SOURCE: “A Lesson from America,” in Spectator, September 2, 1989, pp. 31–32.

In the following excerpt, Lezard offers an unfavorable assessment of The Colour of Memory.

When publishers wake up, as they periodically do, to the fact that young people look good on dust-jackets, the results can be pretty inspiring. Geoff Dyer's first novel, The Colour of Memory, has inspired me to leave the country. It is a plotless novel, not so much written as observed, where youngish people on the dole in Brixton with mildly precious names like Foomie and Sternako sit on roofs, drink beer, go to parties, name-drop a lot and smoke loads of grass. It is a pleasant existence, based more on the continuous capitulation to desire rather than the life of the mind, at times poignantly evoked. There is a great deal of the elegy in Dyer's book: he describes everyone with all Heathcote Williams’ tenderness...