'Among the funniest things Dyer has ever written'. Review: White Sands, by Geoff Dyer

Canongate, £16.99

Review by Richard Strachan

IN THE title essay of this characteristically funny and unexpectedly profound collection, Geoff Dyer is driving with his wife from Alamogordo to El Paso, having spent the day in the gypsum dune fields of White Sands. Stopping to pick up a hitchhiker, they soon pass a sign warning against doing exactly this, drawing motorists’ attention to a nearby detention facility and the risk that the hitchhiker you’ve just picked up is probably an escaped convict. And yet, as the atmosphere in the car curdles, Dyer can’t quite bring himself to ask the man to get out; he’s worried it might seem rude. As the hitchhiker tries to explain himself, Dyer finds his mind wandering: “Whatever I was meant to be thinking about and concentrating on, I thought to myself, I was always thinking about something else, and that something else was always myself and my problems.” This is in fact a pretty succinct summary of Dyer’s style and method as an essayist and travel writer; an endearing comic solipsism that doesn’t quite mask a steely self-awareness, and that gives little hint of a perspective that sees the world as equally freighted with meaning and the source of potential disappointment.

If Dyer’s collections have always been heterogeneous, linked more by fact they were written by Geoff Dyer rather any other connective thread, there’s a thematic cohesion to this book that distinguishes it from its nearest work, Yoga for People Who Can’t be Bothered To Do It. The book is given context by the last essay, an account of the mild stroke Dyer suffered not long after moving to California. Although it has had no lasting effect on him, the incident clearly gives a retrospective significance to the works of art or the resonant places he writes about here. Rather than presenting just another series of jaded travel pieces, Dyer has implicitly used his brush with mortality to turn his gaze inwards as well as outwards, to engage more with the numinous, and the essays are interspersed with short recollections of significant places and people from his childhood; a vertical pillar of sandstone just outside his home town, for example, or his louche auntie Hilda, who first brought him back reports from the American west that he has come to love so well. From this perspective, the pieces on outsider art like Sabato Rodia’s Watts Towers in Los Angeles, “a highly decorative exo-skeleton for an absent interior”, or more mainstream conceptual pieces like The Lightning Field in Quemado, New Mexico, become meditations on the fundamentally religious impulse to create sites of meaning. For Dyer, art and landscape, especially the vast, unhindered landscapes of the American west, are negotiations with time, where “Time is alive, permanently.”

All this might sound sombre, but some of the essays are among the funniest things Dyer has ever written. Northern Dark is a hilariously bleak account of a failed attempt to see the Northern Lights on a trip to the “hellhole” of Longyearbyen in Norway, and Dyer’s immature crush on his tour guide in Beijing’s Forbidden City becomes the source of much self-mocking comedy. Only the first piece in the book disappoints, a peculiarly clumsy and overbearing piece about Gaugin and Tahiti, that seems to confirm rather than unmask Dyer’s self-described reputation for indolence. On top of this there are familiar landmarks to help guide the reader, and Dyer draws frequently on his personal pantheon for illumination, an eclectic mix of writers like John Berger and DH Lawrence, as well as jazz musicians like Don Cherry and critical theorists like Theodor Adorno.

In the course of what has now become a long and distinguished career, Dyer has always made a virtue of the way he blurs the distinction between fiction and non-fiction. In a brief note at the beginning, he explains that “the book does not demand to be read according to how far from a presumed dividing line … it is presumed to stand”, a stance that gives him the freedom to introduce fictive elements into his essays, and essayistic elements into his fiction (or both at the same time). It’s a style he has made completely his own, and that offers near-limitless scope for expansion; as long as Dyer finds something interesting enough to write about, you can guarantee that it will be interesting enough to read about too.