Fearful symmetry

WATER WORKS Dyer's new novel takes place in Venice and on the Ganges.

Photograph: Jason Oddy

A free-associater with both feet on the ground, Geoff Dyer is equally comfortable writing about 'shroom-induced head trips, jazz and the poetry of W.H. Auden. His compelling new novel, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, is a riff on Thomas Mann's Death in Venice. Or, rather, two riffs. The book's first half follows Jeff Atman, a British journalist who attends the 2003 Venice Biennale, where he has a flash-in-the-pan fling with a young American named Laura. This section starts sexy and closes with cocaine-hangover despair. The second half focuses on a British journalist, never named, who travels to the holy city of Varanasi, India; once there, he decides to stay indefinitely and withdraws into a state of monklike renunciation. What, the reader is provoked to ask, is going on here? Why are these two waterfront cities being juxtaposed? Most significantly, is the narrator of part two Jeff, or someone else entirely?

When TONY calls the London-based Geoff to ask about Jeff, the author refuses to answer that last question, but he argues with gentle fervor that the two parts are inextricably connected. "They lean on one another utterly, and if you take one away, the other collapses," he says. "So much of the meaning of what's going on in each bit only makes sense in reference to something else that goes on in the other part."

In an earlier draft, the 50-year-old author sought to link the two stories more directly. "The Varanasi section was originally a sequel to the Venice section," he says. "It was very evidently the same person, and at some point in the second half Jeff explains that nothing much happened between him and Laura after Venice." But the writer was having trouble making the two stories cohere around a single character. Until, that is, he had an insight. "I thought, Instead of papering over the cracks, I'll just deepen the cracks." He made the deeply funny Biennale section, a third-person satire that Martin Amis would be proud to have written, provocatively distinct from the Varanasi story, which is somber, timeless, sexless and told in the first person.

Accentuating the rift between the two parts has an oddly unifying effect: It actually allows Dyer to meld the stories in ways that a straightforward linear progression never could have. He forges connections not with standard character development but with imagery (water, skulls, umbrellas) and subtly morphing motifs—sex, reincarnation and the nature of the self. The second story could be the memoir of a depressive (the postbreakup Jeff?) at the end of the road, or it could be a tale of divine self-reckoning. "I liked the idea that it wasn't clear if the Varanasi character was having a spiritual breakthrough or an old-fashioned breakdown," Dyer says.

The satisfaction of Jeff lies in its echo-chamber qualities, in watching the two tales seep into one another and accumulate meaning as they do so. "There's one version of suspense whereby you're thinking, Shit, what's going to happen next? And of course we like that, especially in the cinema," Dyer says. "This is the opposite kind of suspense, where you're thinking, Yeah, haven't I come across this before?"

This bifurcated novel could have been a bloodless postmodern schematic, but in Dyer's hands, it's musical and wildly intelligent. This will come as no surprise, as Dyer has always captured hard-to-describe topics—most notably jazz in his nonfiction book But Beautiful—in exceptionally clear and playful prose. With Jeff, he has outdone himself, offering two narratives that play off one another to create an entirely new set of possibilities—a third story—in the reader's mind. The book may not be proceed at a potboiler pace, but as its déjà vu moments accumulate, it grips you in unexpected ways. "It's not the kind of plot-driven relevance that you get in the classic Chekhov line, where he says that if there's a gun on the wall in Act I someone's going to be shot with it in Act II," Dyer says. "I use these details and little chimes to create not a story-based cohesion but an aesthetic, an effect."

Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi (Pantheon, $24) is out now. Dyer reads Apr 20 at Barnes & Noble Lincoln Triangle.

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