Rough Guide to Transformation - Pico Iyer

When Martin Amis gave a central character in his scabrous, compulsive novel “Money” the name John Self, he was showing (or showing off) the impenitence and outsize ambitions of his satire on materialism and the ego. When Geoff Dyer, in his profoundly haunting and fearless new novel, gives his protagonist the name Jeff Atman — invoking the Hindu word for the true and universal self — he’s doing something much more subtle and original. Dyer’s trademark wit and uniqueness, in fact, surround you before you’ve even turned to the first page: the first half of his title, “Jeff in Venice,” at once offers a quippy come-on and announces he’s going to subvert and update the classic novella by Thomas Mann (putting the self, or anti-­self, in place of death); the second half, “Death in Varanasi,” alerts you that he will extend his hyper-­contemporary search all the way to classical India, playing off one Old World city of palaces against another and propelling his story into the domain of Allen Ginsberg and all those other loose-limbed seekers who have turned that holy city of Hinduism into a backpacker’s Vatican.

“Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi” could as easily be called “Samsara and Nirvana” and stripped of its “novel” label (if you forget that Philip Roth, V. S. Naipaul and W. G. Sebald, among distinguished others, have all made fiction out of slightly displaced counterlives and protagonists who sound like themselves). Jeff, in other words, feels a lot like Geoff: an all-purpose writer for the high-end British papers and a determined idler whose love of freeloading can never quite conceal his hunger for something deeper and more transcendent. In the first half of the novel, he goes to Venice to cover the Biennale art exhibition on a journalist’s boondoggle that quickly turns into a quest to score as much sex, drugs and other low-end fun as possible. Along the way, in a style that’s reminiscent of Colson Whitehead’s “John Henry Days,” the narrative has fun with the meta-ness of contemporary pseudo-events: everybody is planning a dinner for the artist Ed ­Ruscha, and hustlers selling fake handbags on the street turn out to be an “installation.”