Mr. Dyer is keenly, almost achingly, aware of our own impermanence. His imagination, you could say, has a built-in time-lapse function. He sees a lifetime of past and future boredom in a museum guard’s face; the sight of a particular soccer field immediately induces 'a vision of its own demise'; 'The Lightning Field' makes him wonder what aliens will make of it long after humans are gone.
'Stories don't interest me,' Geoff Dyer told the Huffington Post in 2014. That this is true is evident in his new collection of essays, White Sands. Which doesn't mean that White Sands isn't a good read, because it is. You must, however, get used to Dyer's tone, which is persnickety and unenthusiastic. His virtue is not the whole-hearted embrace of experience and exotic locales but the parsing of degrees of disappointment. He also doesn't pretend to be heading anywhere, but then White Sands turns into a memoir and becomes unexpectedly moving.
When Dyer’s insights gain altitude, they are transcendent, reminding us that every square inch of the planet shimmers with the magnetism of its former life and former meaning. And yet, even as that awareness rises in him, it’s clear that Dyer is not someone comfortable in an empty world, and he connects most easily to the sublime through the man-made, like the eerie Lightning Field, and as the installation’s artificial magic gathers steam in his consciousness, the power of the landscape itself, and its existence before civilization and art, seems to dwindle. By the time you finish this collection, the answer to the question — What is Geoff Dyer searching for? — comes not directly but by default. To be alive, I suppose, is the answer. To make sure his world is as big as he can get it and to make sure that his mind keeps apace of that expansion. A worthy enough mandate for a guy just passing through, as are we all.
There are a number of interesting factoids and Dyer's usual fluid, intelligent style. But I am baffled by the meaning of it all. The book seems an unnecessary journey.
In his ninth nonfiction book (he’s also turned out four novels and several essay collections), the very droll Dyer makes a series of pilgrimages, then wonders what all the fuss was about. The fact that the reader knows that this will be his reaction takes away nothing from the amusement, and occasional enlightenment, of the journey. That’s Dyer’s specialty. If the arrival is inevitably disappointing, that doesn’t make the getting there any less worthy of the effort.
There are clever moments and flashes of humor and a few high points, but nothing in it feels especially urgent or revelatory ... It’s not that Dyer isn’t capable of marvels. But here, at the height of his career he’s not writing at the height of his powers. The laziest moments tend to appear as conclusions, when he’s feeling the pressure of finding the plot ... Dyer seems to have swallowed the myth that surrounds certain very exceptional prose stylists, which is that it doesn’t matter whatthey write about or what they say, so long as they say it well ... At his best, Dyer is humorous and erudite, a rare combination. He uses his novelistic gifts—documenting social behaviors, seamlessly following streams of thought, juxtaposing observation and dialogue—to capture ephemera, fleetingness, beauty ... If White Sands were by anyone else, I would probably think it was pretty good. But it’s by Geoff Dyer.
Experiences From the Outside World, is a collection of his travel writing, though the real thread that runs through it is painful honesty ... Not much happens to Dyer; probably the most dramatic moments in White Sands are his attempt at dogsledding (he falls off), an attempted hookup with his Forbidden City guide (no spoilers) and, in the title essay, his acquisition of a sinister hitchhiker in New Mexico (ditto). The real action is in the lively intercourse between Dyer’s mind and the outside world.
Dyer is not at his best when he projects our shared fate ('We are here to go somewhere else'); he is too easily aroused and disappointed and self-concerned to do this work. He’s better — among the recent best, I think — when he’s telling a first-person story about contemporary life ... White Sands, which is dedicated to Dyer’s wife, gradually reveals itself to be a romance, but only when it rests — like a couple in a hotel room; it’s only during the pauses between chapters, and along with the book’s first and last images, that such a story emerges. 'We are here to go somewhere else,' the narrator says in the opening story. Maybe. But if you flit too fast – between cities, genres, forms — the story itself can be easy to miss.
Dyer’s writing is energised by disappointment, switching smoothly from comic exasperation to cosmic sorrow ... With his customary elegance of thought, he sees that our attempts to transcend our situation through travel and art are motivated by our awareness of our final destination: 'We are here to go somewhere else.'
