A Memoir of Working-Class Britain Wrings Playfulness from Pain

The escape from working-class life has good narrative pedigree, a classic form—beginning with the idea of escape itself. It’s something like a sharpened bildungsroman. The child is nudged forward by an ambitious parent, by an influential teacher, or simply by a curiosity that, like water, insists on finding its way in and out. There’s the Cortés-like discovery of world-disclosing books; the opening up at school or university; perhaps a gradual estrangement from those same ambitious parents, who discover, too late, that they’ve been underwriting the family’s own unravelling. And then there’s the journey away from the old home, toward actual new worlds.

“Homework” (Farrar, Straus & Giroux), a new memoir by the English writer Geoff Dyer, traces several such journeys. Dyer could hardly be unself-conscious about what might be called his writes of passage. A coolly funny stylist—the author of the brilliant “Out of Sheer Rage,” among many other books—he knows a thing or two about narratives of, and out of, working-class life. Dyer was born in Cheltenham in 1958, the same year that the Marxist cultural theorist Raymond Williams, who would become an important influence on Dyer’s work, published the pioneering study “Culture and Society.” In a sense, Dyer grew up alongside British cultural materialism. Intellectually, the era was one of radical ferment, but radicalism worked on the canonical: D. H. Lawrence and Thomas Hardy remained royalty in schools and universities, thanks to the king-making attentions of Williams and F. R. Leavis. It’s no surprise to find Lawrence and Hardy invoked in “Homework,” or to learn that one of the secondhand books Dyer’s mother brought home was a battered orange Penguin of Williams’s “Border Country.” You could say that Dyer has done his homework.

But it’s not just homework; it’s also the work that home does on you. The reason Lawrence, Hardy, and Williams shadow “Homework” is not simply that Dyer is a shrewd reader who propelled himself from a bookless, working-class home to Cheltenham Grammar, and then to Oxford. Others have made that climb, too. What makes those writers crucial here is that Dyer’s own journey is viscerally connected to theirs. Hardy, the son of a Dorset stonemason and a mother who oversaw his schooling, wrote “Jude the Obscure,” the great novel of frustrated ambition, about a stonemason’s attempt to access a lightly fictionalized Oxford. (Dyer admits that he once filched a copy from a Cheltenham bookshop.) Lawrence was the son of a Nottinghamshire miner who could barely read and an ambitious mother who’d taught school. Williams, the son of a Welsh railway worker, was, like Dyer, lifted by grammar school and a scholarship to an august university—Cambridge, in his case.

And Geoff Dyer is the only child of a Gloucestershire sheet-metal worker and a school lunch lady. Home was more or less bookless. His mother may have bought books for him, but, as he notes, she “never became a reader.” In fact, she was only a generation removed from illiteracy: her own father, a farm laborer from Shropshire, couldn’t read at all. She’d say that, like some twentieth-century Tess Durbeyfield, she was “raised to milk cows.” She longed to be a seamstress but somehow lacked the confidence, or the self-esteem, to pursue even that modest ambition.

Dyer is provoked to a kind of bitter bewilderment by the “culture of deference” that fixed his parents’ lives in place. He grew up in a family ruled by fatalism, and by the dictum of “accepting one’s lot.” His parents benefitted, to some extent, from postwar prosperity, but remained in the grip of older anxieties. He speculates that they’d only ever really known a “subsistence-level relation to the world”—mere survival, leaving little for the surplus of culture or even of leisure. Pleasure was difficult, almost a burden. His parents were the products of “centuries of rural life in which obligations and hardships greatly outweighed all possibilities of treats or abundance.” So the past was always close at hand: the young Dyer could almost touch those long centuries of rural life—the same world that connected him to the writers he was reading (and, sometimes, shoplifting). One wonders if the Oxford dons who marked his essays on Lawrence and Hardy ever understood that, for Dyer, these authors could never be just “authors.”

Dyer’s memoir is a funny and often painful book that both follows and departs from the traditional working-class bildungsroman. It offers, perhaps, a stranger account than even Dyer quite allows: at times, a wounded narrative pretending not to be. Many of the classic elements are here—the murky atrocity of school food; the ecstatic discovery of literature (for Dyer, especially Shakespeare) and music (gallons of dubious prog rock); a spurt or two of rebellion; sexual fumblings in cars; the anxious opening of exam results in “buff-coloured” envelopes, those official passports to the wider world.

All this is delivered in Dyer’s familiar mode of extended riffing, comic loitering, and dry exaggeration. At one point, he pauses to analyze a family snapshot, reading both the sociology and the aesthetics of a nineteen-sixties photograph, in a bit of Englished Roland Barthes. Then he turns to his parents. Perhaps it seems odd, he writes, that his dad’s sweater is tucked into his trousers, “but since he tucked his shirt into his underpants an internally layered logic is at work.” Where Barthes hunted for the punctum, the accidental detail that pierces the heart, Dyer larkily pretends to puncture the punctum. The pretense is the thing. His style, as carefully layered as his father’s clothing, is one of punctilious paradox—the paradox being that Dyer is always performing not performing. The result is an almost weary vanity, in which the author plays himself as if under duress, simultaneously flourishing and folding up the self.

That Dyer burlesque—of self-ravelling and unravelling—stretched across a memoir (though the narrative essentially ends at twenty-one) quickly takes on a quality of mock-heroic completism. Like it or not, Dyer is going to tell us, in great detail, about the boyish intricacies of Airfix model airplanes, the TV programs that his family watched, his bicycles, his favorite sweets, the painstaking assembly of a Brooke Bond tea-card library, or the day that Jeremy Hartwell thought he was getting first prize at the school raffle, only to learn he had won third (a large Cadbury’s Fruit & Nut bar).

This reader did like it. Perhaps because my own nineteen-seventies childhood in the North of England was atmospherically similar to Dyer’s, or more likely because Dyer can be involvingly funny about anything, I found myself laughing with scandalized delight at my little shocks of recognition. Yes, the school showers, being in unpleasant proximity to the school toilets, gave one the sense, as Dyer puts it, that “one was cleaning oneself in very hot piss.” Why, indeed, were the dead “front rooms” in people’s tiny houses so rarely used, instead kept as morbidly pristine as an undertaker’s parlor? (Dyer spent the first eleven years of his life in what is known in Britain as a two-up-two-down—two bedrooms upstairs, two rooms and a kitchen downstairs.) Yes, childhood was a time of variously disgusting smells, starting but by no means ending with those of school food. Dyer gives us the perfect phrase: “a thick smell of inbred gravy.” Inbred! As if it were the product less of a recipe than of an accursed inheritance.

My own upbringing was more middle class than Dyer’s, and I was born seven years later, but I remember well the stringent thrift of that postwar era—a slightly traumatized austerity that lasted into Mrs. Thatcher’s avaricious, wide-boy eighties. Everything could be patched, darned, or tinkered with. (Some cars existed only to be tinkered with.) Failing that, you could always hit the thing—slapping the TV usually did the trick. Dyer is especially funny about the purity of his family’s recycling: once his father had used up his razors, they were handed to his mother to shave her legs; once she’d finished with them, they still weren’t thrown out. “Their functional life was ended but they had some as yet undiscovered potential use even if they were so blunt as to have rendered suicide almost impossible,” Dyer writes. Cue the droll puncturing of the punctum: “Given sufficient determination you could have attempted to saw away at your wrists but the effort and time involved would have reawakened a sense of purpose synonymous with the will to live.”

In that modest world, to assert one’s own needs or aversions was to court moral disapproval. Dyer rarely liked the food that he was served, including his mother’s cooking. “Well, you’re hard to please” was the quintessentially English response. In context, Dyer notes, it was “a terrible rebuke.” Being “hard to please,” he adds, “was anathema to the culture of gratitude that pervaded the 1960s.”

Is it any wonder that, as a writer, Dyer has so brilliantly cultivated a style of ironic self-escape, a kind of negative egotism? The prose points both ways: I am, and am not, hard to please. The mock-heroic plenitude—a page, say, on Waddington’s jigsaw map of the British Isles, or four pages on schoolyard fights, including a close study of the resident bully—is a way of insisting on one’s importance and denying it at the same time. Movingly, this self-insistence can be read as a type of amateur cultural materialism: here, for the record, are the smallest specificities of a working-class English childhood in the sixties and seventies. Down among the Cadbury Fruit & Nut, the Vesta beef curry, and the Huntley & Palmers Breakfast Biscuits is a reality rarely touched by theorists, who are too busy theorizing. Here, too, in the Airfix models and the vainglorious LP collection is the solitary self-curation of the only child—the kid who can’t dash from his bedroom to a sibling’s, model or record in hand. These things are precious.

Yet something is also being denied, or avoided. As “Homework” unfolds, the reader starts to see Dyer’s mock heroics as a species of louche misdirection. Surely he knows what he’s doing. To open a section with “One year there was a raffle at school,” or “When I was fifteen we went to Bournemouth for a summer holiday,” or even “To my surprise I quite enjoyed rugby, up to a point,” is to offer a kind of defensive pre-ironizing—the writing setting itself up for its own sardonic disavowal. If everything is important, then nothing quite is. But what, exactly, is being disavowed?