Geoff Dyer

Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, by Geoff Dyer; Pantheon; 296 pages; $24.

This new book by one of my favorite writers comes, as usual, out of deep left field. Geoff Dyer’s books are reliably and joyfully unclassifiable. They range from an analysis of John Berger, to Paris Trance; a re-telling of Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, updated for the new millennium, to Out of Sheer Rage, the story of Dyer’s inability to write a book about D.H. Lawrence, in the course of which he writes the book.

Dyer adores paradox, and his use of language is marked by an undertone, and sometimes an overtone, of barely suppressed fury.

Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi contains two novelettes. In the first, a glum, middle-aged hack journalist attends the Biennale in Venice, consumes mass quantities of Bellinis and gazes desultorily at the art.

“Quite a bit of the work on display could have been designated conceptual, in so far as the people looking at it were conceived as having the mentality of pupils at junior school. Fair enough, except most of it looked like it was made by someone in primary school, albeit a primary school pupil with the ambition of a 17-year-old Russian whose widowed mother had saved every ruble to get him into a tennis academy in Florida.”

Did I mention that Dyer can be very funny?

Jeff meets a beautiful younger woman named Laura, with whom he exchanges smart, witty backchat in the manner of William Powell and Myrna Loy — at one point, they propose to launch an art exhibition called “Is That It?” displaying works by the most consistently disappointing artists of their day — after which, they proceed to commit sexual acts that would have struck Powell and Loy as excessively energetic.

In the end, the Biennale over, they part, telling each other they really must do it again sometime.
Jeff is a familiar man in his profession: the cynic who loathes most people but not nearly as much as he loathes himself; the low man on the totem pole who can be had for a couple of glasses of Prosecco and some canapés and who consoles himself by thinking of those who aren’t on the totem pole at all.

Death in Varanasi apparently finds the same journalist — a point Dyer is needlessly coy about, as his name never is mentioned — in India on short notice to turn a story that, like all stories, he has no interest in turning. He is attracted to a young woman, but she is more interested in a friend of his, so he spends most of his time observing bodies being burned by the Ganges, hence the title. He watches “women in red and yellow saris flicker by like load-bearing flames.”

With time, and immersion, something overtakes him. He begins to go native in a big way, shaving his head and wearing traditional Indian garments. He stops reading and stops caring about going home.

“I’d come to Varanasi because there was nothing to keep me in London, and I stayed on for the same reason: because there was nothing to go home for.”

As I said: paradoxical and completely unclassifiable. The novellas both contain elements of travel writing, along with eroticism, but Jeff in Venice, narrated in the third person, carries Dyer’s trademarked charged voice — some of the same fury as Philip Roth but with less motivation.

Death in Varanasi, however, is narrated in the first person, and it’s a more ruminative, slower and less interesting trip. Yet, it’s redeemed by Jeff — if it is Jeff in the second story, and I believe it is — and his crystallizing moment of revelation about his life: the way he’s always found something getting in the way of his enjoyment.

“I realized now that the thing was me. I was in my way. I was ahead of me in the queue. I was keeping me waiting. … When I drank beer, I was waiting for the glass to empty so that I could have it filled and start drinking again. Rather than simply enjoying the high of cocaine, I was also monitoring it, to see if the effect was wearing off, so I could top it up, have more, start monitoring again. … In Varanasi, I no longer felt like I was waiting. The waiting was over. I was over. I had taken myself out of the equation.”

If Jeff in Venice is the question, then Death in Varanasi is the answer.

Dyer is, as always, brilliant — a writer who matters.