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 self-importance 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 USS George H.W. Bush was that it allowed him the privacy and freedom to break wind.
