Homework: Geoff Dyer brings 'a whole world' to life in his memoir

Book cover of Homework by Geoff Dyer — Homework by Geoff Dyer

(Image credit: Farrar, Straus and Giroux)

Geoff Dyer's "thought-provoking and entertaining books" have always had a prominent autobiographical strain, said John Self in The Times. Whether grappling with D.H. Lawrence ("Out of Sheer Rage") or Russian cinema ("Zona"), they are "as much about him as what they're supposed to be about". So perhaps it's surprising that this "smart, funny man" has taken so long to write an actual memoir.

In "Homework", Dyer offers an account of his upbringing in Cheltenham – one that in some ways was "nothing special". He was the only child of lower-middle-class parents, and his childhood was "filled with 1960s and 1970s cultural touchstones, from Eagle and Beezer comics to 'The Generation Game' and 'Stingray' on the television". But "by applying his idiosyncratic world view to experiences many of us will recognise", Dyer has produced something exceptional – a work that at one moment reduced me to fits of giggles (with its riffs, say, on school dinners), and at others made me think – about class, memory, or how Britain has changed. If you haven't read Dyer before, "Homework" is the "perfect place to start".

Until about halfway through the book, Dyer's reminiscences are "perhaps a little bit boilerplate", said Ian Sansom in The Spectator. Then he sits, and passes, his 11-plus – "the most momentous event of my life" – and suddenly, "everything changes". The "lineaments of the adult Dyer" emerge; he is set on a path that will take him first to Oxford, and then on to his career as one of literature's most "stylistically distinctive voices". Yet the greatest strength of "Homework" is its "quiet acknowledgment of what he left behind". With "characteristic humour and tenderness", Dyer writes movingly about the constricted world of his parents – his father, who found nearly everything "disappointing", and his warm-hearted but chronically self-doubting mother.