Late careers of the brilliant
Geoff Dyer is not an easy writer to categorise. A novelist and essayist whose books often seem to fall into the ambiguous area between the two forms, he can perhaps best be described as a writer’s writer.
His latest book, The Last Days of Roger Federer, comes with glowing endorsements from some impressive names. Zadie Smith calls him a “national treasure”. William Boyd says he is a “true original” and Steve Martin, the American film star and comedian, says he’s “one of the few writers whose paragraphs I can immediately reread and get more from”.
Martin is bound to be doing a lot of rereading with this new book, which, despite the title, has very little to do with Roger Federer. Its subtitle is “And other endings”, and really it’s an extended meditation on the late careers of various artists, writers and, to a lesser extent, sportspeople, full of the kinds of wide-ranging and often hilarious digressions with which regular Dyer readers will be familiar. Most of all, though, it’s a study of the passing of time and how his own allotment has radically and, of course, irreversibly shrunk. As young as he may remain at heart, Dyer is 64 and therefore, by any reckoning, in the latter stages of his own
