Class in the background, people in front

Written after his parents’ death, Geoff Dyer's Homework is a book about beginnings. Starting with his birth in 1958, the memoir follows Dyer’s upbringing in working-class Cheltenham, ending eighteen years later on the eve of his first year at Oxford. Call it social mobility if you will, but it was not a hero's journey, Dyer emphasises. “I was lucky," he repeats, once for passing the exam that got him into grammar school and again for all the “free stuff” that sustained Britain after the instatement of Beveridge's welfare state and before Thatcherism.

Unlike The Last Days of Roger Federer, a book on the last chapters of the likes of Beethoven and Nietzsche, Homework recounts an ordinary story, then. Where previous generations had forayed into history and bore the scars of two world wars, Dyer's story is one of many that “happened” to White working-class boys like him. But if class is “a perennial English experience," Dyer only picked up on it in his twenties, reading the works of E. P. Thompson and Raymond Williams. In his life and prose, class stays in the background.

Front and centre you will rather find the hundreds of details that make people who they are, paraphrasing a beloved quote from Wharton’s The Age of Innocence. It is “the precision with which you can render everyday life” that makes writing worth it, as Dyer puts it.

Charming the audience with self-deprecating wit, he reserves much of this precision to the quips and quirks of his late dad, whose garage full of tools was “like the tomb of a working-class pharaoh.” He “didn’t believe in abroad,” and never went on holiday bar a coach trip to France forced by his wife later in life. He hated spending money so much that “he wouldn’t give you a gum chew if his mouth was full of them.”

None of this is meant at his dad’s expense or that of anyone else’s story. “In what I write, nobody should emerge worse than me", Dyer sums it up. Following the master and friend John Berger, Dyer seeks “writing, and writing about everything, so that all readers can learn something new and... have a good time.”

He will also tell you not to listen to the advice of friends and publishers. Avoid your dad’s too: “Never put anything in writing”, Geoff's dad once warned. Dyer listened but made exceptions, it seems, whenever he could be accurate.