Geoff sentences

• Last Updated: May 07. 2009 3:47PM UAE / May 7. 2009 11:47AM GMT

Carnival participant in Venice. Rex Features

Geoff Dyer’s new novel jumps abruptly from the art-world glitz of Venice to the shores of the Ganges. Denise Roig considers the inventive oeuvre of a writer unbound by the strictures of genre or convention

Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi
Geoff Dyer
Canongate
Dh72

“It’s possible to be a hundred per cent sincere and a hundred per cent ironic at the same time,” observes the nameless narrator of the second section of Geoff Dyer’s new novel, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi. The character could be describing the writer who created him. Travel writer, art critic, novelist, essayist – no label feels expansive or descriptive enough to take in the whole of Dyer’s turf – he brilliantly crosses and blends not only genres, but two quite different experiences of the world, two ways of seeing. He is the open, trusting heart in possession of a mind that knows better, the sardonic romantic. When Dyer is sober, he is also ribald. When filled with awe, he is at the same time irreverent.

In the final travel essay of Yoga For People Who Can’t Be Bothered To Do It, for example, Dyer visits Burning Man, the annual hallucinatory happening in the Nevada desert. He takes part in the bliss and the mayhem, bicycling across the playa in a pink feather boa, staying up all night for such events as the Great Canadian Beaver-Eating Contest. Spliced between these side-splitting episodes are elegiac descriptions of holy sites in the Far East. Somewhere on the tightrope walk between the two narrative threads we learn of Dyer’s recent emotional breakdown, something only hinted at in the book’s previous essays. On the last page, he leaves us nearly weeping with the wacky, beautiful pain of it all. This convergence – everything exists concurrently, or at least in such close juxtaposition that it seems that way – is what gives Dyer’s work power, what makes us hoot and choke.

Exploding the expectations of genres is part of the punch. His biography of DH Lawrence, Out of Sheer Rage, reads more like an autobiography: it is as much about Dyer’s near-phobic resistance to writing about Lawrence as about Lawrence’s life and work. His novels – Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, the first in 11 years, is his fourth – often lack the usual footholds of character development and plot. Paris Trance, his second novel, lopes along like a druggy, lovesick travelogue. “Personally, I’m not that interested in content,” he once told an interviewer in The Brooklyn Rail.

In the same interview, Dyer cited Ryszard Kapuscinski and Nietzsche among his favourite “novelists”, and claimed that the “fiction/non-fiction distinction means nothing to me. There are distortions in both.” These remarks could be taken as deliberately provocative – a baiting of the interviewer to see whether he was awake. But Dyer seems to mean it. “Everything in this book really happened, but some of the things that happened only happened in my head; by the same token, all the things that didn’t happen didn’t happen there too,” he writes in the introduction to Yoga For People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It.

Maddening? Sometimes; but Dyer is above all entertaining, playing the distortions for all they’re worth and revelling in the bending of genres. And despite his self-absorption – he is often front and centre, the main persona – he is endlessly curious about the world. He began But Beautiful, now considered a classic book on jazz, knowing very little about music. More recently, he published a book on photography, The Ongoing Moment, in which he admitted that he hadn’t owned a camera for most of his life. Dyer brings to any enterprise a heightened awareness of what is beautiful, an uncensored sense of humour, an eye for meaningful connections, and a surprising depth in the scatter.

Dyer’s latest is a novel in two parts. Before its publication, he said he didn’t know whether he would call it Jeff in Venice or Death in Varanasi. It seems quintessential Dyer that in the end he went with both titles. Why leave anything out? In the first section, a freelance writer named Jeff Atman goes to Venice to write a story for an arts magazine. Like all Dyer’s “heroes”, Atman carries baggage heavier than his laptop. He is seriously out of love with his profession (“Back at his desk, the perennial question kept cropping up: how much longer could he keep doing this stuff for?”) and worried about the interview he’s been assigned with the former wife of a dead painter. Mostly he suffers from a sense of how small a space he inhabits on the planet. “The biggest joke of all – the thing that made him more depressed than anything – was that at a certain level he was considered successful.”

The parties begin. Champagne flows, elbows rub, vaporetti deliver the glitterarti from one gala event to another. At the first of these, Jeff meets Laura: young, American, desirable. As is often the case in Dyer’s writing, first encounters are visceral or nothing. “He looked at her but there was only one thing to say … and since he couldn’t say what he wanted to say – you’re beautiful and unless you have a voice like David Beckham’s, I’m going to be in love with you in less than a minute – he said nothing.”

They walk the canals, they see art, they go to bed. After four or five days of this, Laura returns to California and Jeff is left sitting by a canal wondering what, if anything, will happen next. As he contemplates his situation, we get descriptions of Venice that sound a great deal like Geoff Dyer, consummate observer and travel writer. Jeff trudges up the stairs of an old church, lamenting that “the idea of the church tended to go hand in hand with a not inconsiderable thrust of verticality, that the notion of the bungalow had never really taken root in ecclesiastical design”. And earlier: “The idea of Venice being insubstantial, a shimmering dissolution of light and water with everything turning into air, was at odds with Jeff’s experience of being there. The thing that struck him about Venice was how substantial it was.”

A protégé of the art critic and novelist John Berger (one of his first books was Ways of Telling: The Works of John Berger), Dyer knows his way around a gallery. In some of the book’s funniest moments, he skewers the pretensions of conceptual art. “Ideally, the perfect art installation would be a nightclub, full of people, pumping music, lights, smoke machine and maybe drugs thrown in. You could call it Nightclub, and if you kept it going 24 hours a day it would be the big hit of the Biennale.”

Like the best funny writers, Dyer is always on the edge of sadness. For Atman, now alone in Venice, “there was nothing to do except stroll, so he strolled through the crowded, empty city. It was like swimming in the sea, when you go from a patch of warm water to a band of chilling cold.” Something leaves us cool as readers as well. Perhaps it is Jeff’s take on Laura, which seems so simplistically male – she reads mostly as an ever-changing dress that can hold up her end of a cryptic conversation, not a person you miss when she’s gone. The dialogue between the lovers is clunky, often revealing what we already know about them. When, over strawberry gelati, Jeff worries “that they were talking themselves out of what he most wanted to talk about: how they were going to spend the rest of their lives together”, it feels unearned. We are left more bemused than moved.

The book’s second half, Death in Varanasi, is narrated by a London journalist assigned a story for The Telegraph on short notice: 1,200 words on India’s holiest city. Is it Jeff Atman, post-Venice? Is this where he’s gone to recover? How much time, if any, has elapsed? The connection is never made clear. Jeff and the unnamed journalist sound similar, but the journalist seems even less anchored. There’s less at home to pull him back, more here to draw him in. On an early taxi drive through Varanasi, he observes: “Everything was piled up. Everything was excessive. Everything was brightly coloured and loud, so everything had to be even brighter and louder than everything else.”

Time ticks. The weather heats up, the travel story gets filed, friendships are forged – one of Dyer’s many strengths is his rendering of on-the-road encounters – and the journalist stays on at the Ganges View hotel. “I had become almost a fixture at the hotel … I was no longer on the lookout for friends, for people I could eat dinner and make jokes with. Everyone I met was just passing through.” We watch him strip away creature comforts and earthly desires as he navigates the ghats along the Ganges. And we watch him slowly relinquish his former self. He loses his passport: “Unsure of precisely how long I had been here, I checked the visa in my passport – or would have done, if I could have found it.” He is barely recognised by an old acquaintance visiting from London: “You look like a castaway,” comments the man.

One afternoon the journalist crosses to the other side of the Ganges – a shore that has looked hazy and holy from across the water. Up close, the other side is a wasteland of sand and boggy, brackish pools. He concludes that “since this life – the one back on the other side, over there in Varanasi, back in the world – was the only one you got, the only real crime or mistake was not to make the most of it. The idea of the afterlife or eternity was just what it was revealed to be here: rubbish ... What was left here was the aftermath of life itself, what was left when your time was up.” Such sober truths often lie in surprising wait at the end of even the zaniest Dyer romp.

But even with allowances for his diversions, for his playing with form and convention, one is too often left wondering: where is this going? Will the trailing ends of Part One ever connect with Part Two? Of course, one doesn’t read a Dyer novel for the usual narrative devices. But one does look for the unlikely, moving intersection: of the absurd with the true, the ironic with the sincere. Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi feels so deliberately divided that it begs to hook up somewhere. But connection and, consequently, meaning are hard to come by.

I recently reread Hotel Oblivion, one of Dyer’s best essays. Dyer, his girlfriend, Dazed, and an acquaintance they call Amsterdam Dave meet in the Dutch capital for a mutual friend’s 40th birthday party. There are the usual Dyer high jinks with illegal substances and bad weather. In one of the funniest scenes in recent British literature, Dyer tries to change his rained-on pants in a loo the size of a lily pad. But there’s depth and emotion here, too, stumbled-upon happiness. The three end up hopelessly lost at night on the Amsterdam canals, convinced they will never, ever find their hotel again. And then they do. And then they don’t. Same name, different hotel. Still, the key works in the door. “Although it did not look like our hotel, perhaps it was our hotel after all, and even if it wasn’t, it was a good sign, surely, that the key worked.” In moments like these, Dyer pulls off something deeply satisfying that still eludes him as a novelist: he connects. The keys fit.

Denise Roig’s latest collection of short stories is called Any Day Now.