John Jeremiah Sullivan at Bookforum:
I WAS TRYING TO FIGURE OUT what struck me as odd, at first, about Geoff Dyer’s new memoir, Homework, when it dawned on me: it isn’t odd. The book, that is. Formally and in terms of genre, a Dyer book almost always represents a novel (so to speak) hybrid. His scholarly projects have a way of turning into memoirs and novels. Out of Sheer Rage began as an attempt to produce a study of D. H. Lawrence but became a book about his own inability to do so (even as it remained, in the words of The Guardian, a “very strange, sort-of study of D. H. Lawrence”). But Beautiful was conceived as a work of nonfiction jazz appreciation but became, in Dyer’s own description, “as much imaginative criticism as fiction.” His works of ostensibly pure fiction, meanwhile, have tended toward the auto-fictional, to such a degree that a reader could easily forget, at least for spans of pages, that they aren’t memoir. Take, for instance, the indelibly titled Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, concerning the adventures of “Junket Jeff,” a Dyer-like avatar who moves through the world of freelance-writer assignments and celebrity art profiles (the auto-fiction gets meta-meta when you encounter a distorted-mirror story involving a character named: Geoff). Dyer has written two essayistic travelogues: Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It and White Sands, each of which involves, again in his own unapologetic words, “a mixture of fiction and nonfiction.” There are also two books about movies, each having to do with an individual picture—Zona: A Book About a Film About a Journey to a Room (on Tarkovsky’s metaphysical masterpiece Stalker) and Broadsword Calling Danny Boy (on the World War II action flick Where Eagles Dare)—both of which are so essayistic and at the same time hyper-focused, consisting entirely of Dyer’s digressive and ultra-personal responses to those films’ every scene, that they resemble neither “cinema studies” nor general-interest film crit. One could go on. James Wood put it well, writing about Dyer in The New Yorker, when he described the books as “so different from one another, so peculiar to their author, and so inimitable that each founded its own, immediately self-dissolving genre.”
more here.
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