HOMEWORK

A Cotswold childhood during the ’60s and ’70s.

Remarkably accurate if surprisingly conventional, Dyer seems the least likely slacker to finish homework. Famous for not writing a book about D.H. Lawrence and mooching around Varanasi not doing yoga, Dyer, in this memoir, recounts growing up in Cheltenham, a sedate spa town in the English midlands. The only child of a working-class couple, he focuses on two key events. The first is passing his 11-plus exam, which gives him access to a grammar school, and the second is his matriculation to Oxford. Difficult as it may be for Americans to understand, a national test at the age of 11 funneled the academically gifted into a feeder system for college, while largely abandoning everyone else. Shedding his working-class identity at 11 to eventually mingle, at Oxford, with enormously privileged members of the upper class, is the true voyage of the book. Along the way, this meticulously itemized memoir includes playing the game called conkers (horse chestnuts on a string), supporting the Chelsea soccer team, trying to avoid warts at the swimming center, helping his dad on the allotment (a garden area away from the gardenless house), taking elocution lessons to lose his local accent, collecting LPs, and riding his bike. His portrait of an England emerging from the Second World War into the comparative affluence of the 1960s makes for touching reading, especially its depiction of the contrast between the author and his Depression-era father, for whom wartime rationing never really went away. Still—this being Dyer—his eye for quirky paradox never falters. Front rooms remain unused, pianos do not get played, a family visit represents “a lack of occasion,” while beauty goes conspicuously missing. Given a Christmas gift, he declares himself “entirely undisappointed.”

An enfant terrible reflects on his not-so-terrible enfance.