The Last Days of Roger Federer by Geoff Dyer

The Last Days of Roger Federer
by Geoff Dyer
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2022

There is much about the tennis-playing fanatic Geoff Dyer in The Last Days of Roger Federer but little about Federer. Dyer the writer admires Federer the player for the insouciance he displays under great pressure on the court. But in The Last Days Dyer feels no pressure to imitate his idol’s graceful but serious mastery. In a book purportedly about ageing and dying, Dyer is content to be entertaining, like a guy parodying Federer’s elegant backhand while hitting balls against a wall on a public court in Santa Monica where Dyer lives.

Federer won more than twenty Grand Slam tournaments, called the “majors.” Dyer seems proud to be a minor writer. He discourses at length on his fear of appearing “grand,” particularly a grand writer. Instead, Dyer chose years ago to be a brand, someone you could count on to report on his varied interests—such as D. H. Lawrence or Jazz or movies or photography—without any ambition to be a champion. In tennis terms, Dyer is a hacker or a grinder but always with a grin on his face that assures readers that Dyer won’t expect too much of them or himself.

There’s a lot more than usual about Dyer’s personal life in The Last Days—his past enthusiasms for drugs and parties, musical performances he has seen, athletic injuries now that he’s 64, his opinions of books and writers. His self-indulgence might be charming now that he says he’s out of the “sexual marketplace” if Geoff weren’t so smug about preserving what he calls his “fourteen-year-old self” into late middle age.

Dyer amuses himself by presenting himself as a humorous figure, the stereotype of the Oxford-educated, book-quoting but pints-loving British twit. This act isn’t so funny when it comes up against American seriousness. Dyer describes being disturbed on a public tennis court by Black basketball players on the court next to his—their music and pot, their language, their avid competitiveness. They wanted to win, to be champions that day on their court. Unlike Dyer, they were not insouciant and refined.

The appeal of Dyer’s comic cleverness also falters when he discusses books and writers, particularly his betters. He admits with no explanation that he cannot read Faulkner, and never made it past three pages of The Sound and the Fury. That would have been the section told by an “idiot,” not very amusing and certainly not “easy,” an adjective often paired with “insouciance.” Writing about Don DeLillo’s work after his 1996 Underworld, Dyer says DeLillo “made a slow and wobbly glide” toward The Silence in 2021. The “last days” of Dyer’s title have an eschatological connotation. For him, the most important last days are the tennis games he fears he can no longer play. Since Underworld, DeLillo has published three serious novels dealing with last things: Cosmopolis (assassination), Falling Man (about 9-11) and Zero K (about assisted suicide). “Glide?” If anyone is gliding, it’s Dyer from one book of reportage to the next since his serious 2009 novel Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi.

Maybe “sliding” is more appropriate to The Last Days of Roger Federer, its structure. Divided into three parts with sixty numbered sections each, the book, Dyer claims, has a rigorous mathematical “order” related to time passing—60 seconds in a minute, 60 minutes in an hour. Perhaps, but within each part Dyer slides from subject to subject, sometimes associatively, sometimes arbitrarily. He often comes back to artists’ failing powers in their late days. There’s a substantial section on the similarities between the last works and days of Beethoven and Nietzsche, a digest of a book Dyer says he failed to write. But almost as long is a section about his never buying shampoo because he takes it from hotels. Near the end of the book, Dyer spends many pages showing that in his 60s he’s still cool enough to try the psychedelic DMT. Perhaps The Last Days has an imitative form—memories and ailments and animadversions with only occasional continuities—because “old man” Dyer is incapable—or pretending to be incapable—of writing any other kind of book. “Remarks,” Gertrude Stein told Hemingway, “are not literature,” and Dyer’s often unrelated remarks are also not what one expects from literary non-fiction.

Although Dyer thrashes the late work of Martin Amis, Dyer does praise Amis’s recent autobiographical novel Inside Story. Perhaps The Last Days is a similar autofiction masquerading as, Dyer claims, a diary of his life and thoughts during the pandemic--a novel about a minor writer becoming less and less, more and more his own subject. If Dyer isn’t profound on ageing and failing, he counts on readers finding him still clever. Living the last year in London, I’ve noticed that here “clever” has the connotation of intelligent, smart. For this American, “clever” is more negative, suggesting avoidance, superficiality, sliding by.

In a blurb for The Last Days of Roger Federer, Zadie Smith calls Dyer “a national treasure.” Maybe the British nation but not the American. Unlike Dyer, America’s treasured writers, our major writers, play seriously as Jimmy Connors and Pete Sampras and John McEnroe did, as Roger Federer does even when struggling with injuries. “Wouldn’t it be marvelous,” Dyer asks, “if it were possible to be a serious writer without taking oneself at all seriously?” The problem with The Last Days of Roger Federer is that Dyer only pretends to not take himself seriously. While he may poke fun at himself, it’s always Geoff Dyer on Geoff Dyer at the center of his attention and book.

Tom LeClair's fifth and final "Passing" novel--Passing Again--was published in July by I-BeaM press.