Dave Eggers: can't write titles for shit

Dave Eggers is the author of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. He is also the protagonist, a twentysomething college graduate dealing with the usual issues--you know, the direction of his life, the unbelievable youth and power he feels, the urge to express himself and reject the past, and raising his brother, eight-year-old Toph. Because his parents fucking died.

That might seem crass, but it's similar to the way Eggers himself approaches the deaths of his parents. Both were victims of cancer (as I said in the previous post, I don't have the book with me, so I might not be perfectly accurate here) within a few months of each other. Suddenly, the heads of the Eggers family are cut off, and Dave, his sister Beth, his somewhat distant and removed older brother Bill, and young Toph are on their own.

Dave and Beth take Toph from Chicago to their new home, Berkeley, California, where the two older siblings share the burden--and joy--of raising Toph. To Dave, this is a perfect opportunity to act as a sort of fake parent to Toph. He will not become his parents--whom he both reveres and hates, or maybe just exploits (more on that later)--he will be a model for a new world, a new parenthood. He will wrestle with Toph. He will play frisbee. He will don socks and slide on hardwood floors, even if his girlfriend and sister disapprove.

But Eggers' feelings toward Toph are not that simple at all. He describes the sort of out-of-place half-pity and half-distrust he feels when he is around parents of children Toph's age--a twenty-three-year-old among soccer moms. He describes his irrational fears that someone will contact child services and alert them that he and Toph eat off paper plates because no dishes are clean, or his fears that when he leaves Toph with a babysitter so he can go out for a night, the babysitter--a harmless Berkeley grad student--will brutally murder the boy, Eggers' fault for being negligent.

The novel is essentially divided into two parts (split, by the way, by a mostly but not totally fictional interview for a spot on San Francisco's Real World season). In the first part, Eggers employs the sort of back-and-forth dialogue that made me love his more recent book, You Shall Know Our Velocity! Lines of dialogue are presented without any "he said" or "she said" to stand in the way. Several times characters just stop being characters and start speaking directly to the reader, or addressing Eggers not as themselves but as other parts of his mind--pointing out to him, for example, that he is doing his parents a disservice every time he exploits their deaths for pity.

And Eggers definitely does this. Not only are there a few scenes in the book that this occurs--such as the "free haircut" scene--but Eggers readily recognizes the entire book is an exploitation. The title, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, is an admission of this. The question Eggers wants to resolve, it seems, is whether exploiting his parents--and recognizing and admitting that he is--in any way detracts from the tragedy itself. At one point, for example, as he is reflecting on his mother's death near Lake Superior, he upsets himself by realizing that he is later going to record his thoughts in order to write the book. Not only is he going to do this, he is already debating what to put, and is in fact carrying a tape recorder for this purpose. Does this detract from the thoughts on his mother's death?

The second half of the book gets a little crazy. This isn't Harry Potter--be ready for full-page paragraphs. Here Eggers deals with the meaning of his parents' deaths--years after their passing, he finally returns to Chicago--and faces the reality of his relationship to Toph and his major expression of his youth: a magazine he and his friends produced called Might Magazine. In several instances, Eggers' relationship to his growing brother is illustrated; while it would be telling too much to describe them, I'll admit that at first their significance was not apparent to me. As for Might, Eggers must recognize the failure of the youth he believed in so strongly.

That's not to say that at the end of the book (I called it a novel before, and I'm not going to delete that, but I'm not sure it's a novel since it's mostly non-fiction) Eggers is a wise old man. Not exactly. As I recall, the book doesn't exactly fade away comfortingly, accepting the responsibility of old age. Eggers is still on fire. The world is still a terrible sweet violent place.

The second half of the book contains some of the most beautiful writing I can remember reading. Of all things, Dave Eggers makes the throw of a frisbee beautiful and glorious and uplifting. Seriously, his description of a frisbee flying is really a great thing. So if he can move me with talk about a frisbee, imagine when he's describing his mother's ascension. Eggers is absolutely staggering.

I would recommend this book wholeheartedly to anyone--well, except for the language, I suppose. I would recommend this book wholeheartedly to anyone who can handle reading the word "dickfuck" and who doesn't mind a little grotesque rumination about the contents of a cancer. AHWOSG stands as one of the strongest, most daring, most darkly beautiful books I have recently read--self-conscious but unapologetically meaningful.

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Dave Eggers, Vintage Publishing.

Grade: A-

Positives: it really is heartbreaking and genius; Eggers' messages about youth, parenthood, and death are beautifully delivered and dead-on; Eggers' writing is unparalleled.

Negatives: Eggers himself called the later part of the book "uneven" for its ruminations; Eggers' self-consciousness--aware he is writing the book, aware the book is self-pitying, etc., could be too much for some readers.