You might not have heard of Geoff Dyer. He has a sort of quiet famousness, typical of a writer too dignified for fame. Too good for celebrity, really, Dyer has written fiction, discourse, and genre-defying works that aren’t quite novels, not quite autobiography, not quite books about jazz or D.H. Lawrence, but quite, quite wonderful. And as you’d expect from an author who occupies many genres (including his very own), Dyer’s latest collection of essays displays his hummingbird ability to flit from topic to unrelated topic and yet probe deeply into each with agile and elegant precision.

Working the Room roves in its first third from his love of photography, to Rodin, Turner; to asking: ‘Is Jazz Dead?’ The second section tackles writers and writing: D.H. Lawrence, Fitzgerald, McEwan, West, Cheever, DeLillo, Sontag … All of which are engaging essays because it’s a great writer dissecting great writers. A most intimate process, I found. Partly because it’s an exercise that can’t help but simultaneously reveal both subject and author. Most intimate, though, is the last chunk of wonderful, first-person shoot’em-ups in which he’s subtly writing about himself while writing about ‘Being Sacked’; ‘My Life as a Gatecrasher’ … And in ‘Of Course’, meeting and pretty much immediately marrying his wife, rather late in life.

There’s a lot of charismatic erudition in this collection. But in the more frowny of the essays, I found the topic relegated to a garnish beside the real appetite for snuggling closer to a mind worth knowing. Especially as Dyer is one of those raconteurs who, even when he’s on a topic, is never really on that topic. But Dyer himself encapsulates my take on his collection (and perhaps his secret insecurity) in the essay: ‘In Regarding the Achievement of Others: Susan Sontag’, during which he claims Sontag was not the type of writer she adamantly thought she was. That she was absolutely a critical writer, not a fiction writer. Because as scholarly and perspicacious as Dyer is, where he truly excels is in those seemingly simpler essays about life as we all experience it. About the man himself. About experience itself. Futility itself. A futility he manages to make you belly laugh at.

In these essays he’s Graham Greene in his gentle melancholy – always seeming on the precipice of some gallant confession of despair, depression, existential angst. And yet he’s Billy Connolly in his ability to be off the topic he’s on – giving us a kind of peripheral vision into the question at hand. A collection this broad almost defies the point of a review: isn’t an essay largely dependent on your interest in the topic? Although in Dyer’s hands, almost all the topics feel warranted.

But this reader couldn’t help love him best for the last third. Like loving an actor for the panto he does on the side. Like loving George Michael for the stuff he did with Wham! Like loving your husband for taking out the bins. This is an impressive flight through eclectic, worthy topics, but I judge Dyer the way he judges Sontag – deciding that the writer he really is, is the one that’s so uniquely him. And even if I’d guess it’s not the type of writer he most aspires to be, it’s a writer well worth getting to know.

Jon Bauer is the author of **.