Geoff Dyer, the British novelist, critic and essayist, sums up his new collection of essays and reviews from the past 25 years, “Otherwise Known as the Human Condition” (Graywolf; 432 pages) as “a glimpse of a not-unrepresentative way of being a late-twentieth-early-twenty-first-century man of letters” — one who writes on assignment, covering a vast range of subjects, in addition to creating fiction. “It’s a job for life; more accurately, it is a life,” he writes in the introduction, “and hardly a day goes by without my marveling that it is somehow feasible to lead it.”
Dyer’s gigs include magazine essays, book reviews, and introductions to photographic collections and new editions of works by canonical authors. He swings from trenchant critiques (Ian McEwan’s “Atonement”) to you-are-there journalistic adventures (“The Wrong Stuff”) to astute art and music criticism (“Turner and Memory,” “Is Jazz Dead?”) to personal essays (“Sacked”), seeing his subjects with a piercing eye, punctuating his ideas with telling metaphors and imparting mind-blowing insights in every piece, and seemingly on every page. Continue reading
