A HEARTBREAKING WORK OF STAGGERING GENIUS
By Dave Eggers
Simon & Schuster, 375 pages, $23
Sometimes, it pays to wait. Take, for instance, this review. By now, most of you already know that Dave Eggers is this year’s literary superstar, the flavor of the month, the writer du jour. You’ve read about him in The New Yorker, which late last year excerpted the 29-year-old Lake Forest native’s “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius,” an anti-memoir that begins with his parents dying of cancer, barely a month apart, then seeks to deconstruct the genre of confessional writing even as it partakes of it all the same. You’ve seen him profiled in Salon and The New York Times, heard him discuss his life on Charlie Rose’s TV show, maybe even glanced at the reviews that have appeared in virtually every major print outlet in the English-speaking world. As a phenomenon, Eggers has reached critical mass, so much so that, according to The New York Observer, an inevitable backlash has begun. But if, on the one hand, this has to set some kind of land-speed record for getting chewed up and spit out by the media, it also makes my job as reviewer that much easier, since in the aftermath of the Eggers feeding frenzy, there’s not a lot left to talk about besides the book itself.
Of course, when it comes to “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius,” to talk about the book is to talk about the author, because there’s an intimate relationship between the two. I’m not referring to the work’s status as what Eggers derisively labels a “memoir-(sort)” of book, but rather its at times uneasy mix of postmodern diffidence and knowing engagement, a posture Eggers has cultivated since the mid-1990s, first as cofounder of Might, a sharply satirical magazine of twentysomething culture, and now as editor of McSweeney’s, a quarterly journal that elevates irony to high art.
Here, however, such a sensibility is heightened, from the volume’s title-“A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius”-to its nearly 40 pages of hilariously mocking front matter, which include “Rules and Suggestions for Enjoyment of This Book” (“There is no overwhelming need to read the preface. Really. It exists mostly for the author, and those who, after finishing the rest of the book, have for some reason found themselves stuck with nothing else to read.”) and a list of absurdly self-referential “Acknowledgements,” where Eggers admits, among other things, that “he did, indeed, vote for Ross Perot in 1996, and is not the least ashamed about it, because he is an ardent fan of the rich and insane.” If all this seems a bit mannered, by turns self-aware and self-indulgent, so, too, suggests Eggers, is the act of writing a memoir, which is exactly the point.
“(W)e are . . . young people,” he says of himself and his friends, “pretending to be young people, putting across an image of ourselves as representatives, for now and posterity, of how youth were at this juncture, how we acted, and in particular, how we acted when we were pretending not to act while pretending to be ourselves.”
Given Eggers’ sense of memoir as, at best, a matter of personal contrivance — or, as he puts it, “the self-aggrandizement as art form aspect” — what’s surprising about “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” is how straight he plays so much of the book. Partly, this has to do with the tragedy of his parents’ dying, which left him, at 21, as guardian of his 8-year-old brother, Toph, circumstances that reside at the heart of the story he wants to tell. It’s hard to be ironic, after all, when you’re describing your mother, too weak to get off the living room couch, spitting green fluid into a plastic receptacle as the whole family waits for her to die. Some of the most powerful writing in the book, in fact, comes in the opening chapter, when Eggers evokes his mother’s final days in a documentary style that’s almost unbearably clear-eyed, avoiding even the illusion of sentimentality by focusing on the small, often inconsequential moments that surround a death. As he tries to help her stop a nosebleed, Eggers and his mother watch “American Gladiators” and “Love Connection”; later, after going to Highland Park Hospital, they discuss how chemotherapy has changed her hair. Even when she dies, and Eggers and Toph move to Berkeley (with their older sister, Beth, who is attending law school there), the book maintains this low-key realism, finding its form by cleaving to the surfaces, the mundane yet moving matter-of-factness of the everyday.
Were “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” inspired by a different subject, this constant wash of details, this endless chatter, might backfire by not allowing us a stake in its author’s inner life. But if, at times, it can be frustrating, it also represents a powerful coping mechanism. “There must be noise,” Eggers notes, in a rare unfiltered moment, “there must be music and games. No silence.” Eggers, after all, is not just dealing with his parents’ deaths, nor his own fitful passage into adulthood; he’s also trying to raise his younger brother, with little in the way of parenting skills besides the ability to throw a Frisbee and an appreciation of the sock-sliding potential of their apartment’s wood-floored hall. That’s a ridiculous situation, and Eggers knows it, a coming-of-age scenario in which all the stages of growing up are telescoped and experienced at once.
Still, if Eggers regularly seeks out the humor in such a dynamic, there’s a darker side he can’t avoid. One night, for instance, he leaves Toph with a baby-sitter, only to end up obsessing that his brother will be dead when he gets home. It’s a nightmare panic every parent has experienced, but seeing it from the perspective of a 23-year-old underscores the poignancy even more. “I just wanted to be out,” Eggers imagines telling the police. “I didn’t care much what we did. You have to understand that at that point I was getting out once a week, tops, maybe once every ten days, and so when I could get a babysitter on a night when anything was happening . . . I’d race into the city, to eat there with whoever was eating — maybe they’d just be sitting around, at Moodie’s usually, watching cable, getting ready, and I would be there, on the couch, with a beer from the fridge, savoring every minute, not knowing when it would come again.”
At moments like this, “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” begins to live up to its title, affording a glimpse of the author’s vulnerability even as it spins it into something else. As the book progresses, though, it can’t quite keep that focus, becoming loose and, in places, slackly written, trading the specificity of Eggers’ situation for a more generalized account of his experiences at Might. There are some good anecdotes here, most notably that of the infamous Adam Rich death hoax, in which the magazine faked a story about the former “Eight Is Enough” star’s premature demise. But while Eggers clearly includes this to make a point about media sensationalism — and, by extension, his own self-voyeurism — in the end, the Might material meanders, never particular or compelling enough to develop any narrative momentum of its own. More effective are the book’s occasional forays into meta(non)fiction, as when Toph breaks out of character to question his brother’s intentions, or when Eggers’ interview for the MTV series “The Real World” (he was not cast) becomes a device to “complete the transition from the book’s first half, which is slightly less self-conscious, to the second half, which is increasingly self-devouring.” Still, for all the charm of seeing a writer deliberately revel in the artifice of narrative, Eggers neither takes it far enough nor seems to have much purpose for it, other than (perhaps) to express his own discomfort about the story he wants to tell.
Ultimately, the issue all this raises has to do with the subtle distinction between writing about one’s life and writing about writing about one’s life, a conflict embedded in the very marrow of “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” and one that Eggers never fully resolves. Oddly enough, however, his struggle to come to terms with this only serves to humanize his work, by giving us a glimpse of the writer as work in progress, the man behind the curtain, as it were. After all, despite the assurance, the outright coolness, of his persona, Eggers is a first-book author, involved in that most fundamental of explorations, the discovery of who he is. It’s a messy process, but a worthwhile one, and you can see its fallout on nearly every page of “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius,” as he attempts to speak from the heart yet keep a certain sardonic distance, to reconcile enthusiasm and disaffection, engagement and irony.
