As is typical of Dyer, the book has little to do with Federer at all, alighting on him just a few times. Like nearly all of the author’s work, under whatever genre it may nominally arrive in our hands, it’s about him — a memoir in camouflage ... The Last Days of Roger Federer is of a piece with this previous work, but because of its subject, a little more somber, a little more urgent. It’s a masterful, beautiful, reluctantly moving book — that is, moving despite its subject being naturally moving, courting no pathos, shrewd and frank — and Dyer’s best in some time. Indeed, one of his best, period ... If you like this kind of quick counterpunch against a received idea — I do — then Dyer is for you. Most of the rest of the book is taken up with comparable meditations on the great white male depressives he reveres, among them Philip Larkin and D.H. Lawrence, Beethoven and Nietzsche ... Dyer seems to be consciously pushing these two kinds of experiences against each other, testing his brain to see what it can tell him about aging, his body to see how much it has left in it ... The risk of these writers’ style, with their short chapters and darting insights, is randomness, and sometimes this book, whatever its thematic claims, seems to consist of what has come under the author’s eye, an arbitrary collocation ... His own book, if it heralds a late style, promises the same kind of show: a powerful and funny mind, ranging across the canons of both art and experience, cutting closer toward deep truths, telling us what things are like when time is shortening. Thank goodness he has time left, I finished the book thinking, leaving the coffee shop in a mood tinged, perhaps inevitably, with a little sorrow. In the words of his hero, Dylan, it wasn’t dark yet, but it was getting there.
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