Book Review: The Search by Geoff Dyer

The Search
Novel by Geoff Dyer
Graywolf Press, May 2014
ISBN-13: 978-1555976781
$15.00; 176 pp.
Reviewed by Ann Beman

Although The Search is a detective novel—of sorts—its clues are never what they seem. With a title like The Search, you assume you’re in for a quest, and that in the end, something or someone will be found. But you would only be half-right, because this book isn’t so much about solving a mystery as it is about savoring the journey and milking the metaphor. Geoff Dyer’s second novel, The Search was first released in Great Britain in 1993, with Graywolf publishing the slender work of fiction for the first time in the U.S. last summer. It opens in Chandleresque detective/noir fashion, with the hard-boiled, hard-drinking protagonist, Walker, gatecrashing a posh party where he meets Rachel, the archetypal “dame,” who shows up on Walker’s doorstep two days later to persuade him to track her perhaps-lost-on-purpose husband. Reluctant to take the case, but hoping to eventually bed Rachel, Walker embarks on the search.

This hero’s journey graduates into trippier territory, as Dyer sets the errand in a vast imagined landscape both familiar and absurd. The opening chapters occur in a city vaguely resembling San Francisco. As Walker sets out, “he [crosses] the Bay Bridge and [heads] up the coast.” Later on that same page, however, he encounters a landscape “flat and featureless, almost an abstraction, existing only as distance.” The author’s stage is set: a blank, mysterious unknown on which to create the unexpected. It could be anywhere, the start of any road trip. For mystery buffs, armchair travelers, not to mention Geoff Dyer fans, The Search cannot fail to hook us. We’re with Walker as he trips into diners, bars, and cheap hotels. We’re with him traveling via cars (both owned and stolen), buses, trains, box-cars, and bicycles across a borderless landscape — a landscape dotted with mythical place names, such as Leonia, which are reminiscent of Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities. Each stop along the way veers further from the familiar, even as we close in on the supposed subject of the quest. A city called Horizon consists of one enormous Borgesian building. “Here and there he found windows but all he could see from them, except for the damp courtyard many yards below, were the walls and windows of the rest of the building, the rest of the city.” Another town, Despond, saps Walker of all motivation and he barely conjures the energy to escape. No surprise, then, that the novel’s final stop is in a town called Nemesis.

Throughout The Search, the author delights in metaphors of reality and illusion, often relying on photographs and plays of light. He speaks of motion as represented by “the slight ghosting of a photograph,” and of a pivotal moment “held like a vast camera flash.” During a nighttime storm in a place that screams of Nevada: “Rain purpled and greened around him.” Dyer has us all but tasting the puddles on the parking lot’s asphalt and smelling the rain in the surrounding desert.

Yet even as his prose dazzles, Dyer evokes the voices of his influences: Carver, Calvino, Borges. He blatantly leans on the grail legend, too, beginning with the subject of Walker’s search. Rachel’s husband is called Malory, a nod to Le Morte d’Arthur’s author, and the gesture that draws Walker to Rachel in the first place resembles Mary Magdalene proffering the sacred chalice. Further along, a thug refers to Walker as Lancelot, and at times he seems to step right into a looking-glass Camelot: “He looked up at the stained glass windows where imploring figures blazed with colour: a knight in blue-white armour, a woman clutching a golden cup in both hands as if simultaneously praying and offering it to him. He walked past waving candle flames, the tombs of dead knights.”

In the end, we feel our knight-errant weirdly triumphant, but there’s also a degree of post-travel blues. With both books and travel, it’s the unexpected encounters that make the stories. And finishing a book is like returning home from a road trip. The relative stillness roars in our ears, forcing us to reflect upon how the book or the trip has changed us, or perhaps tweaked us. In reflecting upon The Search, you can’t help but want to revisit the clues that Dyer has trailed for Walker, and for us readers. The Search seems as if it’s meant to inspire its own search — a literary quest. Make this book the first stop.

Ann Beman has been writing a book about thumbs forever. LAR’s nonfiction editor lives in California’s Sierra Nevada with her husband, two whatchamaterriers and a chihuahua in Kernville, on the Kern River, in Kern County (cue the banjoes).