Essays hit the mark with inside stories

HERE is a terrible admission for a reviewer with pretensions to objectivity: I often judge a book by its cover.

Author Geoff Dyer at home near London. Picture: Stuart Clarke

HERE is a terrible admission for a reviewer with pretensions to objectivity: I often judge a book by its cover.

Take, for example, Working the Room, English author Geoff Dyer's second collection of essays, reviews, appreciations and autobiographical pieces, culled from the last decade.

What a handsome production it is! Hardback, with quarter-bound cloth over paper-covered boards and patterned endpapers: the book world's equivalent of a three-piece suit. And at 400 pages, including index and acknowledgements, it is a substantial volume in a physical sense.

Even the black and white author photograph, its subject in profile, eyes cast down to an invisible text, bespeaks intellectual seriousness.

Look more closely at the rigid geometry of its cover art, however -- a series of converging lines that suggest the minimalist interior of an East End gallery, complete with abstract canvases -- and you will notice something curious: the image is rendered in a graphic designer's approximation of blue biro. Even the admiring bumpf on the rear panel ("possibly the best living writer in Britain", etc,) has been cursorily underlined with what may well be a Bic ballpoint.

Here is one case where superficial examination provides clues to the deep content of a text.

Cool high-mindedness, warmed to body temperature by a cheerfully insolent and self-mocking wit: the Dyer method in a nutshell. This is why we have come to read him as a Kulturcritik on the European model -- philosophically learned, cosmopolitan in outlook, a 21st-century flaneur -- who nonetheless provides all the pleasures (clubability, irony, passionate amateurism) that mark indelibly the personal essay in Britain from Dr Johnson to Zadie Smith.

It also helps that Dyer writes like a dream. Here he is, describing the acquired taste that is novelist Denis Johnson, author of 2007's Tree of Smoke:

What made it [Johnson's previous novel] so intriguing was that it seemed to be the work of a writer who, at some level, did not know how to write at all -- and yet knew exactly what he was doing. Jesus' Son, his best-known book, is even skimpier: a collection of stories about strung-out losers unfolding in meticulously addled prose . . . A writer, then, of distinctly American graininess: a metaphysical illiterate, a junkyard angel.

It takes certain poise to celebrate an anti-stylist such as Johnson using critical faculties honed by reading English at Oxford. But the difficulty of doing so is part of the attraction for Dyer. As an essayist he seeks subjects far removed from the front offices of music, literature, art. And as a man he is drawn to those outsiders and eccentrics whose restlessness, eclecticism or plain oddity makes them immune to categorisation.

In fact, "conventional artistic achievement" is, for Dyer, an almost oxymoronic term. It is those who by dint of talent or temperament somehow escape the narrow, agreed modes of thinking from which culture is constructed -- those who commune with reality in its unmediated form -- whose insights are most worth exploring.

This is why, in an essay on the emergence of ghost-bikes, those battered white cycles left chained to traffic lights and fences in urban centres throughout the US and Europe as monuments to dead cyclists, Dyer is moved to write:

Perhaps it is a sign not only of the solipsism of the contemporary art world but of a wider social failing, that it is on the margins -- and beyond -- of the competitive, hedge-fund-powered art market that one finds evidence that art, rather than being an amusing diversion or profitable investment, might be integrated with a broader goal of social progress.

He is saying that art has power -- aesthetic impact, political heft -- to the degree that it resists assimilation into the mainstream; once incorporated, it becomes elevator music. And while this attitude might seem relatively recent, a vague anti-corporatism with its roots in British punk and the ideological battles of the Thatcher years and beyond, it is actually grounded in a tradition far older. It was D.H. Lawrence who wrote that a "book lives as long as it is unfathomed. Once it is fathomed, once it is known and its meaning is fixed or established, it is dead."

Lawrence is the subject of Dyer's most explicitly autobiographical work of "faction", 1997's Out of Sheer Rage, and one of the great renegades to which the later author continually returns. Here he is represented by two essays, originally published as introductions to Penguin Classics reissues, on Sons & Lovers and Lady Chatterley's Lover. Both are small miracles:

For [critic Raymond] Williams, "the tragedy of Lawrence the working-class boy is that he did not live to come home". In fact, that was a part of his triumph. As Lawrence sought gradually to realise his "inner destiny" through a series of surges and repudiations, he came to feel that he didn't "belong to any class"; after years of wandering, of feeling a stranger everywhere, he came to feel "everywhere . . . at home".

It is hard not to read Dyer's (another working-class boy) famously peripatetic lifestyle and transnational fascinations (Indian ragas, Czech photographers, Russian films and American novels) in the light of these words. It is also fair to say the best essays in Working the Room are about writers on the move: Rebecca West, for example, whose magnum opus on the nations of former Yugoslavia inspires a rhapsody:

Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is digressive and meandering -- you never know what will happen next -- but this is not to say it is shapeless . . . Making different demands on the reader's expectations of order, [it] has the unity or fluidity of a sustained improvisation in prose.

Again, it is hard not to see a great deal of the author reflected in his treatment of his subjects. When Dyer reads W.G. Sebald's The Rings of Saturn, he observes that "it is the trembling, the perpetual uncertainty, the hovering on the edge of infinitely tedious regress . . . that generate the particular suspense . . . that makes Sebald's writing so compelling." He could just as easily be reviewing his own pleasantly interminable faction from 2007, Yoga for People Who Can't be Bothered to Do It.

If there is a faint tang of narcissism about a critical project assembled from those who reflect the author's talents and preoccupations, the total effect charms more often than it chafes. A true critic -- and Dyer is a true critic, one of the smartest and funniest, and most various in his interests, at work today -- is one whose reading is continually refracted through their personality and life experience. Their reception of each new creative act is recorded as an addition to, an overlay of, the perceiving self, rather than a temporary interruption, a momentary distraction from the business of living.

In this sense, all the essays of Working the Room are autobiographical, despite the air of serial fandom they transmit. As Andrew O'Hagan once wrote of the Smiths' frontman, Morrissey, a universally adored musical fixture of Britain in the 80s: "Influences were the whole point of him, it seemed, and he understood hero-worship in such a manner as to make him a new sort of hero."

Geordie Williamson is chief literary critic of The Australian.