to this is Don Paterson's equally brilliant memoir Toy Fights — which Dyer mentions in Homework. It's a weird meta moment, like seeing a character on EastEnders watching Coronation Street.)
But Dyer also makes us think about things. Looking at old family snaps, he observes that a photo doesn't spur memory — 'the photograph is memory. If I remember the weather of my childhood as perpetually sunny that is because photographs were only taken on days when the light was deemed sufficient.' The recent past always seems strange because of its proximity, and selective memory feeds unhelpful nostalgia, but it's hard not to feel something's been lost when Dyer remembers the joy of buying books from the corner shop (or Virginia Woolf novels in Woolworths!).
Homework is also about how we differ from our parents and the points at which our lives diverge. For Dyer this was passing the 11-plus — 'the most momentous event of my life . . . Everything else that has happened could not have happened were it not for that'. It took him to grammar school and then to Oxford — away from Cheltenham, away from his mum and dad. The moment when part of our life becomes 'incommunicable' to our parents is always a minor tragedy for them, always essential for us.
Dyer's father at first seems more fully explored than his mother. He's a 'passionate creosoter', a reluctant allotment tenant, a man of extreme reticence (not a quality passed on to his son) and miserliness for whom 'the idea of indulgence or pleasure played no part in his make-up . . . He never invested himself wholeheartedly in anything except saving money.' But then Dyer's mother comes to the fore late in the book, with an extraordinarily moving account of an aspect of her life that 'even mentioning is a betrayal'; it curtailed her ambitions and showed how the strangest, most innocent things can become destructive obsessions.
If you've read Dyer before then you'll need no persuasion to read this book. If you haven't, it's the perfect place to start, because you don't need to be interested in any of Dyer's obsessions (tennis, jazz, Russian cinema) to enjoy it. You just need to be interested in great writing, in the eccentricities of people, or in life. That should cover pretty much everyone.