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Geoff Dyer’s Idle Days at Sea

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Over the arc of his long career, Geoff Dyer has cultivated a certain style. If reviews are to be believed, his carefully crafted technique is a higher achievement than the substance of his books themselves. In his latest book, we finally see its limitations, as we watch the book collapse under the weight of his own style and the burden of his chosen subject.

Another Great Day At Sea: Life Aboard the U.S.S. George H.W. Bush (Pantheon, 208 pages, $24.99) is ostensibly an account of a fourteen-day ride-along on the Nimitz-class nuclear aircraft carrier in its title. Dyer’s sojourn takes place in 2011—around the time the Arab Spring came to Bahrain, referred to here as “the beach”—in some classified location within the vast blueness of the Persian Gulf.

Dyer has two Sancho Panzas with him, a photographer whom he dismissively refers to as “the snapper” and Ensign Paul Newell, a shipmate. The plot is unsurprisingly sparse—it turns out that a military aircraft carrier, when not at war, is a dull place to be—and goes like this: Dyer arrives onboard, where each day he’s taken to a different part of the ship, from the gym, to the brig, to the flight deck, to the morgue. The book sees him roaming relatively freely, interviewing crewmates on their lives and histories and feelings and dreams. The cumulative effect is hazy, unmoored—the ship an unchanging, gunmetal sameness painted onto the equally constant sea.

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Like all of Dyer’s books, Another Great Day At Sea is moored mostly in the author’s head. Dyer is known for jumping between and mashing up genres, but common to all of his literary experiments is a relentlessly autobiographical search for meaning; the headspaces he explores in his books are fractal, almost, with ideas that repeat in patterns across his oeuvre. Dyer’s thirteenth book, a collection of essays titled Otherwise Known As The Human Condition (Graywolf, 2011), reads as a legend for the rest of his work: here are the essays that have been turned into books, or book-like things. Reading it is like waiting at a packed café for a friend to arrive, only to turn and find they’ve been sitting behind you the entire time.

All of Dyer’s books spark this shock of recognition. He whinges and whines and complains and snarks—this is also on prominent display in Another Great Day At Sea, as the military isn’t known for its emphasis on comfort—but somehow, after you’re half-convinced you’ll remain caught in the throes of his neuroticism forever, he’ll offhandedly drop an insight that feels as though he’s been rooting around inside your mind.

No exception, Another Day At Sea is indulgent, and I don’t mean that in an entirely negative way: Dyer works best when he’s cut loose, given space to pinball between his memories, neuroses, and observations. Fans of Dyer will find a lot to like: there’s the dry humor, the classic indulgence, the easy insight. Dyer’s inner life is meant to drive the plot forward, to keep you interested in what he’s got left to say. As it turns out, an aircraft carrier provides just enough breathing room.

“If a plane’s not carrying ordnance it’s a dang pleasure craft,” a sailor says midway through the book. “If we didn’t have ordnance this boat would just be a floating platform for a bunch of fancy, overpaid video guys putting on an air show.” His tone is part aggressive, entirely enthusiastic; sailing on this vessel and doing this job is his life’s work. The munitions man’s conviction parallels Dyer’s own regarding his career as a dilettantish man of letters, but the rich sense of place is nearly absent (which has perhaps more to do with Dyer’s stylistic nomadism than anything else).

That said, when a writer boards a military vessel, you expect war reporting—robust words to pay tribute to robust men and robust women and robust nationalism. Here, that expectation is inverted, and aside from a brief, despairing mention of Tom Wolfe’s perfect essay “The Truest Sport: Jousting With Sam And Charlie,” Dyer dives for cover in the opposite direction. Despite the presence of thousands of pounds of explosives, the trip is a voyeuristic pleasure cruise into his childhood memories of the post-World War II-era. It’s also a way to again scratch the military itch that’s dogged him for decades. “As a boy I had loved war and soldiering,” Dyer writes, going on to say:

I got particularly obsessed with reading about the U.S. Marine Corps to the extent that, in a softly lit, armchairish sort of way, I began to wonder if, in another life, I might have joined the Marines, might have been a jarhead and had ‘Semper Fi’ tattooed on a properly muscular forearm.

It comes off as nebbishy—anything more than a passing interest in the carnage and chaos of war strikes me as naïve, boyish, unfortunately romanticized. Under the auspices of Alain de Botton’s writing residency, Dyer experiences his first foray to the front—or, as he puts it in the book, to the tip of the spear.

At the level of the sentence, this works; Dyer is a very good writer. His meandering, flâneuring style is suited to the setting, and his phrases wobble in glib self-negation, wavelike in their motion. There’s a stochastic element, too. Though by the end you realize that Dyer retains very firm control over where exactly his sentences wander, your first read feels like being caught in a storm of Brownian particles, buffeted back and forth and back again.

But the glibness gets old, quickly, and without cover of humor, Dyer’s extreme solipsism becomes overwhelming, even annoying. Everyone is a character sketch without a real personality—more anthropological curiosity than fully human. The people that Dyer spends the most time with, the photographer and the naval officer tasked with leading him around the ship, never merit more than passing consideration. Near the end of the book, Dyer attends two promotion ceremonies, one for Ensign Newell and one for another officer, Clinton Stonewall III. Where he spends Stonewall’s ceremony arbitrarily fighting tears, Dyer relates how he’s eaten a piece of paper during Newell’s. These are illegible, random gestures, and as the book progresses Dyer gives the impression that it’s because he’s cracking up from his days at sea (he starts calling himself “Beachbelly” and narrating in the third person). Perhaps it’s an allergic reaction to his flâneur tendencies?

Whatever the case, when Dyer writes “[t]he longer I spent on the carrier the more convinced I became that, of all the kinds of writers I was not, ‘reporter’ was at the top of the list,” it comes off as an apology. Which begs the question: Why write the book at all? Need one’s process of self-discovery be this public?

Nowhere are the blemishes more apparent than in the seven-page excerpt published in the April 21st issue of The New Yorker, where, after what can only have been utterly draining rounds of editing, one sees what’s left of a Dyer book after all the Dyer has been taken out. It’s a dry and unforgiving read, covering about 70 percent of the material in Another Great Day At Sea. The piece is lifeless, as if anyone who’d spent any time on an aircraft carrier and could string together a competent sentence might have dashed it off:

We trooped down the stairs from the flight deck, and took off our cranials. There may have been no jets landing down here, but we were engulfed by industrial clamor. In the course of a two-week visit, I moved constantly between the numerous levels below the flight deck, often barely conscious of where I was. The boat remained a three-dimensional maze of walkways, stairs and hatches. I walked through the walkways and stoop-ducked through hatches, always focussed on a single ambition: not to smash my head, even though there was an opportunity to do so every couple of seconds.

And so forth. (That’s not to say the editors of The New Yorker lobotomized the entire book; there are beautiful, throwaway moments that manage to undo some of the damage.)

About three-quarters of the way through, Dyer gives us a genuinely interesting moment of complete sincerity—no humor, no meandering—as he compares piloting a fighter jet to his battling his anxieties about writing:

Climbs into the cockpit, connects all the tubes and harnessing, goes through the checks and is shocked to discover, all over again, what he’s been discovering for a while now: that there’s no place on earth he’d rather not be. [ . . . ] If only, he thinks, he could be one of the guys on the deck, watching the planes come in, not doing it himself, just observing others doing it; not writing it, just reading about it.

I’m personally sympathetic to his anxieties about writing; anyone who’s ever put keyboard to monitor in earnest has felt similarly. I’m even inclined to forgive the indulgence here, as his confession feels fresh and alive. But any serious journalist could do better. His style falls short—the voice isn’t strong enough to bear out its ambition—because of the tensions inherent to the setting: Why use a military setting and then studiedly not mention politics, war writing, or even the Arab Spring? Militaries are global extensions of power, and therefore should necessarily require serious thought about their effect on The Other. By definition, a flâneur’s solipsism is The Other’s antithesis; a flâneur’s tone cannot adequately address a military subject.

Dyer’s honesty is short-lived, in any case, and as the chapter ends the book swings right back into his characteristic breeziness. The topic isn’t raised again, and it feels like a loss. It feels disingenuous.