HOMEWORK: A Memoir, by Geoff Dyer
“The single most important thing about my formation as a writer,” Geoff Dyer told The Paris Review in 2013, “is that I come from a nonreading family.” “Homework,” the latest book from the prolific and award-winning writer, tells the story of that formation in Cheltenham, England, and describes the world Dyer left behind for Oxford at the age of 19.
Or did he leave it behind? He would not be the only writer who has spent a lifetime returning to events that happened before he had words to express them, let alone write them down. What relation does the genre-disdaining, intelligently unintellectual, painfully hilarious 67-year-old writer have to the boy who once collected the promotional cards in boxes of Brooke Bond tea?
One continuity is an exquisite and exasperating intimacy with boredom. Dyer has played ennui like a piano in his previous books, turning his impatience with writing about D.H. Lawrence into the sui generis book “Out of Sheer Rage” — a display of frustration, by the way, entirely appropriate for a Lawrentian. As a child, Dyer was a collector of not only cards, but also model airplanes (built impatiently of course) and plastic soldiers, before he moved on to prog-rock vinyl and modernist books as a teenager. The young Dyer’s objects of desire feel achingly English, not just from half a century ago but from a civilization that has since vanished.
Although hearing about someone else’s personal memorabilia is as dull as it ever was — at its low points, reading this book can feel like being trapped in a conversation with an uncle who is enjoying his reminiscences rather more than you are — Dyer is wonderful on the strangeness of remembering itself. As an adult, he notices that his younger self’s attachment to a card about the Galápagos tortoise far outweighs his emotion on seeing one in real life. “Homework” records the kinds of memories we all have — first sip of beer, first fight, first sexual encounter — but also the vividly remembered oddities, like the summer afternoon when the children in Dyer’s neighborhood played on the street with a beach ball until it popped. The important fades so quickly and the trivial turns out to be unforgettable.
Dyer’s father is one of the more indelible characters in the book. The factory worker created the conditions for boredom by his reluctance to spend money. He is also, as our parents often are, his son’s principal tormentor. When Dyer becomes interested in tennis, the trip to a sports shop to buy a racket becomes a debacle. His father is about to pay when he says to the cashier that he’s heard that members of the local tennis club get a discount. The cashier asks if he is a member. To which he says: no. As the worker goes to consult his manager, the air in the shop, Dyer writes, turns entirely into embarrassment, breathed in by everyone apart from his father. They do get the discount, as a one-time courtesy, but Dyer will forever remember the price paid in humiliation. (He went on to write memorably about the sport, particularly about Roger Federer.)
Dyer’s mother shares her husband’s thrift, though hers is emotional. She worked serving lunch at a local school — she soon stopped bringing leftovers home when Dyer refused to eat them — but always talked of wanting to become a seamstress. At home, she sewed outfits for her son’s action figures, but, bafflingly to him, never allowed herself the chance to turn her hobby into her day job. She seemed to think that path wasn’t open to her, the way it appears many women of her time once thought. (Though there is a twist in store for her, and it is the occasion for some of the most beautiful writing in the book.) Perhaps it is his parents’ attitude, more than anything, that led Dyer to write. Having been “home-schooled in notions of acceptance I later found entirely unacceptable,” he decided not to stay at home itemizing his collections all his life.
The most important event of Dyer’s younger years was passing the exam that allowed him to attend a grammar school, the more rigorous institution in the two-tier system Britain had then. There, an English teacher encouraged him. Dyer, college-bound, already knew that the things that were most essential to him could not be communicated to his parents. He could not yet know that the career his education would make possible meant he would join a branch of British writers running from Thomas Hardy to Zadie Smith, a lineage of outsider autodidacts who revitalized the prim English novel. Dyer’s memoir deftly captures this transformation, one both unlikely and inevitable.
HOMEWORK: A Memoir | By Geoff Dyer | Farrar, Straus & Giroux | 276 pp. | $29
The post A Major Writer Remembers the ‘Nonreading Family’ That Shaped Him appeared first on New York Times.
