Geoff Dyer's most recent collection of short essays and reviews is divided into four sections: "Visuals" (pieces about photographers, mainly, but also a few painters), "Verbals" (pieces about novelists, including a couple of substantial articles about DH Lawrence), "Variables" (a rag-bag of commissioned pieces) and "Personals" (pieces about his past).

The first three of these are fine, in the sense they do their job well, but seldom rise to a height that seems actually remarkable. The last is much more interesting  shrewd, funny, original  and reminds us that although Dyer is always smart when he's writing about things in the world, he's best when he's dividing his attention between them and himself.

He knows this, which is why he's generally organised himself to look inwards as well as out. His Lawrence book, Out of Sheer Rage, is a prime example; it spends as much time fretting about its own process and procedures (or the lack of them) as it does analysing its subject. Even his most recent novel, Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi, plays a similar game. It isn't much interested in providing a crossable bridge between its two parts, which allows both of them (especially the second) to take on the appearance of an autobiographical study.

This is all done with such a light touch that Dyer has made a reputation for himself in the last 20-odd years as a kind of admirable slacker. Actually, as he tells us, slacker isn't quite the word. Skiver is. "All I've ever wanted from a job is to skive. Skiving is a whole way of approaching  in the sense of avoiding  work. It's not the same as slacking, because skiving can involve a far greater investment of energy and initiative than doing the work could ever have necessitated."

This distinction informs every piece in "Personals", because it reminds us that Dyer has spent the past 20-odd years devising a way of writing that appears to float calmly along the surface of things but is actually very busy paddling underneath. In this respect, it both addresses and solves one of the central preoccupations of all his work  which is how closely his adult life does and does not connect with the circumstances of his childhood.

On the face of it, his past and present are poles apart  divided, as he says in a series of touching anecdotes, and with due references to Jude Fawley and Tony Harrison's poems, by his education in Oxford. His mum was a dinner lady and his dad a sheet metal worker (in Cheltenham, where he went to the grammar school); he spends his time writing about pictures and literature, in prose that's half in love with sex and drugs and empty afternoons.

They travelled very little, he travels a lot. They didn't have much time for culture (or the permission to enjoy it), his life revolves round it in one way or another. And so on, and so on.

The very clarity of the antithesis is (paradoxically) enough to imply a close connection  but there are more definite kinds of link as well. Dyer's parents were hard grafters and so is he (hence that passage about skiving). They lived in a deeply moral universe and so does he  he can't live lies, he tells it as it is, and he has an instinctive taste for high seriousness. No wonder the book is dedicated to his parents. It appears to describe a long march away from home, but in fact its more analytical sections amount to a celebration of more or less traditional virtues  all of which are well caught in a language of "contrived naturalness" (the phrase he uses approvingly of Richard Avedon).

Nothing wrong with any of that. And nothing wrong either with the way he presents himself. He's consistently the guy who falls into writing because he's too passive to get a different kind of job; or the radical stylist who won't give punters what they want by telling a narrative-driven story. These are all ways of seeming "alternative" to the mainstream, but they are all tried and tested archetypes. You might almost say they're a version of orthodoxy. In fact they must be: last year he was named GQ's "Writer of the Year".

The reason there's nothing wrong with any of this is simply that Dyer writes very well and makes very good company on the page. Reading Working the Room doesn't seem like work at all. It does, however, leave questions about what he might do next. Can so affably demotic a manner rise to the mood of high seriousness that seems to press on him increasingly often? Will he make the digressive, riffing style  in novels and non-fiction  do more than he has used it to do already? Can his strategies for surprise continue to seem surprising  and throw up more profound insights? It's not really a part of Dyer's character to set out such challenges in such serious terms (it would look too try-hard). But they haunt Working the Room nevertheless.

Andrew Motion's The Cinder Path is published by Faber.

Geoff Dyer has long been the most productive of slackers. He measures out his decades in generous essay collections, like this one, and in between times writes his languid, elegant, brilliantly conversational novels and books  a dozen at the last count  that tend to insist that his principal subject is lassitude, procrastination, self-doubt, even while materially proving the opposite. He gives genuine deadline-dodgers and excuse-inventors, with unwritten and never-to-be-written books piling up around them, a bad name. Though Dyer seems convinced that he is a premier-league time-waster, no experience or impression in his writing and travelling life, no idle hour on a long-haul flight or jet-lagged evening in a foreign hotel, is beyond anecdotal redemption. "I write about whatever happens to interest me," he notes in the introduction here. "It's a job for life, more accurately, it is a life, and hardly a day goes by without my marvelling that it is somehow feasible to lead it."

As a critic, Dyer always gets his qualified lack of qualification for the role in first, which makes the humanity and dazzle of his insights all the more likable as they unfold. The manner was established early and reached its perfect pitch in Out of Sheer Rage, his book about being unable to write a book about DH Lawrence, which among many other things was an hilarious and unanswerable dismantling of the dry pomposity of Eng Lit, and a manifesto for Dyer's own approach: that beguiling mix of accidental knowledge and genuine excitement, of sudden inspiration and honest boredom, an insistence that love for a book or a musician or a painting or a photograph is never something that can be separated from a writer's own life, but is intimately involved in it.

The circumstances of seeing or reading something are always at least as important to Dyer as the object of his easily distracted attention; thus his essay on JMW Turner begins, winningly: "I'm not entirely sure that this (see plate 7) is the picture I'm writing about" and goes on to describe how at "some point in the last decade I was killing time  however quickly it passes there are odd pockets that need somehow to be disposed of  at Tate Britain, cruising the Turners", before suggesting that one painting, possibly but not necessarily the one at hand, gave him such a jolt that "I took some notes that I've been unable to locate and which I never got around to writing up properly". If what followed was not a brief and fabulous meditation on the importance of precision and haziness in Turner's vision of light, would this intro be annoying? Possibly, but the question never arises.

Quite properly, like several of Dyer's quixotically stoned adventures, this book seems constructed as a vague quest. You move through the unusually lit rooms of the author's fascinations  with photographers ranging from Larry Burrows to Martin Parr  through "verbals" (including two pre-Out of Sheer Rage essays on Lawrence, which incongruously find Dyer in somewhat restrained and anonymous voice); you get to hear further improvised jazz themes, which pick up where Dyer's sketchily definitive lives of the bebop artists, But Beautiful, left off, and you end up fully in the company of the author himself.

Dyer is becoming, in these latter pieces of memoir and comical self-observation, a character just as arch and seductive as that professional self-effacer from the previous generation, Alan Bennett. He too is the provincial boy  from a working-class family in Cheltenham, in Dyer's case  up at Oxford, the arriviste who, despite all subsequent appearances to the contrary, would have you believe he has never arrived. If Bennett's default position is social embarrassment, Dyer's is a vestigial unease at his sense of arrested development, a distant and unresolved nervousness that perhaps life should not be just a continuation of studenty habits and tastes. At one point, in an essay not wholly ironically named "Otherwise known as the human condition", he invites his readers to join him, aged 51, in his indefatigable search for the perfect cappuccino/doughnut combination in New York. Elsewhere he muses, with proper existential fascination, on the small moments of luck  not getting caught with a forgotten spliff in his pocket at Miami airport, say  that have allowed his life to continue to feel inadvertently charmed.

An only child himself  and one, as a he writes poignantly here, estranged by lifestyle from his parents  Dyer is determinedly childless; like many writers he sometimes seems to have reserved his nurturing instinct for his own narrated boyish self. As he observes, in a sharply funny recollection of his post-Oxford life on the dole: "A friend recently said that, for as long as he could remember, his dream of perfect happiness always centred on the idea of having a family (my idea of perfect misery) my sense of perfect happiness has never progressed beyond a slightly archaic idea of Bohemia." There is a sort of heroism in this, and a sort of narcissism, and it is the mark of Dyer as a writer that he can play both for all they are worth, and keep both himself and his reader smiling.