Just finished Geoff Dyer's The Colour of Memory which arrived on Monday & I've been swigging since. It's good in that first novelish way (it is his first, I think). So obviously worked up from journalings of wasted months - a point he makes in the Note to the Revised Edition. I like his aesthetic of the "inch from life - but all the art is in that inch". How true.

Compared to - say - Iain Sinclair, the writing is easy going, in places pretty functional. Dyer apologises for there being no plot as such but it's a ruse. He knows that at the core of the book is a pervasive aimlessness of that period in one's life when time expands to fill the void. Jobs are picked up & dropped, people come & go, there's not even a rumour of mortgages, babies, & other stuff that hold you down to place & responsibility. Why then even think of a plot?

And yet, he's clever in not filling in the gaps. The held glance between Steranko & his sister Fran is left in the air at the close of chapter 007 but it's clear that things have changed by 005 & his kiss with Foomie. Or the way he closes the novel entering Freddie's apartment & discovering the journal (which is/isn't) the manuscript we're reading. What of corduroy jacket Freddie? We're not told explicitly - moved abroad, died? - & are better off left guessing.

So much of the later GD is already here: frequent little riffs off jazz records that are on a turntable or bought in the market; worked up passages on photographs or - like Monica's bedroom seen through a window - life that is becoming photogenic; the allergy to regular employment; the cultivated delinquency. And there's even the hint of Tarkovsky - a Brixton Nostalgia? - at those points when the writing stalls & time seems to stop & an epiphany is hinted at yet never quite arrives ...