A lot of has been written lately about whether essays are the novels of the twenty first century, the form best suited to our times: short pieces, directly drawn from life, equally capable of fact and whimsy, and able to keep hold of our ever-diminishing attention spans. Geoff Dyer is often used as evidence for the prosecution of the novel by figures like David Shields, whose disillusionment with modern fiction is well known. Dyer’s latest book of essays, written over the last ten years, is a worthy champion of its form. Wide-ranging and personal, they include work on everything from D.H. Lawrence to donuts, and are written in an engaging, conversational tone that holds your attention throughout.

Of course, it’s not without faults. Some of the writing seems a bit too hasty, careless in places, which can be distracting. While the variety of subjects reveals Dyer’s impressive range of knowledge, it also means that not every essay will appeal to every reader, unless your interests happen to align perfectly with his. His essays on photography also suffer from a lack of illustration; only a couple of photographs accompany each essay, at best, which makes some of his references difficult to follow.

Most importantly, Dyer’s attitude towards his own life, and his descriptions of his lifestyle, may leave some readers grinding their teeth at his apparent good fortune. After a scholarship to Oxford removed him from his working class background, Dyer’s twenties were spent in a decadent drug-and-dole-fuelled haze from which he emerged as a writer, spending the rest of his life living in various exciting places – London, Brighton, Paris, New York – writing and reading about the things he loves. Sometimes, in his more autobiographical pieces, the tone he adopts when describing his lifestyle is a strangely ambivalent, as though he is both boasting of his good fortune and defending his choices at the same time. Given the current reorganisation of the welfare state, the youth he describes now seems almost quaint, antediluvian; he can hardly be blamed for taking advantage of a system that no longer really exists, but he can certainly be envied for it.

Having got these complaints out of the way, I can now concentrate on what makes Working the Room a brilliant read. In his descriptions of his ‘lucky’, halcyon lifestyle, Dyer seems to overlook the factor that has helped him maintain it over the years: his talent as a writer. Dyer’s status as a ‘gatecrasher’ across different areas of interest means that he can draw effective, heady comparisons between areas, applying knowledge acquired in one area to other, quite different subjects. His writing is extremely, irascibly witty: “A lot of contemporary British art flogging itself as conceptual has the intellectual depth of a paddling pool and the gravitas of a helium balloon,” he writes in ‘Idris Khan’. His self-deprecating descriptions of gatecrashing different subjects, and of his wild obsessive hunt for the perfect donut-and-coffee experience, are hugely enjoyable. He provides an original take on the familiar, and largely stir up interest in the unfamiliar; I found myself making a list of books he mentions that I would now like to read, and of photographers whose work I want to seek out.

Dyer’s book certainly shows that the essay, or review for that matter, is a lively form. However, it also proves that David Shields’ proposition is essentially false. The essay is not the new novel; it is simply the essay, an adjacent form that neither supplants fiction nor, in my view, really attempts to do so. There is an odd tendency among commentators such as Shields to assume that one form necessarily negates another; Dyer’s book proves that this is false logic. His essays, in some case, come in the form of reviews of novels, and show his debt to the genre elsewhere in references to literature, both past and present. The breadth and variety of his comparisons celebrates the fact that a multitude of art forms exist, from photography to literature to jazz to essays, and that each can be used to shed light on the other. Dyer’s defence of a critic’s role is understandable, given his shift from fiction to non-fiction, but he does not make the mistake of attacking the novel in order to defend the essay. Both are of importance in his conception of the world, and his writing shows his enormously infectious, insightful enthusiasm for each.

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