In the first sentence of the first essay in this collection, Geoff Dyer confesses that on his way to French Polynesia to write about Gauguin he somehow lost his copy of David Sweetman’s biography of the artist. As travel writer failings go, it pales in comparison to Karl Ove Knausgaard’s arriving in Newfoundland for a road trip through North America without a driver’s license. We know of the Norwegian’s lapse because he wrote about it at length in the New York Times Magazine, the publication that had paid to bring him to the continent.
Admissions of ineptitude seem to be fashionable in contemporary travel writing. Perhaps it’s a response to centuries of travel writers coming off as the heroes of their own stories: savvy, dauntless, omniscient guides to the world. Perhaps it’s an attempt to stave off, or at least soften, accusations of elevated privilege: Look, I’m just as bumbling as you tourists are. Or, like the conversational, blog-like writing that occasionally turns into trenchant analysis online, it may be a ploy to catch readers off-guard, to give them a mix of low and high or, in this case, dumb and clever.
Apologies for the digression, but readers of Dyer will be familiar with the practice. My favorite instance occurs in his novel Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, when the title character ponders, as he slowly goes mad in India, Roger Federer’s fateful decision in 2006 to wear a cream-colored blazer onto Centre Court Wimbledon. Jeff clearly has never been able to reconcile, not even in one of the world’s holiest cities, the unconscionable pairing of formal wear with tennis shorts.
This first essay is titled “Where? What? Where?” and in it Dyer reflects not only on the art and flawed humanity of Gauguin but on tourism rituals in the South Pacific, luxury hotels, imperialism, disappointment in travel (which reveals to him the attraction of Islam; no pilgrim to Mecca ever left feeling let down), the nature of embarrassment, the definition of paradise, the offspring of luminaries, and the redoubtable girth of Tahitian women and men. “It’s like some calorific battle of the sexes” is just one memorable line in a riff that is so funny and insensitive that, checking to see where the essay first appeared, you are not at all surprised to find that it was in a British, not an American, publication.
Toward the end of the essay, Dyer comes upon an empty soccer field, which he imagines being discovered a hundred years hence. The empty goalpost reminds him of a photograph of an empty goalpost (by Luigi Ghirri) that has long fascinated him. Sitting at the end of the field, so that one empty goalpost contains the other, Dyer considers “the all-engulfing purposelessness” of his visit—”framed not by the lack of a larger goal but by a larger lack of goals”—as well as the impermanence of human life. Both of which, it goes without saying (and it does in this essay), provide an impetus for writing: Putting experience into words can give meaning to what otherwise might be meaningless, and putting those words into a book is a bulwark against personal extinction.
The author of White Sands is an older, more thoughtful writer than the one who gave us Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered to Do It, Dyer’s earlier collection of travel essays. (In the author photo he has exchanged his T-shirt for a collared shirt and sport jacket.) Middle-aged travel writers are more reflective by nature but also out of necessity: They don’t, as a rule, enjoy the multitude of lush experiences that younger, more thrill-seeking travelers do, so to fill the pages they resort to rumination. Travel writing as a whole has become more analytical over the decades, in response to an exhaustively photographed world that has obviated the need for endless descriptions. And Dyer, though not a travel writer by definition, brilliantly and often hilariously enriches the genre.
A few of the pieces here hark back to his Yoga days, being what Graham Greene would have labeled “entertainments.” The essay entitled “Forbidden City” does little more than tell of a tourist’s (i.e., Dyer’s) attraction to his tour guide (who is not really a tour guide but is very attractive). Though it does illuminate a rarely addressed travel phenomenon, which is that sometimes the moments of interest and promise that one hopes for on a trip arrive infuriatingly on the last night.
The title essay, which reads like a short story, shows the author and his wife driving past a sign cautioning motorists not to pick up hitchhikers—in a part of New Mexico with several detention facilities—shortly after they picked up a hitchhiker. But even this slight tale is rife with tense humor and Dyer’s deft mind-eye coordination: “In the intensity and single-mindedness of their desire to contain menace,” he writes of the facilities, “they exuded it.”
The best pieces here, like many of the best trips, are based on quests. Though “Northern Dark,” in which the author and his wife travel to wintry Norway to see the Northern Lights, is more of a standard travel story, albeit with Dyer’s trademark disappointment and gleefully accurate detail. As a former travel editor, I’ve read countless stories about dog sledding, and this is the first one that noted “the urine-stained and poo-smeared ice of the compound.” Dyer is much better when following his passions (it was his wife who wanted to see the Northern Lights) in less brutal conditions. His interest in art, especially of the eccentric, monumental type, leads him to Walter De Maria’s The Lightning Field near Quemado, New Mexico, and then to Robert Smithson’s Spiral Jetty at the Great Salt Lake, which, two years after its creation, was completely underwater. Not long afterwards, Smithson was killed in a plane crash: “After the Jetty sank and his plane crashed, Smithson’s reputation soared.”
But Dyer is as keen on educating as he is on entertaining, and we learn here about the Land Art movement, of which Smithson was one of the leading proponents, and we’re given D. H. Lawrence’s thoughts on the power that certain places, like Taos Pueblo, exert—what the novelist called nodality. Smithson and De Maria, Dyer posits, “were attempting to create nodality.” As was, in his own way, Sabato Rodia, the man who built Watts Towers, which Dyer first saw pictured on the cover of an album by jazz trumpeter Don Cherry. This connection allows Dyer to weave his knowledge of jazz into the story of his visit to the towers, including his regret at his failure to write a biography of Jimmy Garrison, so that the essay (“The Ballad of Jimmy Garrison”) becomes a meditation, with references to Camus and Hannah Arendt, on ambition and resignation, unremitting labors and unfulfilled dreams. Read this chapter and the next time you’re in Los Angeles, you’ll probably visit the towers.
Another place worthy of a pilgrimage (at least for Dyer) is 316 South Kenter Avenue in Brentwood, the former home of the philosopher Theodor Adorno (here referred to as “Teddy”), a musical adviser to Thomas Mann—a fellow emigré from Nazi Germany—and the author of Minima Moralia: Reflections from Damaged Life. Dyer, who moved to Los Angeles two years ago, demonstrates his intellectual bona fides while simultaneously making fun of them, noting that (like Knausgaard) he takes pleasure in the idea that he is the type of person who reads Adorno. He is also fascinated by the fact that “all these European super-heavyweights, the gods of high culture,” landed, as he did, in Southern California. In a typically wide-ranging essay that includes (I’m almost tempted to say “inevitably”) a trip to Muscle Beach (brains and brawn), Dyer is able to add something new to the growing corpus of literature on the City of Angels.
The last chapter is the most personal, as Dyer tells of suffering an ischemic stroke. The misfiring in his brain manifested itself first in his eyes—the two most important tools in any writer’s kit. Though Dyer does more with them than most of us do, and one hopes that he will continue to dazzle for many years to come.
Thomas Swick is the author, most recently, of The Joys of Travel: And Stories That Illuminate Them.
