Notes from an egghead

A portrait of the Genius as a young man

by Michael Anft
3/29/00

Eggers' whole point is to avoid stooping to conquer.

A Heartbreaking Work
of Staggering Genius

by Dave Eggers
Simon & Schuster, $23, 375 pp.

This is a review. Its intent is to impress upon the reader the knowing, ironic cleverness of the reviewer while ostensibly reviewing a book marked by astounding hype and burgeoning sales, Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. The review will not impart much of the vérité of Eggers’ metafictional yet almost entirely nonfictional account of his challenging life as a young-adult orphan, surrogate dad to 8-year-old brother Toph (pronounced with a long "o"), fledgling magazine editor and fully media-ized disciple of the gods of Irony – though it will try.

The reviewer promises to play his role in the publishing-publicizing continuum, discussing as he will the book that flew off the shelves upon its release last month and has spawned a spate of Is-It-Too-Self-Consciously-Ironic-For-Its-Own-Good? arguments among the hyperliterate. Yes, he shall discuss the book in question as A Phenomenon – one that notoriously finicky New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani calls "a virtuosic piece of writing ... the debut of a talented – yes, staggeringly talented new writer" – because that way readers will see that it is bigger than they are and hence should be read, just as this review should be read. No, the reviewer is not above manipulation, much like the reflexively self-reflective Eggers, our Genius himself.

Editor of the iconoclastic quarterly literary "anti-magazine" McSweeney’s, Eggers has made sure that A Heartbreaking Work is an anti-memoir, a post-postmodern collection of memories and observations from the many sides of Dave, with no aim but to entertainingly tell the full story, with cutesy detours.

For the uninitiated (the initiated can skip ahead to paragraph nine, as I’m about to regale my readers with what we reviewers call the Perfunctory Plot Recap, or PPR): The Eggers family lived in the comfy confines of Lake Forest, Ill., where Mom, a Montessori teacher, and Dad, a lawyer, raised four kids, the youngest of whom, Toph (short for Christopher), is 7 at the book’s outset. (Genius is 21. He has an older brother and sister, who later play subordinate roles in the upbringing of young Toph.) Both parents contract different types of cancer in their early 50s and, within 32 days of each other, die.

A Heartbreaking Work’s first chapter qualifies as a steel-toed kick to the gut. Writing sparely and avoiding the memoir genre’s typical bathetic excess, Eggers recalls the late nights sitting in the living room where his mother lay dying, where he kept an eye on her breathing. He recounts her green expectorations into a tray, and his pinching of her nose, seemingly for hours, so it would stop bleeding. This is as real and tough as it gets. Eggers does little to adorn these moments with irony, or much else. Instead, there’s an almost impressionistic, not quite stream-of-consciousness feel to his memories – the light in the room, his half-dreaming while Toph sleeps on his lap, his thoughts about his girlfriend. Life insists on moving along, even as it slowly leeches out of his mom.

Which, in a way, is what Eggers is getting at, without getting into all that "triumph of the spirit" crap. Even as A Heartbreaking Work becomes a bit of a forced, loopy buddy film – starring Eggers as Big Bro-Cool Dad and towheaded Toph as his trusty, admiring sidekick on their "adventure" from the Midwest to a new life in San Francisco – the author achieves a kind of symbiosis between the road novel, the coming-of-age story and the recovery-from-crisis shtick – all without turning his book into a complex of clichés. While many of his moments with Toph seem like so much forced frivolity (save for when Eggers teaches Toph how to sing along with the epochal strains of Journey, which Eggers can do, he notes in a typically hyperbolic flourish, "because I am an extraordinary singer"), the fraternal relationship makes for "life-affirming" reading, an idea the author would undoubtedly gag on.

As the book progresses episodically and chronologically, Eggers’ narrative tricks multiply, backflip, pirouette, crash and burn. Characters go out of character to confront the author about his need for them to behave a certain way just so ol’ Dave looks good. His suicidal friend, "John" (a real friend but not his real name; Eggers’ autobiography is only "based on a true story," you see), in the hospital after yet another attempt at self-annihilation, jumps out of bed, rips out his IVs and starts walking, tired of being abused by the writer:

(Eggers): I’m telling the nurse. You’re – You’re supposed to stay overnight. And then I stay here until three a.m. or so, when they say that you’re safe and sleeping fine, and then with heavy heart I finally go home, to Toph, to more obligation ...

("John"): Listen, dipshit, screw it. This is such fucking garbage. I’m just supposed to lie there with my bruised shins and everything, while you get to play the dutiful friend, always there for me, ooh, ooh, all responsible, while I’m lost and worthless ... Listen, fuck it. I want no part of that. Find someone else to be symbolic of, you know, youth wasted or whatever.

Not everyone is taken by Eggers’ multifaceted, purposely stylish approach. To those not as ironically clever as your humble reviewer, Eggers’ story may be emotionally confusing. Why shouldn’t the author tell his own story, guilt-free, without all the self-questioning, many are asking. The author, after all, admits that he wants to use his life as fodder for a book and possibly a TV series. (He unsuccessfully auditioned for MTV’s shockingly unironic "The Real World"; his chapter on the experience is one of The Phenomenon’s most inventive.) So why all the hand-wringing? Why not get on with it, as he did in the book’s trenchant opening chapters?

Eggers’ whole point is to avoid stooping to conquer. As an editor and reader, his bullshit detector has gone apeshit when he’s come upon false emotional notes and cheap sentimentality, and he wants you to know that he knows what complete tools writers can be when their subject is themselves, even as he relates a tale of loss and gloom that could wring tears out of a portrait painting. But there’s a secondary purpose to Eggers’ asides, lists and marginalia: He also wants us to laugh with him – and sometimes at him – and so he throws around loopy formal experimentation (think of metafiction writer Robert Coover or Eggers’ fellow wunderkind, David Foster Wallace). Thus he enlarges readers’ views of "narrative," even as he cuts himself down for his need to retell his sorrowful tale.

Eggers’ talent manifests itself in his ability to set you up for some emotional payoff – some sort of sitcomy, subliterate normalcy – then rip the cheap veneer off to expose his own worst instincts, and probably yours too. He wants you to know that he knows you know that he’s capable of manipulation, so better keep that guard up, even though he’s already doing that for you. He’s read tell-all, not-quite-highbrow dreck like Kathryn Harrison’s incest memoir, The Kiss, and anything by anyone named McCourt, and has concluded, like many of us, that the modern memoir as a form is a self-indulgent, exhibitionistic pile of reeking bad faith. (In the book’s acknowledgments, among 32 prefatory pages of what one wag calls "throat-clearing," Eggers calls the spate of memoirs "inherently vile and corrupt and wrong and evil and bad ... (but) we could all do worse, as readers and as writers.")

Eggers’ "adventure" is worth the side trips. His worries about his often tragic friends; his magazine (the late, lamented Might); his near-paranoia about Toph’s safety whenever he’s left with a babysitter; his rambling asides about the nature of celebrity and the lack of a private life (yes, he notes the irony in bringing this up in this context) are all rendered with a care for detail and a piercing intellect that’s worth sharing a few hours with. And there is an old-fashioned emotional climax in the book’s downright poignant final two chapters for you fogies who don’t quite Get It.

Eggers does everything possible to make sure we view him as fully human, alive, hyperaware and flawed. That he pulls off the miracle of allowing us to experience a simulacrum of his pain without reducing himself to an object of pity is a testament to his, um, genius. He has also rescued – temporarily, I’m sure – the memoir movement from the hands of the cathartic-confessional crowd, something cynical reviewers are likely to revere him for.

At least until the film version comes out.

This review appeared originally in Baltimore City Paper. E-mail Michael Anft at letters@metrotimes.com.