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Boston Globe
17-03-2025
- Entertainment
- Boston Globe
Geoff Nicholson, author of darkly comic novels, dies at 71
His Facebook profile once had a list of "liked" books whose first two titles were "Gravity's Rainbow" and "The Big Sleep," a thumbnail distillation of his own oeuvre of highbrow plundering of lowbrow culture. Get Starting Point A guide through the most important stories of the morning, delivered Monday through Friday. Enter Email Sign Up Mr. Nicholson was a verbal jokester, whether in ambitious fiction or in more prosaic writing. For the 'About' page of his website, he annotated his own Wikipedia entry. In response to Wikipedia's assertion that his work was 'compared favorably' to that of Kingsley and Martin Amis, Will Self and Zadie Smith, Mr. Nicholson wrote, 'I don't recall anybody ever comparing me to Kingsley Amis, but I suppose they might have.' Advertisement One person who did compare him to Kingsley Amis, the midcentury British satirist, was The New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani, writing a 1997 review of Mr. Nicholson's best-known novel, 'Bleeding London.' "As he has done in the past," Kakutani wrote, "Mr. Nicholson nimbly weaves his eccentric characters' overlapping lives into a wacky, black-humored farce, a farce that combines the clever high jinks of an Alec Guinness Ealing comedy with the satirical wit of Kingsley Amis." In "Bleeding London," which was on the shortlist for the Whitbread Award, three protagonists are variously obsessed with mapping the city. (The novel inspired hundreds of photographers in 2014 to snap 58,000 pictures of London streets for an exhibition at City Hall.) Maps were a recurring theme of Mr. Nicholson's. In his novel 'The City Under the Skin' (2014), a kind of cartographic thriller, women are abducted and their backs tattooed with crude maps, before being freed into an unnamed dystopian city. One character is a clerk in a map store. Advertisement Mr. Nicholson accumulated maps for much of his life. He told The Los Angeles Times: 'I'm a bit of a serial obsessive in that I get deeply interested in things for a short time. And as a novelist, I'm always thinking, 'Is there a book in this?' " The protagonist of his novel "Hunters and Gatherers" (1994) is a bartender who is working on a book about oddball collectors and their heaps of stuff. 'Collecting is an act of appropriation,' the character observes, in what could be a vision statement for Mr. Nicholson. 'The world is arbitrary and disconnected. By starting a collection you start to make connections. You decide what matters and what's valuable. You make a neat world.' In the Times, Kakutani wrote, "Indeed, his own novel stands as a charming little testament to the ordering impulses of art." Other obsessions of Mr. Nicholson included VW bugs, which featured prominently in two novels, 'Still Life With Volkswagens' (1996) and 'Gravity's Volkswagen' (2009), and sexual fetishes. He was the author of 'Footsucker' (1995), a murder mystery starring an unapologetic foot fetishist, and 'Sex Collectors' (2006), a nonfiction work about connoisseurs and accumulators of pornography. Emily Nussbaum wrote in a Times review: "He's such an appealing writer that you want him to succeed. Sadly, Nicholson's chosen territory turns out to be surprisingly unsexy." Mr. Nicholson was married for a time to Dian Hanson, a former model who edited a fetishist magazine, Leg Show. After living together in New York, the couple moved to Los Angeles when Hanson became the editor of sex-themed books for the luxury art publisher Taschen. Mr. Nicholson reveled in the 1960s kitsch of his home in a geodesic dome in the Hollywood Hills. Advertisement Geoffrey Joseph Nicholson was born March 4, 1953, in Sheffield, England, in the industrial Midlands east of Manchester. He was the only child of Geoffrey and Violet Nicholson. His father was a carpenter. He studied English at Gonville & Caius College at the University of Cambridge and drama at Essex University. He published early stories in a literary magazine, Ambit, whose prose editor was J.G. Ballard, the author of dystopian science fiction novels. Mr. Nicholson succeeded Ballard in the role. In all, from 1987 to 2023, Mr. Nicholson published 17 novels and 10 works of nonfiction. He could be touchy about his prolificacy, which was sometimes mentioned by reviewers. "I've published 20 books in 22 years (some quite short), and I'd say that's not excessive, given that I don't have a day job," he wrote in an essay in the Times in 2009 about the fact that reviewers frequently mentioned his output. "But accurate or not, 'prolific' definitely didn't feel like an unalloyed compliment." An early marriage, to Tessa Robinson, ended in divorce, as did his marriage to Hanson. Gannon is his only survivor. She was one of the photographers on the 'Bleeding London' project, and Mr. Nicholson and she became a couple in 2018 when he moved back to England after his second divorce, to the village of Manningtree in Essex. In his later years, Mr. Nicholson's obsessions simmered down, from fetishism to strolling. He wrote memoir travelogues, for which he preferred ambulating locally to wilderness trekking. 'The Lost Art of Walking' (2008) was inspired by his habit of solving plot twists in his novels on long walks. In 'Walking in Ruins' (2013), the abandoned sites he explores include the faded environs of his youth in Sheffield. Advertisement In his final book, 'Walking on Thin Air: A Life's Journey in 99 Steps' (2023), Mr. Nicholson wrote: 'I go to places. I walk when I'm there, I look around, I write about what I see and feel. It's not the only thing I do with my life, but it's probably the best part.' The book was steeped in the knowledge that his life was likely to be shortened by cancer, though naturally he treated his circumstances more with gallows humor than with spiritual introspection. "Nicholson's writing career has been varied, admirable and courageous," Tom Zoellner wrote reviewing the memoir for The Los Angeles Review of Books. "He stops to notice uncommercial and even bizarre subjects, shunning well-traveled roads. He goes where he likes. He gets out often. Nobody can imitate him." This article originally appeared in
The Guardian
17-02-2025
- Entertainment
- The Guardian
Geoff Nicholson obituary
During 2014, hundreds of photographers, amateurs and professionals, Londoners and tourists, snapped images of 58,000 London streets. The vast project – inspired by the novel Bleeding London – culminated in an exhibition at City Hall and prompted imitation by camera enthusiasts elsewhere in Europe. It was one of the high points of the 50-year career of the author Geoff Nicholson, who has died aged 71. Bleeding London was the 10th of 17 novels that Nicholson wrote between 1987 and 2024, alongside 10 works of nonfiction, a plethora of short stories and anthology contributions, and several popular blogs. His surreal, complex and sometimes transgressive comedies were only erratically successful from a commercial point of view, although his third novel, What We Did on Our Holidays (1990) was turned into a 2007 film, Permanent Vacation, starring David Carradine. But several of his works won critical acclaim. Bleeding London (1997) itself and his debut novel, Street Sleeper, were shortlisted for literary prizes. Bedlam Burning (2002) was a New York Times notable book of the year and Day Trips to the Desert (1993) was a Radio 4 Book at Bedtime. Nicholson did not capitalise on these early successes and remained – unlike the more celebrated figures to whom he was sometimes compared, such as Jonathan Coe or Will Self – something of an outsider, at least in the UK. But his work attracted a cult following, nowhere more so than in Los Angeles, where he lived and worked between 2006 and 2018. Living near Hollywood with Dian Hanson, his second wife, whom he married in 2006, Nicholson was a contributing editor for the Los Angeles Review of Books and an established presence on the local literary scene. It was there that he began to write more insistently about maps and walking – exploring the relationship between emotions, behaviour and geographic location – a focus which has chimed with growing interest in psychogeography. Nicholson was born in Hillsborough, a working-class suburb of Sheffield, the only son of Geoffrey, a carpenter, and his wife, Violet. After passing his 11-plus, he attended the city's King Edward VII grammar school, and then, from 1972, Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge, where he studied English. After a further degree in drama at Essex University, he settled in and around London, working in bookshops and pursuing literary ambitions in the evenings. He scripted a play for Radio 4, wrote travel pieces, food and theatre reviews for Time Out and sundry other outlets and sold sketches for TV shows such as Not the Nine O'Clock News and Chris Tarrant's Saturday Stayback. He had stories published in Ambit, the quarterly counterculture literary magazine. In 1987 JG Ballard, the science fiction writer whom Nicholson succeeded as Ambit's fiction editor, described Street Sleeper as 'witty, zany and brilliantly comic'. The lead characters in Nicholson's novels are often slightly lost, unsure what to make of what is happening to them. Not infrequently their dilemmas lead to violence. Usually, the denouement is humorous, with multilayered plots resolved in elaborate, improbable, even apocalyptic farces. Having little control over their lives, his characters seek comfort in an intense attachment to things. Nicholson writes a lot about – variously – the electric guitar, deserts and cocktails. He had a lifelong love of the Volkswagen Beetle, and collected hundreds of toy models of the car. The motor features prominently in two of his novels. Sexual fetishism crops up a lot too, most notably in Footsucker (1995), whose hero is aroused by women's feet, and Sex Collectors, a work of nonfiction published in 2006 that is based on interviews with collectors of pornography. But as Nicholson got older, his engagements with the world became simpler. Walking is the theme of five of his last eight published works, albeit that in The Miranda (2017), the perambulation comes only after an episode of ultra-violence. The note, though, in this later writing is gentler and the prose ever more crystalline. Nicholson could dissect and explain the most abstract ideas. As one New York Times reviewer put it, he was 'the rare writer capable of making reference to Jacques Lacan [the French psychoanalyst] without inspiring the reader to toss his book out the window'. It was a time that coincided with a calmer period in his life. After Dian and he divorced, Nicholson returned to Britain in 2018 and settled in the Essex town of Manningtree. Shortly afterwards, he was diagnosed with a rare blood cancer. For the most part that was controlled and he had a new partner, Caroline Gannon, whom he had first met during the Bleeding London project. He went out walking, every day, padding streets near and far. Always armed with a camera, he did his research, took photos, picked up items of interest – an unusually coloured rock, a discarded magazine or an item in a junk shop that took his eye. Much of this discovery fed its way into The Suburbanist, published in 2021, in which Nicholson poked fun at the staid, predictable routine of lower middle-class life and the arrogance of its intellectual detractors. In his final work, the nonfiction Walking on Thin Air (2023), he wrote candidly about his illness, although it was more a celebration of life than of mortality. He did not expect this to be his swansong, but A Life's Journey in 99 Steps proved to be a prophetic subtitle. He is survived by Caroline. Geoffrey Joseph Nicholson, writer, born 4 March 1953; died 18 January 2025
