To keep the reader focused on one enthusiasm at a time, the book is divided into “Visuals,” “Verbals,” “Musicals,” “Variables” and “Personals.” In each of these venues Dyer is totally engaged as a man in the audience making sense out of his notes rather than a lecturing authority leading the tour. This point of view even manages to find its way into “Personals,” where he is writing about himself. In “My Life as a Gate-Crasher” he is challenged by a librarian at the Institute of Jazz Studies to explain his “credentials for writing a book about jazz” to which he replies: “I don’t have any,” I said. “Except I like listening to it” (p. 382).

At its best, reading a Geoff Dyer essay is like watching a magician who really does have nothing up his sleeve. You know you have just read something surprising and beautiful, perhaps even wise, and you wonder, ‘How did he do that?’

There’s that four-letter word again. This never-ending search for things to like is an antidote for professionalism. His lack of qualification is an absence of buy-in, a very contemporary form of beatnik abstraction from the social norm. His greatest strength is not his impatience with his task, though he certainly expresses it often enough, but his distance from his subjects. The distance works best when his chosen subject is photographers and early twentieth century writers. His obsessions with and impressions of D.H. Lawrence, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Rebecca West, Alec Soth, William Gedney, Robert Capa, Enrique Metinides, Richard Avedon – to name a few of the subjects covered in these essays – link together the visual and the verbal in remarkable ways. Dyer has found a way to like things and to work hard at discovering why he likes them. He does the research, travels to the places, he pulls the quotes together. As anti-traditional and anti-academic as he is, he has read every book – and every notebook and letter – by his chosen authors and looked at every photograph by his chosen photographers.

“The Awakening of Stones: Rodin” is a wonderful example of what he accomplishes. It was originally published as an introduction to Jennifer Gough-Cooper’s Apropos Rodin. It begins:

And we’re off. John Berger on the sculpture’s relation to space. Rilke arriving in Paris, writing a book about Rodin, returning to become Rodin’s secretary and writing a poem where we find “the awakening of stones”. Rodin’s relationship to photography and Edward Steichen’s photographs of Rodin’s Balzac. And the subject of the essay: Dyer’s response to contemporary photographs of Rodin’s sculptures of naked female torsos.

As an introduction, the essay might or might not be noticed as a thoughtful compliment to the color images in which Gough-Cooper makes us see marble torsos as flesh. In this collection, with the single reproduction of a black and white image, Dyer’s text transforms any subsequent visit to Rodin’s sculptures, on the page or in the stony flesh, into a new experience.

Dyer establishes the freedom to be intensely interested in and impressed by novelists, journalists, photographers, musicians and the foreignness of France and America without developing a thesis to feed the envy of his colleagues back at the “University of Whatever.” He is sharing his insights into what happened to him, whether he is remembering a painting by Turner at the Tate Britain or attending a Def Leppard concert in Seoul. This stance puts nothing above his reach or beneath his notice.

At its best, reading a Geoff Dyer essay is like watching a magician who really does have nothing up his sleeve. You know you have just read something surprising and beautiful, perhaps even wise, and you wonder, “How did he do that?”