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by Dave Eggers Book Review by Hal Jacobs "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" is a memoir with an attitude. Dave Eggers, 29, founded the satirical Might Magazine (1993-1997) and currently edits the quarterly journal and website McSweeney's. He has, as they say, an edge. On the copyright page of the book, below the fine-print information for librarians and booksellers, he writes that "all characters and incidents and dialogue are real, are not products of the author's imagination, because at the time of this writing, the author had no imagination whatsoever for those sorts of things, and could not conceive of making up a story or characters - it felt like driving a car in a clown suit - especially when there was so much to say about his own, true, sorry, and inspirational story, the actual people that he has known, and of course the many twists and turns of his own thrilling and complex mind." Eggers does have a story to tell. As a 21-year-old college senior, he lost both parents in the space of five weeks from cancer. He took on primary responsibility of raising his eight-year-old brother Toph. The brothers moved from their suburban home in Lake Forest, Ill., to Berkeley, Calif., where Eggers became a house dad and plopped $10,000 down to launch his own zine. In most memoirs, the story of the freshly orphaned brothers struggling to make sense of their new order as they set up home in their new, exotic, Berkeley digs would be grist for the Dawson Creek mill. In Eggers' hands ("chubbier than one would expect," he confides on the copyright page), the memoir is an opportunity to experiment with form. To write the anti-memoir by use of the following: Zine-like charisma, irrelevance and flogging of sacred cows Total freedom to indulge his total self-absorption Occasional use of typographic formalities (like this) to break the conventional paragraph format. Thoughtful, witty, eloquent passages that can be enjoyed while reading the book out loud to one's friends and enemies. For instance, here's Eggers summing up his days with Topf: We scrape through every day blindly, always getting stumped on something we should know - how to plunge a toilet, how to boil corn, his Social Security number, the date of our father's birthday - such that every day that he gets to school, that I get to work and back in time for dinner, each day that we cook and eat before nine and he goes to bed before eleven and doesn't have blue malnourished-looking rings around his eyes like he did for all those months last year - we never figured out why - feels like we've pulled off some fantastic trick - an escape from the jaws of death, the hiding of the Statue of Liberty. Everyone is suspicious of the brothers. Landlords take one look at this odd couple and shake their heads. At school open houses, other parents give them wide berth while Eggers regards himself and his young charge as a "New Model" family and hopes to pick up a single mom ("I imagine that the world of schools and parents is oozing with intrigue and debauchery…"). In the park, as Eggers rolls on top of his brother while wrestling in the grass, he suspects people may get the wrong idea. Everyone is a suspect. The babysitter ("he will do something with wax and rope"). Anyone with wrinkles and laugh lines over thirty. The occasional date-person who questions Eggers about his parenting choices and thus becomes a "bad person." As authority figure and reformed party guy, Eggers keeps alive his parents' traditions, while doing some experimenting of his own: "I am making our lives a music video, a game show on Nickelodeon - lots of quick cuts, crazy camera angles, fun, fun, fun!" Eggers' shortcomings are fully noted in the "Rules and Suggestions for Enjoyment of this Book" section, as well as the Acknowledgements section, where he takes time to acknowledge the distinguished senator from Massachusetts, Palestinian statehood and the implicit logic of the instant replay rule. He notes that the reader "might want to skip much of the middle, namely pages 209-301, which concern the lives of people in their early twenties, and those lives are very difficult to make interesting, even when they seemed interesting to those living them at the time." Beyond chapter four, he notes, "the book thereafter is kind of uneven." At times Eggers becomes overbearing, such as when he interviews for MTV's The Real World (he was a finalist) and revels in the dark recesses of his tortured twenty-something soul to win himself (and his zine) an audience of millions. Towards the end, when Eggers revisits his old friends and neighbors in Illinois, it's too bad he didn't use time-compression more to his (and the reader's) advantage. Furthermore or less, after putting the book down, you may realize that the only memorable character in the book is - the envelope, please - Dave Eggers. The young Topf comes across as a loyal sidekick, Tonto to his big brother's Lone Ranger. But are these faults, or the prerogative of a manic, Surge-fueled, self-absorbed memoir writer? Or, as they also say. . . whatever. Eggers is a great satirist. He's gifted with a sharpshooter's eye for spotting hypocrisy and weakness, moral or fashion, in others. As someone well versed in the ways of ridicule and parody, Eggers was fully aware of the pitfalls of writing about his family tragedy. That he should emerge with a book this good, that shines a spotlight on a generation's pride and folly, that has such a silly title, is truly amazing. Definitely worth the $100,000 he says he was paid in the Acknowledgements (net total after taxes and expenses was $39,567.68). A recent New York Times interview with the author said the "book is being passed around like a new drug from reader to reader." Go to your nearest dealer (of books) and find out why. | top |
An edited version of this review appeared in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Sunday, February 27, 2000 |