Dyer, Maker
Cities, community, growing up and letting go with Geoff Dyer’s The Colour of Memory
Millennia later, when archaeologists comb through the digital detritus of our posts and tweets, perhaps stored in some desert archive refuge protected against the ravages of time by the extravagant whimsy of one of the men they will surely take to be our gods — Bezos, Gates, Dorsey, Zuck — I wonder what custom the excavators will interpret our Instagrams to represent.
These future people will have an answer to the question posed by the narrator of the book I read and liked best in 2018: “What will survive of us?”
I read Geoff Dyer’s The Colour of Memory last year, 2018, the year in which I completed my 28th lap around the sun. In any debate over when one’s mid-twenties end, whereas 27 holds some ambiguous place on the cusp between mid- and late-twenties, 28 is universally held to belong to the late-twenties. And The Colour of Memory is the story of “a nameless narrator and five close friends in their mid-twenties,” doing much of what I spent my mid-twenties doing. They drink red wine from the bottle in one another’s curiously-decorated homes; they hover in a state of simultaneous poverty and privilege; they hold elevated conversations in decrepit conditions and make obscene observations in nicer settings. They rip roaches from book covers and pine over friends and strangers. “Freddie said he might be along later, which was the nearest he ever got to saying no.” I have that friend. You might, too.
A friend of mine, a bartender who serves lobbyists and Congresspeople regularly, hadn’t seen the White House despite living here for nearly two years. When we drove past the Capitol, he asked if that was it. Late in The Colour of Memory, the posse leaves South London for Westminster. “You always know where you are when you can see Big Ben,” one says.
Freddy replies, “That’s right. Where are we again?” The young cast of The Colour of Memory spend the whole book trying to figure it out.
Dyer has admitted “I don’t come up with great storylines,” and his interview with the Paris Review begins with a preemptive strike on the idea of a neat division between fiction and nonfiction. That embrace of a liminal space between the genres is conveyed well by Colour of Memory, which is slotted as fiction but reads as uncannily real. Dyer has a talent for apercus that ring with spontaneous insight, as when one character, lamenting a bar fight, remarks, “There are two kinds of tragedies: those that didn’t happen and those that needn’t have happened.”
In his preface to this book, he writes, “The book did not start out as a novel (and, for anyone expecting a plot, never adequately became one).” Thank god for that. In eschewing anything Freytag-compliant, Dyer is able to find something more like the rhythm of life as we both experience and remember it: episodic, irrational, internalized.
There are developments in Dyer’s novel. For starters, the protagonist loses his job in the first chapter, setting in motion the initial steps that introduce us to his sister, send him on errands courting new business, and more. But these provide only the leaven by which the novel’s real bread is risen: the challenge and difficulty of navigating the many transitions that characterize young adulthood, the post-college years, one’s twenties.
Perhaps Dyer’s realest move, if we take the book to be neither fiction nor nonfiction but, as I’ve put it, real, is that these complications take the unhurried, yearslong pace of the shifts that define the arcs of our life: friendships that drift apart tectonically, fates that metastasize and accrete rather than flash dramatically in thunderbolts from heaven. In that sense, his novel ultimately reveals itself as harboring ambitions as vast as the protagonist’s inchoate yearnings.
Publisher’s Weekly took issue with the haphazard nature of the book’s second half, calling it “jumbled and arbitrarily strung together.” That is a careless interpretation that does not take the book on its own merits but looks for its fit with a preconceived idea of what a novel should be, rather than an appreciation of what a novel can be — and in this case, is. Read it and see if you agree. If there is a misstep, it is in the last gesture, a trick of framing that was, if anything, painted on at the last moment, an assurance to the editor that this is Fiction.
The Colour of Memory is not only a book about the transition from youth to adulthood but also about cities, and perhaps a kind of city that no longer exists: the predigital, preausterity city.
How I came to the book mirrored this theme. The book was not recommended to me by Amazon’s algorithm. It did not appear on Goodreads as a Related Title. It was not conveyed by an influencer into my Newsfeed or Tweetdeck. Instead I picked it out from the fiction section at the Northeast Public Library, more or less at random. I’d heard Dyer’s name, read one of his travel essays. I liked the cover design. The book description was alluring.
But the choice was enabled in the first place by the existence of the public library, a radically communitarian space and resource whose presence we perhaps take too much for granted. The library embodies not only the part of the American dream the capitalists are happy to embrace — that through education we can improve ourselves — but also the parts that they have turned their back on. Libraries, especially in the city, serve the poor as well as the rich. Libraries turn no one away. They are public in the best sense. And, perhaps most radically, libraries are not only sites of improvement but of enjoyment.
A specter haunts the The Colour of Memory, and it is not communism. It is austerity. Dyer’s South London years take place under Thatcher’s government, but the Conservative Party has not yet eliminated the social safety nets that enable he and his friends to spend a few post-uni years figuring out who they are and how they fit into the social organism — if indeed they desire to fit at all. When the protagonist loses his job, he’s eligible for unemployment immediately. Americans will hardly recognize the council flats — public housing — that provide the setting for the novel’s episodes. (Notably, decent public housing engenders not only the ability to survive in the city without a top job but also creates diverse neighborhoods absent the most pernicious market dynamics of gentrification.) One chapter is just a paean to a beautiful bus driver — her beauty somehow bound up in her magisterial management of the big vehicle and its rowdy passengers. “Executives complain of stress and fatigue but it’s nothing as compared with the effort involved in driving or conducting buses through rush hour traffic five or six days a week. No businessman in the city worked harder than this woman.” In another instance, a character remarks that there is nothing so beautiful as seeing a worker emerge from a factory to find the sun on their face.
That is not to say things are all swell. Navigating the welfare state is almost a full time job, and falling behind can be dreadful — as when “a friend of mine got stabbed and missed his dole money because…he was on a life-support machine.” One chapter, less than a page, describes riding the Underground in a car full of people who have all been handed the same flier of a smiling girl, an African immigrant, murdered in the same Tube stop a week prior. In one grim aside, the protagonist parenthetically apologizes to the stabbed man he didn’t stop to help: “I wanted to help you but was too frightened; I’m sorry, I really am.”
The characters of The Colour of Memory are mostly white, and many have gone to university. It’s clear that they benefit in their misadventures from these privileges. That is not an argument against the welfare state. It is an argument to ensure social welfare reaches everyone. Dyer has called himself “a beneficiary of opportunities that were put in place by Labour governments after the Second World War” — opportunities like those that afford his narrator the time to figure himself out, to take odd jobs knowing he has his dole money. Becoming ourselves is part of human dignity. None of us are born who we are. We should all be afforded the opportunity to become.
The novel’s only pretensions, other than that final maybe-misstep, are structural: Each chapter is an entry in the protagonist’s diaristic “album of snaps.” Our narrator is a collector.
By 1989, when Dyer published The Colour of Memory, the zeitgeist had already fully digested such meditations on photographic media as John Berger’s BBC meditations on art Ways of Seeing and Marshall McLuhan’s The Medium Is the Message. But the characters in The Colour of Memory have no cell phones, nor corollary digital lives. They are wholly themselves, embodied. This isn’t to say they don’t have pretensions, but to point out that their doubles are private.
This absence, from our perspective, seems quite a relief. The painter Steranko is under no pressure to Instagram his works in progress. The writer Freddie does not need an enormous Twitter presence to aspire to a book contract. The rapper Belinda can hone her craft without uploading everything to Soundcloud.
After I ran into two separate groups of close friends on the street last Friday, I remarked to another that this kind of coincidental convergence was what I wanted from a city. To which some might suggest that it sounds like I prefer a small town. Perhaps this really is a vestige of my college years when I was on a campus of only 1,600.
But there is an element of improvisation, which carries forward the lives of the Dyer’s coterie. Friends arrive on one’s doorstep unannounced. When one sees an acquaintance one spends the afternoon with them, in celebration of the happenstance. At parties no one is ever looking down at their phones, and if you see your crush across the room, you must go and talk to them — there is no Facebook stalking, no chance of a Tinder match. The experience of the city is changed. (In another book, Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered, Dyer writes about frequenting a bar in Rome: “There was no need ever to arrange to meet anyone at the San Calisto; you simply assumed they would be there.”)
Fascinatingly, the narrator is anxious about this “spontaneous lifestyle,” sensing that his sister, Fran, and his buddy Steranko are more “at ease with the consequences of things.” This sense of contingency haunts him, and he is forever trying to fix himself down: “Foomie asked what I wanted to do, and I said I didn’t know, that for as long as I could remember I had been living from one conversation to the next, going nowhere slowly.” He is paralyzed, as so many of us have been, in the face of the fact that, as John Gardner wrote in Grendel, “Things fade. Alternatives exclude.”
Things fade. Do memories? Even photographic or digital ones?
From the vantage of 2019, “an album of snaps” takes on a double meaning, and our narrator’s anxiety seems to say something about our own Weltansicht. Like a Snapchat, tweet or ‘gram, each of these snaps — each chapter — is a discrete episodes, a vignette, ranging from a few minutes to a couple days. Their impressionistic, rather than completist, illustration of a narrative therefore mimics the style of social media. Instagram and Snapchat stories convey moments in time, sequential but not continuous. At times, Dyer’s protagonist even seems to be stretching for what Ludwig Wittgenstein identified as the eternal life which belongs to the man who lives in the moment. Consider this passage:
I looked around. The trees around the park were perfectly still as if time had stopped, as if every second of the afternoon were held in a single moment: … players jumping for the ball, their feet suspended in mid-air, the goalkeeper’s hands rising above their floating hair; the ball hanging over them like a perfect moon. And everything around us: the crease of the corner flag, the wind-sculpted trees, the child’s swing at the top of its arc, the water from the drinking fountain bubbling towards the lips of the woman bent down to drink, the cyclist leaning into the curve of the path, a plane stalled in the sky, someone’s thrown tennis ball a small yellow planet in the distance.
Despite the protagonist’s efforts to capture these snaps, their completeness ultimately eludes description. As a catalog it evokes the words of another Briton, David Bowie, singing in “Five Years” that his “brain hurt like a warehouse, it had no room to spare.” In the context of Bowie’s album, The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust, Earth has just learned it has only a half-decade before an alien invasion. But the end of youth is also the end of a world.
Incompleteness is both the tragedy and the poetry of memory itself. What we worry over is whether the bits that are lost happen randomly, as in packet loss of digital information transferred over a network, which leaves the result incomplete but loyal to the original; or redacted like a classified document, edited to soothe a future public.
The Colour of Memory is not a polemic against the digital age. The “snaps” that the narrator worries over lovingly are not without value. But you can see it right there in the title, that memory is always colored, that Instagrams always have a filter — if not Clarendon, Gingham, Juno, Ludwig, Lark, then the filter of perspective, of only ever occupying one mind at a time, of the necessity of incomplete information. For Wittgenstein’s eternal life, it is abandoning the past that makes living in the present possible. Alternatives exclude.
In the book’s last chapter, the narrator and his friend come on a bonfire in a city park. City staffers are burning all the junk they have found in the park. The friends pull up two chairs and watch the fire. As the sun goes down, the staffers already departed to let the fire smolder, they toss the chairs onto the fire and walk away themselves. After renewing the book ten times over eight months, I turned it in today.
In a final gesture, let me paste the rest of the passage in which the narrator explains The Colour of Memory as “an album of snaps.” (Also in Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered, Dyer says “I’m not interested in memories — I don’t own a camera.” The latter might be true; the former certainly isn’t.) These short paragraphs admit the impossibility of the objectivity that photographs might suggest. Each snap captures but one perspective on our lived truths. The city is only as healthy as it is haphazard. Like a photograph, whose background is inextricable from its subject, so too are we ineluctably tangled in the city and the lives of friends and strangers.
What could be more beautiful than the idea that we might “stray into each others’ lives,” to change and be changed by the encounter?
In any snap strangers intrude; the prints preserve an intimacy that lasted only for a fraction of a second as someone, unnoticed at the time, strayed unintentionally into the picture frame. Hidden among the familiar, laughing faces of friends are the glimpsed shapes of strangers; and in the distant homes of tourists there you are, at the edge of the frame, slightly out of focus, in the mdist of other people’s memories. We stray into each others lives. In the course of any day in any city it happens thousands of times and every now and again it is caught on film. That is what is happening here. Look closely and maybe there, close to the margin of the page, you will find the hurried glance of your own image: queueing at the bar, hurring for the bus, drinking beer on a roof, bleeding on the floor of the tube (I wanted to help you but was too frightened; I’m sorry, I really am).
Often what happens accidentally, unintentionally, at the edges o in the margins of pictures — the apparently irrelevant detail — lends the photograph its special meaning. What is happening in the foreground in sharpest focus seems somehow unimportant or meaningless compared with — or at least is leant meaning and importance only through — the accidental intrusion of detail: the glimpse of someone’s shoes; a car in the background; a furled umbrella; the tilt of someone’s hat; the child eating a lolly. These details absorb and transform — and are themselves absorbed and transformed by — the principal action; the main subjects become saturated by the accidental inflections of attendant details. The distinction between foreground and background collapses; the subject is usurped by his surroundings, by the momentary patter of clouds, by other faces in the street; his shadow is lost in a blur of others — the shadows cast by accidental gestures.
The Colour of Memory is now available at DCPL.
