Booksology In September 2023, Geoff Dyer was interviewed about his latest book “The Last Days of Roger Federer,” which dealt with “things coming to an end, artists’ last works, time running out.” The journalist asked Dyer if, after writing a book about endings, he would consider writing one about beginnings. Dyer’s response was a categorical no. It was only a couple of weeks later that he realized the book he had just completed was precisely about beginnings — “specifically my own.”
Dyer shares this anecdote in his author’s note to that book. “Homework” is a chronicle of his early years growing up in the English town of Cheltenham in the 1960s and ’70s. It marks a departure for this richly versatile writer. Dyer’s previous nonfiction books have encompassed subjects as diverse as jazz, film, war, literature, and photography. In this, his first memoir, the subject is himself, in various incarnations. The result is both a captivating portrait of the artist as a young man and an insightful snapshot of postwar Britain.
The only child of two working-class — and indeed hard-working — parents, Dyer recounts a childhood filled with family and friends, hopes and dreams, joint activities and private pursuits. There are the usual boyish pastimes: he reads comics, plays with toy soldiers, collects and swaps bubblegum cards, and constructs models of warplanes. A fascination with parachuting and an obsession with the underwater world — helped in part by the aquatic James Bond film “Thunderball” — engender ambitions of a job either in the air or the sea.
Then at the age of 11 comes a major milestone, the consequences of which open up even more possibilities for Dyer’s future. He passes the 11-plus exam and in doing so secures a place among the smarter set at a prestigious grammar school. Dyer calls this “the most momentous event of my life, not simply up to that point but for its duration.” The exam may have been “the big divider,” ending existing friendships, but it was also “the forger of destinies,” putting Dyer on an academic path that would take him to Oxford.
Before getting there, though, Dyer must navigate his teenage years. He starts playing tennis, enjoys bike rides in the Cotswolds, and develops a passion for prog rock. A similar passion for girls takes root, but being at a single-sex school means he has little contact with any and no idea how to acquire the mysterious skill of chatting them up. However, school proves beneficial in other respects. He gets on the right side of the bad boys in his year, including the appositely named Myles Lawless; more importantly, he has an inspiring English teacher who introduces him to the joy of reading books — not just Shakespeare and other set texts but also more modern titles. “There is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in,” Graham Greene wrote. For Dyer, that moment came when he learned that stories could be compelling and language alluring. “A world was beckoning,” he declares, and it is one he runs into and wholeheartedly embraces.
“Homework” can feel episodic, particularly when Dyer regales us with the details and emotions surrounding his first kiss, his first pint of beer, or his first time watching color TV. And yet it feels churlish to take him to task here — partly because childhood is episodic but also because those episodes are so brilliantly relayed. That first romantic clinch leaves Dyer more confused than aroused: “We stood up like a fully clothed Adam and Eve after eating a sensationally normal apple, bewildered, not even disheveled: unseen, uncaught and unpunished.”
Dyer excels with less savory evocations. “There were no ghosts,” he says of a relative’s gloomy home packed with stuffed animals: “the house was so dismal in its own right it didn’t need to be haunted.” Meals served up at home and at school consist of gristly, veiny, fatty meat and vegetables “boiled to extinction”; handkerchiefs are “routinely stiff with yellow snot”; and swimming-pool changing-room floors are studded with “pink band-aids that had floated off raw heels and toes, and water-bloated cigarette ends.”
Dyer’s most absorbing recollections are those concerning his foray into books. But his most satisfying depictions are of his humble, private, and resolutely unbookish parents. His mother was a school dinner lady who always wanted to be a seamstress but was held back and pushed down by a debilitating lack of self-worth. His father, a sheet-metal worker, was parsimonious in the extreme, forever “saving money in the face of the rival claims of ease, quality or utility.” Throughout the book, Dyer writes affectionately about them; in his closing pages, when fast forwarding to 2011, he delivers a poignant account of their final days, and with it, the end of an era.
“Homework” is a vibrant trip down memory lane. There might be little in the way of tension or drama in the form of growing pains or teenage angst, but there is no shortage of candid and beguiling recollections of scrapes, shenanigans, success, and self-discoveries — not to mention musings on such British delights as conkers, allotments, Action Man, Opal Fruits, and toad-in-the-hole. Dyer breaks off when he is 18 and about to go to university. With any luck, his tale of beginnings is not the end of the story.
HOMEWORK: A Memoir
By Geoff Dyer
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 288 pages, $29
Malcolm Forbes has written for The Economist, The Wall Street Journal, and The Washington Post. He lives in Edinburgh.
