Homework: A Memoir
Both a captivating portrait of the artist as a young man and an insightful snapshot of postwar Britain ... Episodes are so brilliantly relayed ... Dyer’s most absorbing recollections are those concerning his foray into books. But his most satisfying depictions are of his humble, private, and resolutely unbookish parents ... A vibrant trip down memory lane. There might be little in the way of tension or drama in the form of growing pains or teenage angst, but there is no shortage of candid and beguiling recollections of scrapes, shenanigans, success, and self-discoveries.
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Although hearing about someone else’s personal memorabilia is as dull as it ever was — at its low points, reading this book can feel like being trapped in a conversation with an uncle who is enjoying his reminiscences rather more than you are — Dyer is wonderful on the strangeness of remembering itself ... Records the kinds of memories we all have...but also the vividly remembered oddities ... Dyer’s memoir deftly captures this transformation, one both unlikely and inevitable.
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Homework distinguishes itself like such a structure among the developed, dreary grounds of the British scholastic narrative ... If Dyer has grown sentimental about the England of his upbringing, his nostalgia is a subtle critique of how optimism in big government has grown worse for wear—Homework bursts with working-class pride, a fond and mournful belief in the possibility of the British welfare state ... Still, the fact of remembering can sometimes feel more important to Dyer than how events translate. He leads us through a grove of anecdotes, some more meaningful than others ... Humor is his life raft because he neglects to plot much of a course around the seas of memory. The book’s languor can be ponderous and vintage, more 20th century than 21st ... The book’s contrast, between familial impecunity and the minor damage of the narrator’s disappointments, forces us to look past circumstance and consider how materialism relates to affection and if this conflict is generational.
