Luc Sante reviews Geoff Dyer the quick-change artist

...Which is to say that instead of being agglutinations of data, his works are characterized by the fact that they are writing—that their insights and their expression are inseparable and maybe indistinguishable. They are the opposite of Wikipedia: By design, they tell you as much about the author as about the ostensible subject. It's like with music—you want the voice before you want the song, don't you? Or do you just indifferently punch up any old cover of "Moon River" and that's good enough? Likewise, with a writer such as Dyer (and there aren't too many in his league), what you dig is interpretation, in its several senses: exegesis, and profound internalization of a subject, and a thorough imaginative remaking of that subject...'