On the face of it, Geoff Dyer’s study of ageing creators in decline is a failure. Written in flabby prose, it has no discernible structure, beyond being a bucket for stray thoughts that struck him on his sofa in Los Angeles. But read another way, the book is the perfect illustration of its own theme: the 63-year-old Briton, the most knowing of writers, understands that he is himself the declining creator he describes.

Dyer has spent decades chronicling his life and thoughts, in 10 non-fiction works as well as four novels. Esteemed particularly by other writers for his ability to bend genres, he has achieved the rare feat of being read since the 1980s. Now, he writes, he has entered a new life-phase: “Though not my last, hopefully, this phase is marked by a daily increasing consciousness that the next may well be . . . ” He felt he’d better write this study before reaching his final phase, which “might be distinguished by an inability on my part to identify or articulate it”.

The ageing creator has rich potential as a topic, especially in our era of ageing societies. The recently deceased Judith Kerr and Jan Morris were both still writing in their nineties, while the great baseball writer Roger Angell, who has just died at 101, published his last article in the New Yorker aged 100. Dyer, with his fearsome erudition accumulated over decades of aesthetic criticism, could have produced a fascinating study of late-life creation.

Instead we get a book of disjointed musings on ageing writers, singers and athletes. Dyer’s almost all-male pantheon includes Nietzsche, Bob Dylan, Roger Federer and the English painter Turner. To be fair, he makes some imaginative leaps, including a nice comparison of the self-hating ex-boxer Mike Tyson with the poet Philip Larkin.

There is the odd incisive line. On the Bronze “survival swimming badge” he won in childhood: “Bronze, in my family, was always enough.” On the first world war, a Dyer obsession: “The source of the deadlock on the western front was that the means of defence were mechanised, whereas the means of attack were not.” And on the possible but unacknowledged cause of Nietzsche’s epochal falling-out with his hero, the composer Richard Wagner: “Wagner’s conviction that the philosopher’s chronic problems with his eyes were a result of compulsive masturbation.”

The best of Dyer’s reflections might have worked as a short essay, or a series of Facebook posts. But this overlong book reads like a compendium of an ageing writer’s characteristic flaws.

First, there are the damaging effects of what Dyer calls “catastrophic early success”. Career-long praise seems to have fed an illusion that anything he thinks is interesting. He has also reached that dangerous level of authorial stardom where whatever he writes will be published uncut. Unfortunately, he no longer seems burning to say anything. You page through accounts of long-ago drugs trips, samplings of his own past work, writings about writing this book, fragments of reheated book reviews, or worse, descriptions of jazz passages, and you wish the publisher had intervened. At times the book sinks into that lowest of literary forms, the Covid home diary. The low-stakes, late-middle-aged vibe peaks in an account of him getting off at the wrong train station and reaching his Tuscan hotel late.

Then there’s the decline in technique. Dyer admits that his own ability to recreate scenes with lyricism and romance “has diminished, disintegrated” with time. But that ability is most of writing. He toys with the idea that artlessness might be an ageing artist’s means to access greater truths. Not on the evidence of this book, it isn’t.

As Dyer correctly observes: “A condition of being able to go on creating late into one’s life seems often to be an inability to see what, for readers, is the most distinct quality of this later work: its deterioration in quality.”

One wishes he had dared look ageing straight in the eye. But he spends far more time on his tennis injuries than on a minor stroke he suffered, and claims not to think about death. The book might have been richer if he did.

The Last Days of Roger Federer: and Other Endings by Geoff Dyer, Canongate £20/Farrar, Straus and Giroux $28, 304 pages

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