San Diego Union-Tribune (Sunday)
In ‘Federer,’ Geoff Dyer ponders the twilight
Author explores games, last performances and last works — with plenty of detours through other subjects
Geoff Dyer has spent a lifetime writing books that shouldn’t work. A biography of D.H. Lawrence that revolved around his inability to write it. A book about photography, though he didn’t own a camera. When a grumpy music librarian asked him what, exactly, were his credentials for writing a book about jazz, Dyer replied that he had only one: “I like listening to it.”
“It was an honest answer,” Dyer once explained, “simultaneously modest and confident.” This languid form of chutzpah has also been part of his enduring charm. The mix of self-deprecation and selfimportance would just come off as unbearable if it weren’t fueled by his canny observations, his pleasing sentences, his comic timing. Only Dyer would have written 200 pages about spending two weeks on an American aircraft carrier and found a surprisingly pertinent place to note that one of the perks of having the rare room to himself on the George H.W. Bush was that it allowed him the privacy and freedom to break wind.
“The Last Days of Roger Federer” is, from what I can tell, Dyer’s 18th book. I would state that with more certainty if I didn’t wonder whether there was an unlisted stray volume somewhere, maybe an essay collection published in Britain, where he was born into a blue-collar family in 1958. Dyer has returned repeatedly to the contrast between that world and the one he inhabits now. In “The Last Days,” he recalls being a teenager when he learned that a professional footballer was retiring from Manchester United. Retirement from work was something that Dyer’s relatives all looked forward to, but the footballer’s announcement seemed to him something entirely different: “It was the first time I knew of anyone stopping doing something they loved, the thing that gave their life meaning.”
The prospect of Roger Federer’s retirement from tennis is just a fraction of what Dyer contemplates in this tour through various endings — last days, last games, last performances, last works. Dyer’s thoughts are so restless that instead of corralling them in essays, he scatters them among numbered sections, collaging “congeries of experiences, things and cultural artifacts that, for various reasons, have come to group themselves around me in a rough constellation during a phase of my life.”
Coltrane, Dylan, Nietzsche, yes, but also Dyer, always Dyer, the point around which this book (like all of his books) invariably turns. He goes from back pain (his) to neck pain (his) to wrist pain (his) to dead hearts (in D.H. Lawrence’s “Last Poems”). Lawrence leads to John Ruskin and to J.M.W. Turner, whose late paintings make it look as if the landscape is dissolving, burned away by a blaze of light. This change in Turner’s style may have had something to do with the cataracts he developed after habitually staring into the sun, but he transubstantiated this physical limitation into paintings that depicted eternity. A few pages later, Dyer is writing about climate change and the empty streets of COVID lockdown, which prompts in him a memory of seeing the Clash perform in London and missing the last train back to Oxford.
It turns out that Dyer, having set out to write a book about endings, is drawn to endlessness, to the way that one thing leads to another, to Nietzsche’s idea of the Eternal Recurrence, to Bill Murray’s iterative journey in “Groundhog Day,” to the 24-hour loop of Christian Marclay’s film “The Clock.” The notion of the apocalypse, with all of the heavy finality it entails, barely comes up in “The Last Days,” and Dyer says in passing that he “scarcely” thinks about his own mortality — “barely give it the time of day, as they say.” It probably strikes him as too ponderous, too definitive, too “grand” — “possibly the single most repulsive characteristic.”
Dyer is in his 60s now, and even though this book details the various ways that his body has slowed down, he has maintained a youthful buoyancy, an implacable easygoingness. “After a stage in a man’s life,” he writes, “it is essential that he retain some residue of how he saw the world as a 14-year-old.”
The pandemic is an inevitable presence, with Dyer launching at one point into a disquisition on how COVID made it impossible to travel, thereby blocking his access to those miniature toiletries from hotels, thereby ending his pledge never to buy another bottle of shampoo. “As coronavirus hardships go this barely merits a mention,” he concedes, “but I mention it precisely because it’s not worth mentioning.” His “shampoo project” was “not only lifeenhancing but life-defining.” He quotes Nietzsche saying, “The profoundest mind must also be the most frivolous one.” Might all this strenuous antigrandness come across as, well, a touch grand?
There are some gorgeous passages in “The Last Days,” some marvelous bits of criticism, some enthralling descriptions of psychedelics, some funny jokes. Still, there is a lot of detritus in a book that often reads like an assemblage of notes, as if every thought that came to mind was so endearing that it deserved to be recorded in full. “A benefit of writing is that it makes one less susceptible to the numerous irritations and calamities of the world beyond the desk,” Dyer writes. “It insulates from bad weather; it’s a shield against COVID and Trump (against thinking about them all the time).”
This idea of writing sounds appealing and pure. It expresses a kind of youthful idealism. But “The Last Days of Roger Federer” made me realize something else, too. After a while, even our 14-yearold selves get old.