Geoff Dyer's "The Last Days of Roger Federer"

One of the best books I’ve read this summer is Geoff Dyer’s The Last Days of Roger Federer (2022). It’s a tricky book to describe. The jacket flap calls it an “investigation”: 

In this ingeniously structured and endlessly stimulating investigation, Geoff Dyer sets his own encounter with late middle age against the last days and last achievements of writers, painters, athletes and musicians who’ve mattered to him throughout his life.

That strikes me as just about right. Its theme is last things. Dyer writes,

Adorno’s “Late Style in Beethoven” was an important early reference point for this book about last things, some of which are late, while some are precociously early. Not that this was ever intended to be a comprehensive study of last things, or of lastness generally. It’s about a congeries of experiences, things, and cultural artefacts that, for various reasons, have come to group themselves around me in a rough constellation during a phase of my life.

Those “congeries of experiences, things, and cultural artifacts” include Burning Man, Martin Scorsese’s Rolling Thunder Revue, John Cohen’s photo of Jack Kerouac, J. C. Chandor’s All Is Lost, J. M. W. Turner’s Rain, Steam, and Speed, David Lean’s Brief Encounter, Albert Bierstadt’s The Last of the Buffalo, John Graves’ Goodbye to a River, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, Keith Jarrett, Jack DeJohnette and Gary Peacock’s rendition of “Somewhere/Everywhere” on their concert album Somewhere, David Thomson’s Biographical Dictionary of Film, William Basinski’s The Disintegration Loop, Beethoven’s String Quartet in A Minor, William Wordsworth’s Preludes, and Peter Hammill’s song “In the End.” That’s quite a grab bag, and it’s only a partial list. 

The book is certainly a curio. It isn’t a narrative, although there are narrative elements, e.g., the Burning Man segments. It isn’t a journal, although there are journal-like entries, e.g., section 53 of Part III (“On 5 July 2018 I took the tube from Wimbledon to Soho, just in time to catch Pharoah Sanders at Ronnie Scott’s”). It isn’t memoir, although there are many memories, e.g., of being at a private gig at Willie Nelson’s recording studio in Austin, Texas:

There was room for about fifty people in the studio. I had no interest in the first band – rockers from L.A. – but the sound was amazing: not particularly loud but so powerful and clear as to be completely enveloping. For the headline act, because of Steph’s VIP status, we were invited into the control booth where, we were told, the sound was even better. I’d not heard of the person we were waiting to see, a soul singer called Charles Bradley who, until recently, had had almost no success. He’d spent time living on the street, had been employed as a James Brown impersonator, and had released his debut album, No Time for Dreaming, only four years previously, when he was sixty-three, in 2011. But hearing the record, another friend said, was nothing compared to seeing him live. The band came on – young white guys – set up a tight groove, and we waited for Bradley to join them. He looked, when he appeared, like someone from another, rougher age. His face was deeply lined; he was wearing a dark sequinned shirt, open to reveal a totemic belly. He opened his mouth and cried out, a moan of deep spiritual and epic lust. It lasted a couple of seconds but tracing its genealogy would require hundreds of pages covering a history extending back more than a century. From that moment on it was obvious that, for the first time in my life, I was at a great soul gig. Except I wasn’t quite. I was in the control booth, hearing the music but separated from the experience by glass. As is often the case the VIP area was the worst place to be. We made our grateful excuses and got out of the booth and into the studio, to share the experience with everyone else. It was wonderful, overpowering, immense.

My favorite section is Dyer’s account of his 2018 Burning Man experience. Here’s a taste: 

All reservations melted away when I saw the dust-blasted figure of Gerry waiting for me at “immigration” and although there were afternoons when I wished I wasn’t there – hunkered down in my trailer, waiting for dust storms to pass – most of the time there was nowhere else in the world I wanted to be. Even during the dust storms I was happy reading Zagajewski’s Slight Exaggeration. The trailer was decrepit – the shower didn’t even pretend to work and the generator was powerless to power anything except a single light that took a dim view of the sunken wreck of the sink – but I had it to myself and just being able to shut the door, to have a barrier between myself and everything going on outside, was enough. And what was going on outside, in the festival at large, was better than ever. 

The book proceeds the way a great essay proceeds – associatively, digressively, additively. But it’s not baggy, and it's never boring. The theme of last things holds it together. I enjoyed it immensely.