Steve Braunias: At the end of the day, is it really over?

Jack Kerouac fell into a long, unhappy alcoholic stupor after he wrote his 1957 classic, On The Road. But nobody can take that success from him, writes Steve Braunias.

OPINION

The end – of life, the world, things like that – is the subject of English writer Geoff Dyer's latest book, The Last Days of Roger Federer, which is only briefly about the tennis legend. I suppose the underlying theme is concerned with death, or at least desolation. But even Noddy in Toyland is concerned with death, and the unbearable desolation of being; Noddy's cap, with its bell jingling like a shop door, and the many and various furies of the terrible Big Ears, are all vivid and desperate attempts to claim life while it's only briefly available.

The end is inevitable. But it can take forever, and many of us live lives of long goodbyes. Dyer refuses to believe that early proof of genius or some other kind of achievement is somehow diminished if the person who possesses that genius or achieves something wonderful never does anything remotely worthwhile again. His example is Jack Kerouac, who fell into a long, unhappy alcoholic stupor after he wrote his 1957 classic, On The Road. Dyer has something beautiful to say about this. "Everything else – not just everything that came before but everything in the sloshy aftermath that was still to come – is insignificant." You can never take that book away from him. If we do one thing right, that's enough. Even the barest of lives can claim that and there are some funeral eulogies that are very bare indeed.

The end is nigh. There are some dark and brooding souls who can't wait for it to be nigh, such as football player George Best, who announced his retirement from the game on his 26th birthday. Best was at his peak, at the height of his athletic genius, his looks, his confidence. He threw it all away. Dyer remembers the shocking news. "It was the first time I knew of anyone stopping doing … the thing that gave their life meaning." I remember the shocking news, too. There was a story about it in the paper. I cut it out and pasted it into a scrapbook and stared at it, and stared at it; I still have that scrapbook, and I still stare at it. I keep wondering what the lesson is and why it exerts such mysterious appeal. I think it's something to do with timing – knowing just the right precise moment to do the worst thing you can possibly do, and make everyone else around you suffer for it, most of all yourself.

The end is final, except when it isn't – we all deserve a second chance, to rise like a phoenix from the ashes of life's cold hearth. Dyer examines the nature of comebacks, and concludes, "Athletes come out of retirement as a way of reconciling themselves to the fact that there is no coming back." It's a little bit negative. But I suppose that's the lesson of the greatest comeback ever told, Christ's resurrection. He didn't stay long. Dyer thinks a lot, in The Last Days of Roger Federer, about D.H. Lawrence. The last work of fiction that Lawrence wrote was the long short story The Man Who Died, which imagines Christ returning to life, but in his version it's not to perform anything miraculous or exalted, but to live a sensual life: "He laid his hand softly on her warm, bright shoulder, and the shock of desire went through him." Nice one. But he gets Isis pregnant and then sails off, determined to repeat his own experience of an absent father. Dyer is right. He should never have come back.

The end is bad. We are routinely instructed to rage, rage against the dying of the light, in the sense that death has a definite shape and we must do what we can to fend it off for as long as we possibly can, but there are other kinds of endings, vague, formless endings, and they can arrive without anyone even being aware of it. Romance, ambition, innocence … Dyer is preoccupied with the end of talent. How is it, he wonders, that Martin Amis can go from writing the golden glowing sentences of London Fields to writing a piece of s*** like Yellow Dog? I wondered likewise about Dyer. Only Geoff Dyer writes like Geoff Dyer, although sometimes Geoff Dyer writes like he's forgotten how to write like Geoff Dyer. He totally knew how to write like himself in Out of Sheer Rage (1997) and Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It (2003), but The Last Days of Roger Federer can sometimes read like a great artist experiencing a loss of form – and sometimes read like a great artist. Dyer, on the joys of being stoned in London: "I could even handle the night bus home after parties, the slur of lights through the window-drizzle, the perpetual lurk of London yobbery." Game, set, and match.