Madman who’s mastered the genre

"Hotels are synonymous with sex," writes Geoff Dyer at the beginning of an essay called, understandably, Sex and Hotels. "Sex in a hotel is romantic, daring, unbridled, wild. Sex in a hotel is sexy ... And it's even more fun if there are two of you."

I hope Dyer will forgive me for spoiling one of the best jokes in his book but there's more to it than meets the eye. For a start, there is the suggestion that Dyer is, shall we say, a bit of an auto-eroticist. Or "somewhat of an asshole", as someone calls him in Of Course, a charming account of his romance with his wife-to-be.

And then there is the condition of singleness: you get the feeling that everything about Dyer is explained in the essay On Being an Only Child. You could say he's a classic example: the kind of man who is incredibly fussy about coffee and doughnuts, loves jazz, and will not countenance having children — and is mystified by those who do. When he brings a potential girlfriend back to his revoltingly spacious two-storey apartment in Brighton he makes her listen to "Hariprasad Chaurasia play the Raga Puriya Kaliyan", as if we have any idea what that is, and then says "it is, of course, an early evening raga".

Well, no man is a hypocrite in his pleasures, as Dr Johnson said. But Dyer really is a good writer. He makes, for instance, great use of his coffee-and-doughnut obsession in Otherwise Known as the Human Condition, a self-portrait of mania which is, in its way, as fine a piece of comic writing as you are ever likely to read: not so much laugh-out-loud as continuously, winningly mad. Dyer's job, really, is to palpate the surfaces of his own reactions and report back to us what the experience means to Geoff Dyer.

This is his most characteristic mode, familiar to those of us who have enjoyed previous books of his, such as Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi and the wonderfully titled Yoga for People Who Can't Be Bothered to Do It. It is high-risk, and can topple over into preening self-satisfaction, as in On the Roof, about how cool it was to be on the dole in Brixton in the 1980s (the subject of his preening, self-satisfied first novel, The Colour of Memory).

But there is much else here. He is an astute, sensitive and properly self-effacing critic: he writes well about Turner, Kathryn Bigelow, DH Lawrence and a great many artists and photographers you may not have heard of, but of whom it is worth hearing; and he is very perceptive about such writers as Ian McEwan, Lorrie Moore and the Goncourts. Essay collections used to be part of civilised libraries — every shelf had a copy of RL Stevenson's Virginibus Puerisque. Maybe in Dyer we have a successor.