ESCAPE ROUTE

Geoff Dyer tracks the comic confusions of a working-class British upbringing.

- BY JAMES WOOD

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 un-self-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.