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Next in the Wave
of Daves
“A Heartbreaking Work of
Staggering Genius"
by Dave Eggeis ■
Simon and Schuster
375 pp., $23
Capitalizing on the 'Tarty of five" young and
hip orphan Zeitgeist, McSweeney's editor and lit
erary impresario Dave Eggers has based his debut
novel on the years of his life after both his par
ents died of cancer, when he was forced to take
care of his pre-pubescent little brother; Toph,
Eggers recounts his mother's last bile-spitting
days on the living room couch, her funeral, his
and Toph's move to Berkeley, the trials and
tribulations of trying to be a twentysomething
go-getter in San Francisco while at the same
time attempting to tp Toph's
parent/brother/best friend; his audition for
MTVs 'The Real World,* and his various attempts
to sleep with the girls he had crushes on in
grade school.
The whole thing is extraordinarily funny,
bitter and tragic, written with a breathless
velocity that makes it nearly impossible to put
down. It is, as the title states flatly, "A
Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius."
Before the memoir even begins, readers are
subjected to the author's "Rules And Suggestions
For Enjoyment of This, Book" ("... you may want
to skip much of the middle, namely pages 209-
301... *), a preface containing scenes from the
book which were cut out for whatever reasons,
and a lengthy but hilarious acknowledgments
section where Eggers concedes that he voted for
Ross Perot in '96, that he does not
look good in pink and that he is "fully
cognizant, way ahead of you, in terms
of knowing about and fully admitting
the gimmickry inherent in all this, and
will preempt your daim of the book's
irrelevance due to said gimmickry by
saying that the gimmickry is simply a
device, a defense, to obscure the black,
blinding, murderous rage and sorrow at
the core of this whole story." By the
time page one rolls around, the witty and
brutally honest tone has been firmly set
Eggers compares himself to. a snake
shedding its skin more than once over the
course of the book, alluding to his hopes
that, by telling all about his parents'
deaths, he will somehow have purged him
self of all the horror. Luckily for his
readers, Eggers realizes that no one cares
for whiners—no matter how tragic their
stories—so he attaches as many bells, whis
tles and drawings of staplers as he can to
his memories, hoping these things will help
fend off the forever hovering threat of self
indulgence inherent in a memoir-type novel
(see Prozac Nation). Eggers knows every exhi
bitionist needs an audience, so he goes out
of his way to keep us entertained while he
does his shedding business, making gracious
concessions to readability that many other
writers with his talent don't. The end result is
a heartbreaking collection of scenes like this
one, where Eggeis attempts to scatter his
mother's ashes in Lake Michigan:
T throw. In the air it spreads out in a tride
diagonal, and drops into the groaning lake with
a series of pitititits. I throw again. Some spills, I
should not spill It's spilled, right there, by my
left foot, about eight particles—Fm stepping on
them! Of course I ami Of Course I'm stepping on
them; how fitting! How expected, asshole! I lean
over to pick up the particles, but I already have
a handful in the other hand and as I crouch
down some of the other handful
spilU on
my right side—Jesus! Jesus fucking
Christ! Why can I not do this rightT
Ouch.
Eggers and his literati Uk (all named Dave by
the way: Foster Wallace, Safaris, Berman,
Remnick) know the American public feels it
doesn't need books—especially not books that
make it feel bad about not reading books, like,
say, Towards The End of Time—so they leave out
all Freudian symbolism or Joycean mind games
and just attempt to give their readers the
straight dope on what it means to be alive in
this day and age.
And to be alive in this day and age means
to be lost in a fog of bullshit rhetoric
(Bush/Gore 2000!) and flashy whizbang
zooms—a combination that at times makes
you want to ditch language all together and '
* - become a connoisseur of, I don't know, pop ,
music .or something. Wise writers like Dave *
Eggers come along with only one intention ■
and that is to tell the truth in all its
pathetic and shameful glory. So, hey there
good people who read Flagpole, don't give
up on the English language just yet—it
stifl. has the potential to get inside the ''
head, speak in soothing rhythmic voices
^ and change the way you live your life—
things that are infinitely more supportive
than the sensory benefits of whizbang
zooms which require the leapfrogging of
language and rationality. They are more
supportive because despite any hippy
dippy whims to the contrary, language is
the air we breath, the intellectual cur-
^ rency of our species and though its pei-
' fection is demanding, near impossible.
When someone makes the proper con
nection, the results axe absolutely mag
ical and provide thick ropes to bind the
^heart to the mind to the soul to what
it means to be alive. Eggers does this,
or comes doser than any author in the
past three or four years has. He is
funny, but not belittling, timely but
not trendy, easy but not stupid, sensitive but
not gooey, wise but not didactic, and above all
brilliant but not obnoxious about it Read his
book.
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