Homework

A portrait of a young boy, who keeps passing exams—and of a changing England in the 1960s and 1970s.

The only child of a dinner lady and a sheet-metal worker, Geoff Dyer grew up in the world of the English working class: hardworking, respectable, steeped in memories of the Depression and World War II. Accordingly, his memoir is not a story of hardship overcome but a celebration of opportunities afforded by the postwar settlement, of which he was an unconscious beneficiary. The crux comes at the age of eleven with the exam that has decided the future of generations: secondary modern or the transformative promise of grammar school?

One of the lucky winners, Dyer goes to grammar school and begins to develop a love of literature (and beer and prog rock). Only later does he understand that this win entails a loss. The loss is of a sense of belonging and—since this very personal story contains a larger social history—of an eroded but strangely resilient England. “Happenings” were a key part of the sixties mythology; this book traces, in perfectly phrased detail, another kind of happening, whose roots extend into the deep foundations of class society.

Tracing a path from childhood through the tribulations of teenage sport, gig-going, romance, fights (well, getting punched in the face), and other misadventures with comic affection, Homework takes us to the threshold of university, where Dyer first feels the cultural distance from his origins that this book works so imaginatively and tenderly to shrink.