Geoff Nicholson, author of darkly comic novels, dies at 71

Boston Globe

17-03-2025

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.
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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.'
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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.
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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.
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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.
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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."
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