Review by New York Times Review
Geoff Dyer shows an eclectic background and a wide-ranging curiosity in a collection of his writing. ASSEMBLING a collection of reviews and essays is a test of the richness of a critic's inner life, an echo-sounding exercise that measures the depth of available talent. While a single piece may be impressive in isolation - rehearsed in a glossy magazine or nestled in the review pages - the book-length selection takes us out of the safety of those shallows and asks whether a writer's reflections still rise beyond the threshold of banality when repeated over several hundred pages. If a critic's sense of artistic achievement is sclerotically narrow, or based on a single approach applied to every work under consideration, the collection will coolly sketch a relief map of those failings. The essay collection is also haunted by the ghost of redundancy. Even the outstanding essayist Stephen Jay Gould approached the form with trepidation. In the preface to his first book, "Ever Since Darwin" (1977), Gould notes that while he was "not unmindful of the outrages visited upon our forests to publish" such collections, he had at least held to the rule that he would "never use the same quote twice." As it happened, this single guideline was too much even for Gould, who couldn't resist repeating Darwin's observation that in "The Origin of Species" "light will be thrown on the origin of man and his history." The stakes are higher still for Geoff Dyer in his latest book, "Otherwise Known as the Human Condition," because it is effectively a hybrid volume that cannibalizes two earlier essay compilations published in Britain. But Dyer brings to the challenge an eclectic background - his earlier work includes novels, reviews and (he tells us) "what might generously be called semi-learned articles" - and this versatility serves him well. What he calls "the unruly range" of his concerns starts out with 19 essays devoted primarily to photography, but also touching on painting and sculpture. Next there are 17 pieces about mostly modern writers, followed by six about music (primarily jazz, but also trance and Def Leppard's formulaic rock). The final phase of the book consists of nine essays classified as "variables" that shuttle between personal reflections and larger social or historical subjects (the fashion industry, war atrocities, Camus's Algeria), and 12 personal essays. The view is wide, and Dyer typically tries to bring his material into focus through the lens of literature. When he translates visual or musical experiences into words, he does so through the intervention of other people's words: in an essay about jazz, he cites Larkin, Borges, Brodsky, Ashbery, Douglas Coupland and D. H. Lawrence. In the space of just two pages of an article about fashion, he points to Pynchon, Cheever and Poe (one imagines the original authence - the readers of Vogue magazine - with their heads spinning). As the book goes on, it becomes clear that Dyer prefers British poetry, particularly Auden, and American prose, particularly DeLillo. Because Dyer is a novelist, the centrality of literature to his frame of reference makes sense. And because he's also a writer of innovative nonfiction, who frequently blurs the lines between genres, he is unsurprisingly suspicious of fiction and of the novel's dominance in literary culture. When writing about both Rebecca West and the journalist Ryszard Kapuscinski, he complains that their reputations have been distorted by "a received cultural prejudice that assumes fiction to be the loftiest preserve of literary and imaginative distinction." Similarly, the section of the book devoted to literary works concludes with the pronouncement that "we are moving beyond the nonfiction novel" toward broader nonfictional forms. This incipient impatience with fiction makes sense, since Dyer's working method in many of the literary essays is to squeeze the poles of life and art as close together as possible: D.H. Lawrence, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Richard Ford and James Salter are each, in turn, presented to an X-ray that tries to pinpoint the skeleton of real life behind the distracting flesh of fiction. Partly because of this technique, the essays devoted to journals (the most obvious nexus of life and writing) by Cheever and the Goncourts provide two of the particular delights of this part of the book. But Dyer does move away from biography, as in his piece for The New York Times Book Review about "Point Omega," DeLillo's most recent novel. Set in the Western desert, the book details a young filmmaker's attempts to interview a retired academic about his role in the Iraq war and climaxes with the disappearance of the academic's daughter. It could be read as a deeply coded autobiography, working at a subterranean level through DeLillo's response to David Foster Wallace's death: the sudden loss, the California setting, the young man's fascination and desire to record an older man's work (just as Wallace once considered editing an issue of The Review of Contemporary Fiction devoted to DeLillo). Dyer's approach to the novel, however, is to draw upon a scholarship of juxtaposition, a kind of collage cognition. When considering the role of Douglas Gordon's art installation "24 Hour Psycho" in DeLillo's novel, for instance, he sets it revealingly next to Gordon's video "5 Year Drive-By." When elucidating DeLillo's dialogue, he juxtaposes quotations from DeLillo's earlier novels "The Names" and "Americana." Though Dyer is a skilled reader of photographs - zeroing in on and interpreting small details, a talent especially evident in his essay on the photojournalist Ruth Orkin - when it comes to books he doesn't seem especially interested in close reading. Instead his approach to literature is expansive, setting a novel in larger contexts, and often, as in the case of DeLillo, the technique is highly successful. This expansive procedure reproduces the structure of the book - with its constant hunger for new subjects - in miniature, but the outward reach has its own internal boundaries. When Dyer writes about Richard Avedon, he reflects that the photographer "never lost the appetite for discovery, but he kept discovering the same thing," and a similar redundancy emerges at times in Dyer's essays. Fitzgerald, Dyer tells us at one point, really succeeded only when he learned "to ground the lushest imagery in the actual and immediate." In the very next piece, we again hear that Fitzgerald's "famous lyrical flourishes work best when they are earthed in the actual and immediate." There are a number of similar repetitions, and while Dyer presents himself as a maverick figure with no time for what he calls the "ferocious nit-picking" of specialists, it doesn't seem unreasonably pedantic to expect the author of a 400-page book to proofread for such repetitions. "Otherwise Known as the Human Condition" lacks some of the sustained pleasures of Dyer's other work - say, the comic anger of "Out of Sheer Rage,"' in which Dyer's encounter with postmodern theory (via Peter Widdowson's "Critical Reader on D. H. Lawrence") prompts him to attempt an ad hoc piece of deconstruction: "In the end it took a whole box of matches and some risk of personal injury before I succeeded in deconstructing it." But almost every essay is enlivened by Dyer's characteristically crisp formulations - Denis Johnson is a "metaphysical illiterate, a junkyard angel"; British skies are a "thwarted promise"; good war writing registers "the adrenaline mist of combat" - as he tries, impressively, to capture what he calls "the humming circuitry of an artist's imaginative life." In Ruth Orkin's photo of V-E Day, Dyer finds "a concentration of American-ness." Dyer's interests include photography, literature, war atrocities and Def Leppard. Stephen Burn's latest book is "Jonathan Franzen at the End of Postmodernism." He teaches at Northern Michigan University.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [April 24, 2011]
Review by Booklist Review
Breath-of-fresh-air Dyer takes a traveler's approach to essay writing, going wherever fancy takes him and reporting on his experiences with an artful blend of keen observations and droll disclosures. He celebrates his freewheeling freelance writing life in a lively introduction to this far-roaming gathering of larky, whip-smart essays from 1984 through 2009. A striking selection of Dyer's exceptional photography criticism, including deep looks at Robert Capa and Ruth Orkin, is found under Visuals. Verbals collects literary essays about Don DeLillo, Richard Ford, and the literatures of boxing and war. In Musicals, Dyer considers jazz and Def Leppard, while among the Variables are a search for Camus in Algiers and a flight in a MiG-29 fighter. Charming and frank essays about being an only child, marriage, and self-defining, possibly self-defeating, habits reside in the Personals section. Dyer may seem blithe, but he is an erudite and penetrating thinker as well as a dazzling stylist. The light and the dark, the buoyant and the weighty, Dyer's incisive pairings of opposites make for a finely textured, many-faceted, and enjoyably provocative collection.--Seaman, Donna Copyright 2010 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In this new collection of previously published writings, Dyer (Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi) traverses a broad territory stretching from photographers such as Richard Avedon and William Gedney ("His gaze is neither penetrating nor alert but, on reflection, we would amend that verdict to accepting"); musicians Miles Davis and Def Leppard; writers like D.H. Lawrence, Ian McEwan, and Richard Ford; as well as personal ruminations on, say, reader's block. In a fond tribute to the power and beauty of Albert Camus's life and work, Dyer reflects on his own encounters with the writer's work in Algeria: "Coming here and sitting by this monument, rereading these great essays, testaments to all that is the best in us, is a way of delivering personally my letter of thanks." In a masterful essay on W.G. Sebald and Thomas Bernhard, Dyer writes: "The comic obsessiveness and neurosis common to many of Sebald's characters is like a sedated version of the relentless, raging frenzy into which Bernhard's narrators habitually drive themselves." Dyer's writing does what the best critical writing always does, encouraging us to view, read, or listen closely to art, literature, and music as well as to pay close attention to various cultural forms and their impact on our personal lives. (Mar.) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A grab-bag of critical essays, reportage and personal stories from the irrepressibly curious Dyer (Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, 2009, etc).The title of this hefty tome, featuring pieces published in two United Kingdomonly collections, suggests ponderous philosophizing. But though Dyer takes his art seriously, his prose is as relaxed and self-effacing as it is informed. Indeed, the title essay is about nothing more serious than his quest for a decent doughnut and cappuccino in New York City, from which he extracts some surprising insights about our need for routines, standards and sense of home. Though the book is wide-ranging, his command is consistent, whether he's writing about Richard Avedon or model airplanes. Dyer consistently expresses an appreciation for the way the idiosyncratic human being emerges despite our best efforts to suppress it. That's evident in the way he admires John Cheever's confessional journals more than his acclaimed short stories, and in his urge to uncover F. Scott Fitzgerald's tragic personal history when writing about his novels. It also shows in the subjects he chooses to write about. Consistently suspicious of slickness in art, he's drawn to photographers like Enrique Metinides, who documented disasters and accidents in Mexico City, and musicians like John Coltrane, whose "My Favorite Things" grows more appealing to Dyer the more decoupled it becomes from its Rodgers and Hammerstein source. In a few pieces, particularly in his first-person reportage, Dyer works a bit too hard to find something clever to say about subjects he wouldn't have pursued were he not assigned to write about theme.g., a Def Leppard concert or a flight in a decommissioned MiG. Also, a handful of book reviews are brief piecework of only moderate interest. But the book is chock-full of Dyer at his most open, thoughtful and lyrical, as in his study of photographs of Rodin sculptures, his appreciation of Rebecca West's neglected travel writings and a candid piece about the first time he was fired, where, in exposing his 20-something childishness, he finds the roots of the adult he became.Whether in sketches or rigorous studies, each piece bears the mark of Dyer's unique intelligence and wit.]] Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
