A coolly funny stylist ... 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 ... All this is delivered in Dyer’s familiar mode of extended riffing, comic loitering, and dry exaggeration ... I found myself laughing with scandalized delight at my little shocks of recognition.
Both a captivating portrait of the artist as a young man and an insightful snapshot of postwar Britain ... Episodes are so brilliantly relayed ... Dyer’s most absorbing recollections are those concerning his foray into books. But his most satisfying depictions are of his humble, private, and resolutely unbookish parents ... A vibrant trip down memory lane. There might be little in the way of tension or drama in the form of growing pains or teenage angst, but there is no shortage of candid and beguiling recollections of scrapes, shenanigans, success, and self-discoveries.
It’s coherent, or maybe stable is a better word, free of the comical overstatement and fictional swerving that characterize Dyer’s other books. It’s formally recognizable in pretty much every way. It is also extremely good ... Beautiful.
Although hearing about someone else’s personal memorabilia is as dull as it ever was — at its low points, reading this book can feel like being trapped in a conversation with an uncle who is enjoying his reminiscences rather more than you are — Dyer is wonderful on the strangeness of remembering itself ... Records the kinds of memories we all have...but also the vividly remembered oddities ... Dyer’s memoir deftly captures this transformation, one both unlikely and inevitable.
Homework distinguishes itself like such a structure among the developed, dreary grounds of the British scholastic narrative ... If Dyer has grown sentimental about the England of his upbringing, his nostalgia is a subtle critique of how optimism in big government has grown worse for wear—Homework bursts with working-class pride, a fond and mournful belief in the possibility of the British welfare state ... Still, the fact of remembering can sometimes feel more important to Dyer than how events translate. He leads us through a grove of anecdotes, some more meaningful than others ... Humor is his life raft because he neglects to plot much of a course around the seas of memory. The book’s languor can be ponderous and vintage, more 20th century than 21st ... The book’s contrast, between familial impecunity and the minor damage of the narrator’s disappointments, forces us to look past circumstance and consider how materialism relates to affection and if this conflict is generational.
Rich, comic, moving, but slightly reticent ... Well stocked with the mundane, eccentric, or frankly lethal stuff of a British childhood in the mid-to-late twentieth century ... Aside from an enthusiasm for sci-fi and prog rock, he seems blithely untouched by larger or more urgent cultural moments or movements.
A good memoir needs to be both particular and universal, which Dyer achieves by applying his idiosyncratic world view to experiences many of us will recognise ... I was more or less constantly giggling for pages at a time ... Extraordinarily moving ... If you’ve read Dyer before then you’ll need no persuasion to read this book. If you haven’t, it’s the perfect place to start.
Page after solid page is full of precise recall, with nothing blurred at all ... A little bit memoir-by-numbers at times, and has some of the self- importance he punctures when he discusses writers who 'make a writerly meal' of their subject. Reading him can feel like a writerly meal, probably best savoured in small portions. That said, he is a serious writer, and brings a satisfying level of sophistication to this engagement with his own past.
Droll, erudite, digressive, self-deprecating, laid-back rather than standup in his humour – the Geoff Dyer voice is unmistakable ... It’s a while before he hits his stride.
Geoff Dyer has written all kinds of good books—on film, literature, sport, photography, war—but none of them I would call great, until now. Homework is an only-child memoir as funny, forthright and self-revealing as Edmund Gosse’s classic Father and Son (1907), with the bonus of being a picture of postwar England unlike any other. It may prove unforgettable ... The memory of childhood to most of us is a burial chamber long sealed off, but Dyer, like a pith-helmeted explorer, has broken into the tomb and, Eveready torch on full beam, precisely catalogues the mundane treasure of those early years and brings it back for our inspection ... A highly original memoir that will provoke, amuse, beguile—and endure.
Homework, Dyer’s 19th book, is not just an account of his childhood and adolescence but an account of his childhood and adolescent preoccupations ... His hobbyist anatomy of childhood obsessions—wearisome at points—adds up to a metonymic account of postwar British history; confusion is welcomed, as confusion always is in Dyer’s work, as closer to the truth than clarity ... Dyer’s parents are movingly memorialised, here. But it is difficult not to feel that Dyer’s programmatic hedonism, in life and in art, is a refutation of his parents’ anhedonic thriftiness—and thus of the shadow of the war.
Wonderfully wry ... Insightful, conversational, and often very funny, Dyer’s memoir is a glorious consideration of class, family, and the vagaries of childhood.
