Droll, erudite, digressive, self-deprecating, laid-back rather than standup in his humour – the Geoff Dyer voice is unmistakable. In his new book he says he’s “most at home in the idiom of the ironic switchback, an educationally enhanced version of something that still [comes] under the broad conversational church-pub known as banter”. You can hear the banter in the title of his 2003 book Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It.
Banter’s trickier with a childhood memoir. If you were relatively happy growing up, as he was, in Cheltenham, the only child of parents who loved him, and you want to be honest about your upbringing, then you can’t muck about too much. Dyer’s humour has never precluded seriousness – about jazz, film, photographs, paintings, DH Lawrence and much besides. But as the title suggests, Homework is a duty in earnest, a task he’s compelled (if only by himself) to complete.
