A portrait of a young boy, who keeps passing exams—and of a changing England in the 1960s and 1970s. The only child of a dinner lady and a sheet-metal worker, Geoff Dyer grew up in the world of the English working hardworking, respectable, steeped in memories of the Depression and World War II. Accordingly, his memoir is not a story of hardship overcome but a celebration of opportunities afforded by the postwar settlement, of which he was an unconscious beneficiary. The crux comes at the age of eleven with the exam that has decided the future of secondary modern or the transformative promise of grammar school? One of the lucky winners, Dyer goes to grammar school and begins to develop a love of literature (and beer and prog rock). Only later does he understand that this win entails a loss. The loss is of a sense of belonging and—since this very personal story contains a larger social history—of an eroded but strangely resilient England. “Happenings” were a key part of the sixties mythology; this book traces, in perfectly phrased detail, another kind of happening, whose roots extend into the deep foundations of class society. Tracing a path from childhood through the tribulations of teenage sport, gig-going, romance, fights (well, getting punched in the face), and other misadventures with comic affection, Homework takes us to the threshold of university, where Dyer first feels the cultural distance from his origins that this book works so imaginatively and tenderly to shrink.
Author
Geoff Dyer was born in Cheltenham, England, in 1958. He was educated at the local Grammar School and Corpus Christi College, Oxford. He is the author of four novels: Paris Trance, The Search, The Colour of Memory, and, most recently, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi; a critical study of John Berger, Ways of Telling; five genre-defying titles: But Beautiful (winner of a 1992 Somerset Maugham Prize, short-listed for the Mail on Sunday/John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize), The Missing of the Somme, Out of Sheer Rage (a finalist for a National Book Critics Circle Award), Yoga For People Who Can’t Be Bothered To Do It (winner of the 2004 W. H. Smith Best Travel Book Award), and The Ongoing Moment (winner of the ICP Infinity Award for Writing on Photography), and Zona (about Andrei Tarkovsky’s film Stalker). His collection of essays, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition, won a National Book Critics Circle Award in 2012. He is also the editor of John Berger: Selected Essays and co-editor, with Margaret Sartor, of What Was True: The Photographs and Notebooks of William Gedney. A new book, Another Great Day at Sea, about life aboard the USS George H W Bush has just been published by Pantheon. In 2003 he was a recipient of a Lannan Literary Fellowship; in 2005 he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature; in 2006 he received the E. M. Forster Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters; in 2009 he was the recipient of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Best Comic Novel and the GQ Writer of the Year Award (for Jeff in Venice Death in Varanasi). His books have been translated into twenty-four languages. His website is geoffdyer.com
