Latest news with #Homework
Irish Examiner
a day ago
- Entertainment
- Irish Examiner
Book review: Memoir rich in literary allusion, social mobility, and so much more
It has become commonplace to laud English writer Geoff Dyer for his versatility, but that makes the praise no less valid. A multi-awarding author of numerous works of fiction, non-fiction, criticism, and other surprisingly genre-defying books, he has now turned his highly accomplished hand to memoir. Homework is an account of Dyer's upbringing in Cheltenham in the 1960s and '70s, a world he evokes in gloriously minute, Proustian detail. Dyer's 1960s working-class childhood is depicted as unapologetically ordinary, filled with the boyish toys and past times that arouse gentle nostalgia for the mid-20th-century world. He writes charmingly about his ever-growing collections of army figurines, Airfix models, Action Man dolls, and bubblegum cards, of playing conkers in the autumn, of the colours and tastes of long-gone sweets, and the rapture of receiving annuals at Christmas. Later, Dyer writes with understated wit and self-deprecation about his adolescent schooldays, detailing his clumsy efforts with girls, his love of football (undiminished by his own mediocrity at the sport), his bookishness, his embarrassing puberty, and his developing sense of physical inferiority. Surrounded by an array of grandparents, aunts, uncles, cousins, and friends, being an only child was never a cause for loneliness. A young Geoff Dyer in his bedroom in his family's home in Cheltenham, England. But, naturally, the two central people in his life — and in the book — are his parents. His portrayal of his reticent, Methodist-background mother Phyllis, whose birthmark tragically afflicted her entire sense of self, is tender and moving. Dyer's more complicated portrait of his father Arthur, a Labour-supporting, Thatcher-despising, staunchly anti-Royalist engineer, is of an unusually tight-fisted and tight-lipped man, who was also self-sacrificing and without any real meanness. He stresses that although they were not poor, his father's internalisation of the wartime rationing spirit simply meant he would never spend any money. Dyer presents distinct dead or diminishing worlds. There is his own vanishing world, the source of the memoir itself. There is the dying world of his parents' generation, and before them, his grandparents', whose farming lives were to the young writer an alien mixture of myth and the Victorian fiction of Thomas Hardy. Dyer's family history also acts as an account of social mobility in England over a century or so. His mother's father, a veteran of the Battle of the Somme, was an illiterate man from rural Shropshire, while much of Arthur Dyer's young life was shaped by the parsimony and violence of wartime experiences. Arthur is depicted increasingly at odds with the post-war consumer boom, constantly complaining about the cost of things, at one point even putting so little petrol in his beloved Vauxhall Victor that he has to coast down inclining roads. Even so, his father could not stop the forces of progress. In 1970, the family moved to a bigger home and, later, Dyer went to study in Oxford. Although Homework is not a book about Dyer's formation as a writer, it is a book rich in literary allusion. Yet, this literariness is never heavy-handed but lightly worn and always illuminating. Dyer is an immensely skilled writer, one who can seamlessly switch from joyfully endorsing his childhood love of sugar to considering, by way of Roland Barthes, the semiotics of an old family photograph. Like all the best memoirs, Homework also reflects on the process of recollection as well as offering a defence of it: 'Can't memory', he asks, 'be a species or form of fact?' The facts of his youth, as he recalls them here, are poignant, joyous, funny, sad and evocative, and offer a portrait of a life of reasonable contentment in post-war England that feels at once both fading and familiar.
New Statesman
25-06-2025
- Entertainment
- New Statesman
How not to plagiarise Geoff Dyer
I am close to a complete first draft of a book about England called Anglia, but stare with anxiety at the seemingly convincing and large pile of paper, knowing that lurking in the crisp, regular type is an unviable mix of quite funny jokes and some amazing drunkenly typed rubbish. In order to avoid facing this problem I keep writing more stuff to dilute the terrible stuff. I fear that, in actuality, I am maintaining about the same ratio. The basis for the project was that I could not write a book about Britain from the Middle Ages onwards, as I had for Germany and elsewhere in earlier books, because too much of the story is already well known and so often parodied. I also had to restrict the book to England, as I could only deal with Scotland, Wales and Ireland in such a cursory way as to be offensive. My heart sank at having to write about people like King John. But then I remembered a family story: my mother's grandmother was, as a little girl, present at the hanging of the 'Rugeley Poisoner' in Stafford in 1856. I realised I could start there and make a more detailed book that might have some unexpected information in it. Although flicking through the pile at the moment, an awful lot appears to be about Madame Blavatsky and her circle. County grounds I also thought as a basic writing discipline I should never refer to the royal family, elections or the empire, as these would take up too much space and would make me write filler guff. One further limit was that most of the book should clearly be rooted in specific counties, ideally with two stories from each county to spread the book countrywide, but chucking away some of the smaller bits and bobs (Rutland) to give their votes to London. In any event, with this series of Toytown-Ozymandian arbitrary decisions – an arbitrariness I now see as having deep and lasting roots in English history – I am sitting next to a pile of paper covered with words of variable quality wondering when my life took this wrong turn. Avoiding all Homework I happily had spent some three years writing and researching Anglia, inwardly smiling at some of its little bits of humour, when disaster struck. In May, Geoff Dyer published Homework, his memoir of growing up in England only about five years before I grew up in England. There is no writer I admire more and I felt suddenly that what had been my own rather special England-evoking project was now something like a trodden-on Thunderbird 5 toy facing off against a real-life Death Star. We even both grew up in spa towns and both (I assume) have access to very similar healing-waters jokes. Obviously I could not read Homework. I am drawn into the tractor beam of Dyer's prose style anyway and need to keep well away. And, worse, I saw a headline for a review of Homework that mentioned the word Airfix. I had planned to write about my Airfix model of the Nazi battleship Tirpitz, jokily saying how after hours of flailing effort with knife and glue to stick together my shambolic Tirpitz, it indeed now looked like the real thing, but in the aftermath of the RAF's legendary Operation Catechism. But what if Dyer had made the same joke and I was accused of plagiarism? In order to avoid reading his book I now had to cross out my Operation Catechism joke. The way we Wear Throughout researching Anglia there have been several points where I have found myself having to watch yet again Sunderland on Film, a DVD of documentary clips from the North East Film Archive that span from 1904 to Sunderland's 1973 FA Cup triumph over Leeds. Only an hour long, it has much of the impact of a great realist novel – the faces, clothes, gestures, hard work. The earliest films included as many people on the streets as possible, grinning and waving, as they would subsequently pay to see themselves projected on a screen. A wedding, a grand shop, a skittering horse-and-cart, two men waltzing, Great War commemorations, the Pyrex factory, an astounding scene of men blowing glass to make scientific instruments. The climax of 1973, with all shops shut and the streets empty for the final, had one shop sign stating: 'As a mark of sympathy towards Messrs Bremner, Giles & Company, this shop will be closed at 2pm on Saturday, May 5th.' The editing of the film is sort of a miracle, with shots of the game entangled with crowds watching televisions in shop windows, on a cinema screen, in someone's home, with close-ups of faces distorted and crying with tension. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe It is probably good that we are largely sheltered from watching such material – it is simply too nihilistic, too raw, too long ago, and the viewer has to sit there knowing that much of what made Sunderland great was about to be swept away. [See also: Is Thomas Skinner the future of the right?] Related
Winnipeg Free Press
14-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Winnipeg Free Press
An A-level account
What a gift — a book you feel is going to be perfunctory turns out to be deeply felt and revelatory. Veteran British writer Geoff Dyer's memoir of his working-class childhood in western England surprises you with its thoughtfulness, wit and vivid detail. Despite its trauma-free subject matter — a boy living with his dull parents in the small city of Cheltenham near the Welsh border — Homework contains passages that will have you laughing out loud, while others might bring you close to tears. Matt Stuart photo Geoff Dyer's memory for detail and humour helps his prose shine on every page. Presumably no relation to the Free Press's international affairs columnist Gwynne Dyer, the author is a literary and art critic, non-fiction writer and novelist. He is a prolific chap, having published almost 20 books. His most recent, 2023's The Last Days of Roger Federer, examines the later works of a variety of artists, writers, musicians and even athletes who have touched his own life. Dyer has lived in Los Angeles for a dozen years, where he teaches creative writing at UCLA. Being uprooted from his native soil, one suspects, and also the death of his parents a few years before that, must have got him thinking of who he is and where he comes from. He was born in 1958. He grew up as an only child when England had finally shed the deprivation resulting from two world wars and a punishing depression. Yet deprivation was all his parents had ever known in their formative years, and it marked them for life. His mother, the daughter of poor dairy farmers, expected nothing beyond subsistence. His father, meanwhile, a sheet-metal worker who had served his war years in India, made a religion out of thriftiness. In an early passage Dyer describes his dad's morning shaving ritual, which took place in the kitchen, 'the red washing-up bowl becoming grey with suds and tiny splinters of beard.' After the blades became too dull for him, he passed them to his wife 'to shave her shins, after which they were still not thrown out. 'Their functional life was ended but they had some as yet undiscovered use even if they were so blunt as to have rendered suicide almost impossible.' This combination of memory for detail and droll humour makes Dyer's prose shine on every page. The book is awash in Britishisms ('biro,' 'lollies,' 'O-levels' and 'A-levels'), which go undefined for North American readers. At one point Dyer applies his art-critic's skills to a brilliant exegesis of the book's cover photo. It shows him in a cowboy hat at age six, while his folks pose beside the symbol of their proudly attained affluence, a sky-blue 1963 Vauxhall Victor, 'looking like an American car but less elongated, as though a U.S. model had been shortened in order to better accommodate itself to our narrow island.' Homework Dyer relates his story chronologically. As a youngster he spends his weekends in the backseat of the Vauxhall on trips to the country to visit his Dickensian collection of grandparents, aunts and uncles. At age 11, he passes his '11-pluses,' England's national exams at the time which divided students into academic and vocational streams. His parents were chuffed that the fruit of their loins was going to 'grammar school,' in which he would learn to work with head rather than his hands, as did they. Ironically, however, this 'most momentous' event separated him from his parents. The attitudinal gulf widened as he grew into his teens, discovering music, tennis, beer and books. He was a lanky, good-looking youth who had his share of success with girls. Some of his erotic recollections verge on TMI, given the wholesomeness of the preceding pages. The story, you think, will conclude triumphantly with Dyer's admission to Oxford University. But there is a moving coda regarding his mother's background, which he foreshadows in his earlier analysis of the cover photo. One quibble. Homework is a terrible title. This memoir is not work at all. Morley Walker is a retired Free Press editor and writer.
Los Angeles Times
09-06-2025
- Entertainment
- Los Angeles Times
In Geoff Dyer's U.K. childhood, a Cadbury Milk Tray meant everything
A certain sort of British memoir takes education as its queasy, pivotal center. The narrators of these books — among them Robert Graves' WWI-scarred reminiscence, 'Good-Bye to All That' (1929), and Henry Green's WWII-era bildungsroman, 'Pack My Bag' (1940) — are often tortured by their schooling, with its wicked authority figures and cruel classmates. Importantly, they refuse to be tight-lipped about the experience. They usually — in the cases of the above, always — end up at Oxford, where their tenure at such an ideal of English education allows their adult selves to come into view. Geoff Dyer is among the great uncategorizable prose writers of the past several decades and he also went to Oxford, albeit at the end of the 1970s, with the war deprivations of yore in rearview. He was not reared by British public academies — the privileged equivalent of private schools in America — but instead at a grammar in suburban Cheltenham, 'a place famed for its Jane Austeny terraces,' he states in his new autobiography, 'Homework,' though his alma mater stuck out like a jagged edge: It 'was, by some distance, the most forbidding modernist building in town.' 'Homework' distinguishes itself like such a structure among the developed, dreary grounds of the British scholastic narrative. No fan of Dyer's, whose many books have ranged from a bizarre if thrilling immersion in the psyches of American jazz musicians to a volume about procrastinating while trying to write about D.H. Lawrence, will be surprised that he departs from precedent. But even if his latest never actually takes us to university ('Oxford lies beyond the boundaries of this book-map and inventory,' he announces), it reflects U.K. literary custom like nothing he's written. Dyer, now 67 years old and for a decade a USC professor, is a cosmopolitan author whose output — fiction, nonfiction, both — has often spanned far-flung locales. Yet this project's geography is circumscribed, its borders hedged. If Dyer has grown sentimental about the England of his upbringing, his nostalgia is a subtle critique of how optimism in big government has grown worse for wear — 'Homework' bursts with working-class pride, a fond and mournful belief in the possibility of the British welfare state. Still, the fact of remembering can sometimes feel more important to Dyer than how events translate. He leads us through a grove of anecdotes, some more meaningful than others. Dyer conjures a macabre, powerful image of his father in a hospital bed after a botched surgery, wearing a badge that reads 'Private Health Care Makes Me Sick,' and spends a few too many pages on the delight of eating 'sweets' (not candy — too Yankee), which nonetheless produces this glorious quip: 'During one discussion of various oral afflictions, my mum exclaimed 'I've had gum boils,' as if announcing an achievement that was in danger of being unjustly overlooked.' Humor is his life raft because he neglects to plot much of a course around the seas of memory. The book's languor can be ponderous and vintage, more 20th century than 21st. Yet the text's unhurried recollections reflect its content: 'Homework' feels leisurely as if to reflect the functional, socialist-adjacent government that allows its characters to subsist. If only, Dyer implies, Americans with the misfortune of paying for their own dental care could afford the rite of developing gum boils. Eventually, Dyer's aimlessness gets us somewhere — and, in the most English way, we find the book's emotional destination in what he neglects to proclaim outright. Dyer, an only child, spends a lot of time delving into his relationship with his parents, focusing on moments when he butts heads with his dad. Young Geoff, child of an expanding consumer economy, wants a guitar, a stereo, a Red Feather racing bike — 'If you didn't have a racer you didn't have a bike,' his older self declares with undiminished enthusiasm, 'but since no one who had a bike didn't have a racer this wasn't an issue.' He receives all of these things. His dad is a sheet metal worker, his mother a school cook, and they have limited financial means — still, the book's contrast, between familial impecunity and the minor damage of the narrator's disappointments, forces us to look past circumstance and consider how materialism relates to affection and if this conflict is generational. Dyer's father was traumatized by the austerity of growing up in England between two military cataclysms, and his daily satisfaction is bound in his ability to pinch pences. In one particularly memorable scene, he buys his son a tennis racket at a store that offers a 10% discount to members of an athletic club — to which he doesn't belong, but he argues his way into getting the deal regardless. In another, Dyer describes a Cadbury Milk Tray that his dad purchased for his mother each year on Valentine's Day though his mom didn't like chocolate. This did not dampen her gratitude, however: The gesture 'was an expression of indulgence unrestrained by any considerations of expense.' Naturally, most of the contents of the Milk Tray were eaten by me, first the ones I knew I liked from the top layer and then, when that top layer had been decimated, the same items from the bottom layer. This bottom layer also came to include what my Auntie Hilda called 'spit-backs' from the top layer: half-eaten choices that I'd liked the look of — based on the legend — but then turned against when I took a bite. And so, to avoid waste, they were returned to the box for someone else — my dad — to finish off. This moment sticks in the mind, the intimacy of a family in which a present for the mother becomes a treat for the child, whose chewed and discarded food is finished by the father. It points toward the book's core: a question of how to distinguish tenderness from frugality. Is 'Homework' about a child who took a remarkably frictionless path, aided by a nation that had invested in civic institutions, from monetary hardship to the ivory tower? Merely technically. Is it a story of how members of a family, protected by a social safety net from abject desperation, developed different ideas about how to relate to material circumstance? We're getting there. What 'Homework' does best is keep these possibilities open while never having an answer for whether the elder Dyer's annual ceremony with the Cadbury box was an act of love. The real homework is the labor that we do when we spend our whole lives wondering. Felsenthal is a fiction writer, poet, critic and essayist whose work has appeared in the New Yorker, the Guardian, the Atlantic and other publications.
Telegraph
26-05-2025
- Entertainment
- Telegraph
Childhood in the 1960s? Here's why it was positively Victorian
Whoever said 'there's nowhere more remote than the recent past' will reiterate the apothegm a thousand times after reading Homework, Geoff Dyer's buoyant autobiography, about his coming-of-age in the backwoods of Gloucestershire. Born in 1958, Dyer grew up in a Britain where world wars were living memories. Buildings were pocked with shrapnel and weed-choked bomb-sites abounded. Everyone had grandfathers who'd fought on the Somme, or uncles who hadn't come back from Burma. Playgrounds were filled with noisy boys shooting each other with toy guns. Childhood could be rather feral, with packs of children running about unsupervised in the alleys and roads; but then there was little motor traffic in the early 1960s. Few families could afford a Triumph Herald or Ford Anglia. Much of Homework is a nostalgia trip. Dyer waxes lyrical, for instance, about eating Peach Melba and Raspberry Ripple puddings, or procuring from the corner shop an Aero or Milky Way ('the sweet you can eat between meals without ruining your appetite'). It's shocking, looking back, how much white sugar people consumed. 'I loved sugar on and in everything,' says Dyer, remembering the cereals, fizzy drinks and jam. Like red meat and full cream, it was considered 'a source of pleasure and nutrition' not the harbinger of obesity and diabetes it is in the 21st century. We weren't health conscious, you see. We also had terrible teeth. Toothache, mouth ulcers and abscesses were prevalent, and dentists more than happy to be paid by the filling. All adults smoked, everyone 'never not coughing'. Sweet cigarettes were on sale to children: the packs contained educational cards about the Birds of Britain or the Royal Canadian Mounted Police. Going for a jog or to the gym was unheard of, and you never saw people drinking bottled water – nor did anyone die in the street or office of dehydration. Regarding exercise, there were heavily chlorinated public baths, but all they were good for was catching a verruca. In general, food was so bad, it must have been done on purpose. Think of the watery stews, lumpy gravy and roasted gristle; the 'evaporated carrots and swamp-boiled cabbage'. The height of gastronomic sophistication was chicken-in-the-basket in pub carparks. If I may add my own memory here, in South Wales we had scampi-in-the-basket. My mother thought she was Elizabeth David when serving Heinz Spaghetti Hoops. Dyer says he was a sickly child, prone to eczema, warts and chesty colds. He had his tonsils and adenoids out – you never hear those procedures mentioned now. Appointments with the doctor or consultant happened instantly, after a quick phone call. With the population some 20 million smaller, the NHS was efficient and unburdened, able to dish out free ointments, tablets, bandages, injections and operations. When Dyer's mother needed a disfiguring mole removing, she was seen at once by Sir Archibald McIndoe, the leading plastic surgeon. Dyer makes other areas of life sound positively Victorian. Streets were visited by tinkers, blade sharpeners, coalmen and ice-cream vans. Houses contained front-rooms that were never used. There was the brown furniture, like big wardrobes, now unsellable in junk shops. Cocktail cabinets contained unopened bottles of Babycham. 'Dead flies showed up blackly in the opaque glass bowl that hung under the light.' What an odd society we were. We used disgusting handkerchiefs rather than disposable tissues; underarm deodorant was yet unknown, particularly for men; children's entertainment was mostly Gerry and Sylvia Anderson's string puppets; and neighbours with mental health issues or other afflictions were openly abused in terms my editors cannot print. Dyer's father was anxious that black immigrants didn't move next door: 'It would lower the value of the house.' Adults did say and think these things, egged on by sitcoms such as Love Thy Neighbour and Till Death Us Do Part. But for all that Dyer quotes Housman – 'The happy highways where I went / And cannot come again' – and lovingly describes the Kodachrome colours in the family photograph album, Homework spends too long with characters such as his father Jack (1919–2011), who must have been the most boring man in England. Dyer Sr creosoted fences, and toiled on an allotment. 'It was a source of pride,' Geoff writes, 'that he wore a jacket and tie to work', as well as on the beach. Jack didn't like books: 'His refusal even to consider reading as something to do was so steadfast as to seem almost principled.' Nor did he like films, or beer in pubs. He partook of two glasses of wine a year. And as for music, he 'would quite happily have gone through life never hearing a note'. Jack's chief pleasure, as his son recalls, was in not spending money. Two words were often on his lips, a contemptuous exclamation: 'How much?' According to a relative, 'he was so mean, even if he had a mouth full of gum boils, he still wouldn't give you one.' He fretted over the 'unavoidable expenses' of running a car: petrol, brake lights, tyres. When it was parked, he removed the rotor arm from the engine to deter thieves. 'Central heating had been invented,' Dyer writes, 'but was not installed in any house that we knew of.' Everything had to be repaired, patched up, bought cheaply. Perhaps this was the spirit of post-war rationing: abundance meant profligacy. Yet Geoff recalls the problem as more than this: Jack was like 'a very slow hard-to-identify puncture', leaking all the fun out of things. Geoff's reaction was to do well at school, pass exams, get to university and get away. Along the journey, we see him having clumsy sex – 'She let me undo her bikini top and feel her t-ts' – and getting drunk on cider and Cinzano. Homework ends with his parents' deaths, both in 2011, by which time Dyer is in his fifties and has long since become a pie-hot writer. He publishes whatever he wants, travels wherever he fancies, secures everything from fellowships to journalism gigs. He has written four novels, and today he's writer-in-residence at the University of Southern California. Bully for him. For though I liked the parts of this memoir that sketch the same territory and era through which I travelled, in the end the rest isn't about very much. That loosened bikini is about it for narrative excitement. There are no sentences to savour in Homework, no perceptions to give you pause or make you gasp. In the total absence of swagger – perhaps this is why Dyer is such a success with committees: he's a safe pair of hands – we're given Barthes or Sontag reincarnated as someone incredibly ordinary. Then again, as regards his father, is Dyer a chip off the old block? There's a strange scene at the end of the book, which goes unexplored, where our author by chance meets an old schoolfriend in Cheltenham, and begins chatting about who is still alive, who has croaked. Yet Dyer must rush away: 'I had one of those cut-price train-specific tickets.' As his parents' sole beneficiary, Dyer was left what, I wondered? It would have been interesting to know the size of his inheritance, after all the descriptions of frantic hoarding – literally, of banknotes under the mattress. One thing I hate: reticent autobiographies.
