Dyer.

Yesterday marked ten years since the untimely death of the German writer W.G. Sebald. The New Yorker's Book Bench blog commemorated the occasion with a post about Sebald's work, where Mark O'Connell noted his influence on the writers Teju Cole, Will Self and Geoff Dyer, who "have been inspired by Sebald’s figurative and literal rambling."

Of Dyer, Mr. O'Connell writes, "Dyer’s work—part essay, part travelogue, part fiction—sometimes reads like a less melancholy, more comic (and more English) variant of Sebald’s peregrinatory prose."

Alas, Mr. O'Connell's timing was off. Responding in the comments section, Geoff Dyer notes:

VERY happy to be mentioned in the company of the great W. G. Sebald but, just to clarify: although it was only published in the US this year my The Missing of the Somme came out in the UK in 1994 two years before The Emigrants was published in English. Out of Sheer Rage (written in the midst of a chronic Bernhard addiction) came out in 1997 and was completed before The Emigrants appeared. I'm guessing those are the two books that look like they were most influenced by Sebald - whom I love, of course - but they couldn’t have been! I was doing the “part essay, part travelogue, part fiction” thing before Sebald invented it! Geoff Dyer

The crowd at the reading processed this information silently. Here was the man who had once written "our lives are actually made up of lots of tiny searches for things like a CD we are not sick of, an out-of-print edition of Phoenix, a picture of Lawrence that I saw when I was seventeen, another identical pair of suede shoes to the ones I am wearing now, even, I suppose, a cornetto integrale, ideally, a place where they serve perfect cornetti integrali each day without fail." He had told us, in other words, that life was only so many searches for the perfect pastry, along with some other stuff. And then the pastry is too sweet.

"I'm not even sure I want one tomorrow," he said.

Mr. Dyer was behind a podium set up in front of the "Ideas" section of McNally Jackson, and therefore stood before a backdrop of book spines that prominently displayed "BADIOU," "WHY MARX WAS RIGHT"and the distinctive green and orange spine of Gayatri Spivak's translation of Derrida's Of Grammatology. He was introduced by the novelist Sam Lipsyte, who described Mr. Dyer's work as "gender-bending." He meant genre. Their respective statures recalled Laurel and Hardy.

During the reading The Observer had a pen and a relatively clean receipt from Amy's Bread Company (for one peanut butter and jelly sandwich and one Arnold Palmer) on which to take notes. The only note The Observer ended up taking, however, was that Geoff Dyer, when writing books, tries "keeping knowledge only fractionally ahead of the writing."

Then The Observer just started writing down names every time Mr. Dyer quoted someone, which happened roughly every three minutes, beginning with the people he quoted in the essay he read about going to the couture shows in Paris from his new collection, Otherwise Known as the Human Condition, and then moving on to the writers he quoted from memory in the Q and A.

Here is the list, which took up most of the receipt and therefore is not in any particular order, and probably not even exhaustive:

1.      Mark Doty (who provided the following epigraph to Mr. Dyer's essay on the couture shows: "The world's made fabulous / by fabulous clothes.")

2.      Frank Gehry

3.      Philip Larkin

4.      Don Delillo (Mr. Dyer quoted the following: "her face conveyed the suggestion of lifelong bereavement over the death of a pet rabbit.")

5.      Jim Morrison

6.      Nietzsche

7.      D.H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers

8.      F. Scott Fitzgerald's Tender Is the Night

9.      Nicholson Baker

10.  Tony Judt (who came up when Mr. Dyer commented on "the incredible regression in social mobility" in Britain.)

11.  T.C. Boyle's Budding Prospects

12.  Albert Camus' Lyrical and Critical Essays

13.  Jonathan Franzen (Mr. Dyer recalled something a friend said about Mr. Franzen: "he suffers so you don't have to.")

14.  Sebastian Faulks

15.  Thomas Mann

16.  "Borgesian"

17.  Charles Dickens' Great Expectations

18.  Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: "I like her tone."

19.  Julian Barnes

20.  Martin Amis

21.  Alan Hollinghurst (Mr. Dyer called him "the greatest straight-down-the-line English novelist," remembering with particular fondness the description, "knob-flaunting speedo.")

22.  Renata Adler's Speedboat

23.  John Updike

24.  Thomas Bernhardt

The discussion ended with a member of the audience asking an extended rambling question about how a British man musters the confidence to write about American jazz with authority, and some other stuff that The Observer stopped paying attention to in favor of examining a book shelved next to her chair called Insectopedia, until another audience member kindly interrupted to summarize the question as "Where do you get off?" To which Mr. Dyer replied, "On the beach in Mexico."

Afterward, a McNally Jackson representative told Mr. Dyer he was entitled to one free book for his pains. He requested and received The Essential Schopenhauer.

There were two outliers at the table: a pair of 60-something med school professors who'd missed half the reading and were unfamiliar with the author's work. They'd been pushed on Mr. Dyer by a mutual acquaintance, and were duped by the Oxford-educated author's upper-crust accent and proclivity for quoting W.H. Auden into thinking Mr. Dyer was like them: snobbish, bourgeois, a respectable dinner companion.

Mr. Dyer is in fact a scholarship boy from the English country town of Cheltenham. Like his role model Lawrence, he was born into a working-class family--his father was a sheet metal worker, his mother served meals in the school cafeteria--and drafted into the academic elite by a grammar-school teacher with an eye for nascent intelligence. Mr. Dyer discusses his origins with a refreshing absence of both disdain and sentimentality in Otherwise Known as the Human Condition: Selected Essays and Reviews (Graywolf, 432 pages, $18), an indispensable compendium of more than 20 years' worth of Mr. Dyer's work for such publications as The Guardian, Prospect and The New Statesman, much of which has never before been published in the United States. "My parents worked hard and I didn't like the look of it," Mr. Dyer writes. He later admits to "a particular isolation that attaches to the scholarship boy or girl." He found aspiration in Lawrence, who "made writing a means of--and a synonym for--being alive: an adventure in short."

At dinner, Mr. Dyer's adventurousness was apparent as he held court with an extended extemporaneous retelling of Yoga's central essay, "Decline and Fall," in which his younger self takes a self-guided tour of the Roman ruins under the influence of LSD. The med school professors were utterly confused. "But," one gasped, "that was a very long time ago. You don't take LSD anymore?"

"Oh, for heaven's sake no," Mr. Dyer replied. "I haven't taken LSD in ages. I don't think I've taken it since ... August at Burning Man."

Like the many personal anecdotes that brighten Otherwise Known as the Human Condition, this one is meant to disarm the reader with warmth and charm before sucker-punching with the work of serious criticism. It is also meant to illustrate something about Mr. Dyer as a writer; namely, that the juxtaposition between his Oxford erudition and his aptitude for Hunter S. Thompson-esque antics (in one essay he casually snorts heroin at a stranger's apartment; in another he refuses cappuccino because it's not being served in "proper china") brings him a long way toward his unspoken goal of rescuing the term "personal essay" from its current incarnation as a euphemism for self-indulgence. Or perhaps it's dry criticism that he's come to resuscitate with his easy prose. Mr. Dyer has made a career of genre-blending, comfortably lounging in the gray areas between fiction and memoir, essay and criticism. This collection is a welcome addition.

The pieces in Otherwise Known as the Human Condition were compiled from two previously published British volumes, Anglo-English Attitudes and Working the Room, and it makes sense that many of the selected essays focus on Mr. Dyer's invaluably alien perspective on American life. Mr. Dyer traces his romance with the United States to a sibling-less childhood spent reading Marvel comics. On the pages of Spider-Man he found "a vertiginous city of spectacular skyscrapers ... a place where the quotidian was suffused with the mythic." The same wide-eyed worldview informs Mr. Dyer's criticism, and balances out the acidity of his essential British irony, as in his backhanded but pointed assessment of the American writer Denis Johnson, "a metaphysical illiterate, a junkyard angel ... [with a] skewed relationship to the sentence--not really knowing what one is and yet knowing exactly what to do with it." Beneath the serrated bon mots hides enthusiasm of an almost American kind. Mr. Dyer freely admits to his jealousy of American novelists, who "had the advantage over their British counterparts of automatic, unlimited access to the mythic, the vast."

Occasionally this passion for grandiosity pushes his tastes toward, well, the grandiose. He likes Keith Jarrett way too much, and believes bad house music leads to spiritual enlightenment. It can also color his prose with the barest touch of purple. In a memorable essay on sadness, Mr. Dyer gets momentarily carried away, explaining that "the blues is not something you play, but a way of calling out to the dead, to all the dead slaves of America." It's a pretty line that a white American could never get away with. It is to Mr. Dyer's credit that he can, sort of.

His stubborn self-conviction is at once comical and oddly admirable. "I am amazed--and often furious," he writes, "that the world does not resemble more closely my own preferred idea of how it should be." When we follow Mr. Dyer to Algeria in search of Camus' ghost, we come to the core of his credo while watching boys play soccer in a "prairie blaze of light," on a pitch the "color of rust," and it's hard to disagree: "As the ball hangs there, moon-white against the wall of cloud, everything in the world seems briefly up for grabs and I am seized by two contradictory feelings: there is so much beauty in the world it is incredible that we are ever miserable for a moment; there is so much shit in the world that it is incredible we are ever happy for a moment."

In an essay on Susan Sontag, Mr. Dyer asks, "Can one's achievements as a cultural commentator and critic be enough to make one a writer in the specially valued sense of those one has written about?" With this fine collection, Mr. Dyer has answered his own question.

editorial@observer.com

Meet Jeff Atman, aging hack journalist:

“He was supposed to be writing a twelve-hundred-word so-called ‘think piece’ (intended to require zero thought on the part of the reader and scarcely more from the writer but still, somehow, beyond him) that had reached such a pitch of tedium that he’d spent half an hour staring at the one-line email to the editor who’d commissioned it:

‘I just can’t do this shit anymore. Yrs J.A.’”

It’s downhill from there for Jeff. At 45 years old he’s off on yet another junket, this time to Venice to cover the 2003 Biennale for the pretentiously named art magazine Kulchur. A freelancer, he’s never written a book or made a splash that might have landed him assignments from Vogue or Vanity Fair. A nobody among his colleagues, he’s a high-class amanuensis employed conducting interviews with people more talented and important than himself—poor Jeff’s inner monologue is an endless grind of solipsistic self-torment. “The biggest joke of all—the thing that made him more depressed than anything,” writes Geoff Dyer of the hapless hero of his brilliant new novel, “was that at a certain level he was considered successful. People envied his getting assignments like this.”

It’s more of the same when he arrives in Venice—until he chances to meet a younger writer named Laura (book deal, Vogue assignment).

Jeff’s aimless existence rallies itself into organization around his desire for her. They fuck in expensed hotel rooms and snort cocaine on a friend of a friend’s yacht. That their lives in Venice are ungrounded aside from their attraction to each other focuses that attraction into something closely resembling love, allowing Jeff, and also, I suspect, authorial Geoff (the slippage between them is, as always in novels where the writer shares a name with the protagonist, the fun part), to divagate on that “strange, modern form of intimacy … that made it easier to lick someone’s ass than to ask when you might see them again.”

IF YOU'RE A JOURNALIST, if you spend time at galleries or art fairs, you can read Jeff in Venice for its fresh observational humor and amusingly substance-starved conversation. But Mr. Dyer doesn’t reference Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice for nothing: Jeff in Venice picks up Mann’s themes of yearning for beauty and lost youth, but also Mann’s deadly seriousness of artistic purpose. Jeff Atman may be a shmuck, but he is a representative shmuck, capable, with the assistance of the usually sadistic but occasionally, strategically beneficent Geoff, of illuminations on art that are thoughtful and new to the precise extent that Jeff Atman is jaded and used up. Here, again disappointed in love and work, Jeff wanders into the Scuola Grande di San Rocco, where he encounters Tintoretto’s spectacular wall-to-ceiling painting of the biblical prophets:

“Jeff’s knowledge of the sources was a little sketchy; beyond the fact that these were biblical scenes, he was completely in the dark. As far as he could make out, Tintoretto had compressed the best bits of both Testaments into one building. In a way, though, it was an easy book to compress, the Bible. Basically things were always getting hurled—out of the light and into the darkness—or were ascending—out of the darkness and into the light, of which there was not a vast amount. Bearded prophets, swirling drapery and billowing clouds—it was all go up there. In marketing terms, though, the pitch seemed fundamentally and horribly flawed: the idea that we could be bullied into paradise.”

IN Death in Varanasi, the second, more somber half of Mr. Dyer’s diptych (and a novella unto itself), the author lifts the lid on his capacity for insight. The gears shift, and we now follow an unnamed first-person narrator, a freelance art-journalist who closely resembles Jeff Atman and whose work takes him to Varanasi, the city on the Ganges where devout Hindus burn their dead on outdoor pyres and spill their ashes into the sacred river. Mr. Dyer’s Varanasi is at once parallel with and opposite to Venice: Venice during the Biennale is aggressively profane; in Varanasi, contemplation of the divine saturates the air, bending the spirits even of tourists passing through. And where Jeff in Venice is about the mysterious eruption of desire into a life that seemed irrevocably dulled by habit, Death in Varanasi is about the renunciation of desire and the hunger for stasis.

On assignment for the Telegraph, our adorably desperate hack retains the jokey skepticism that made him charming in Venice. But here, writing directly from his character’s point of view, Mr. Dyer is able to let go of the momentum toward plot development that naturally arose from the “he said, she said” mode of Venice. Instead, the narrator (more and more dominated, I think, by the authorial Geoff) becomes an observer, an interpreting eye that floats fascinated through Varanasi’s inconceivably crowded and complex society. Death in Varanasi grows into a tapestry of description—of India’s art and culture, of the relationships the narrator strikes up and of his own mental state (which may or may not be Mr. Dyer’s, too).

Mr. Dyer has written a book, Out of Sheer Rage, on D. H. Lawrence, but it’s Henry James that emerges as the real influence on Varanasi. It first manifests itself in the double-negative atmospherics of the opening sentence—“The thing about destiny is that it can so nearly not happen and, even when it does, rarely looks like what it is”—and shows up again in Jeff’s relationship with two of his traveling companions, a man and a woman:

“It is strange when two people fancy one another, when liking turns into reciprocated desire: it is tangible. You can see and feel it as a physical force, a kind of gravity. Even when they were talking, on opposite sides of the table, not touching, their arms were reaching towards each other. When they spoke, their lips were on the brink of touching, just through the word they used. I looked on. I didn’t mind.”

In another novelist’s hand, that “I didn’t mind” would be certain cover for jealousy, the first step toward a love triangle. But Mr. Dyer means it: His art is one of languid, suspended watching, lulling the reader into a morbid Jamesian arousal.

By the end of Varanasi Mr. Dyer has created a character whose stillness of mind is as compelling to the reader as Jeff Atman’s lunging neurosis was in Venice. But Varanasi is the more serious project: There’s much to admire in the steadiness, the thoroughness of description, the way Mr. Dyer, who is capable of allusion and eloquence, restrains himself, and keeps his character’s mind so exquisitely focused on whatever passes before it—proof that the landscape faithfully observed comes to life of its own accord.

Damian DaCosta is a culture reporter at The Observer. He can be reached at ddacosta@observer.com