Dear Michael,
For the one or two readers who may not know it yet, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is Dave Eggers’ story of how, at age 21, he lost both of his parents to cancer within a few weeks and proceeded to raise his then-7-year-old brother, Toph. As many reviewers have stated, the book is a charmer: funny, self-deprecating, inventive, full of entertaining asides and narrative antics (click here for a fuller explication of the book’s appeal). That said, I’m not sure I’ve ever read a book less comfortable in its own narrative skin.
Take the preface, consisting of 31 pages of highly entertaining throat-clearing in which Eggers begins a book-long habit of stating his themes outright. He tells the reader to look out for “The Painfully, Endlessly Self-Conscious Book Aspect,” “The Knowingness About the Book’s Self-Consciousness Aspect,” and “The Part Where the Author Either Exploits or Exalts His Parents, Depending on Your Point of View.” This struck me as funny but awfully unsubtle: Eggers is desperately unwilling to let readers think for even a second that this might be a typical sobfest orphan tale.
With this message loud and clear, Eggers briefly relaxes enough to tell of his parents’ deaths and his transformation from brother to surrogate parent. This part of the book is the saddest, but it’s also the straightest and the most expertly written. Eggers avoids bathos, not through explicit disclaimers but through sheer great narrative. His writing is ironic, but the irony serves to heighten emotion, not to stifle it. (Readers, don’t take my word for it–check out the first chapter, some of which you may have already seen in TheNew Yorker.)
But by the middle section of the book, Eggers seems to tire of the effort. He begins to insert explicit reminders of his discomfort with his own storytelling. Characters break out of their scenes to castigate Eggers for various narrative sins. In a semi-imaginary audition interview with a producer from MTV’s The Real World (Eggers really tried out for the show), Eggers the memoirist berates Eggers the character for his shameless attempt to leverage his tragedy into fame (“Reward me. Put me on television. Let me share this with millions … Am I on? Have I broken your heart? Was my story sad enough?”). The joke, of course, is that by writing Heartbreaking Work, Eggers is doing the same thing, even if it is on his own terms and with a heavier dose of knowingness. And as Eggers says later about a child TV star who agrees to fake his own death for an issue of Might, “Could he really be milking his own past to solicit sympathy from a too-long indifferent public? … It would take some kind of monster, malformed and needy. Really, what sort of person would do that kind of thing?” Wink, wink. By the time I was halfway through the book, I began to think that Eggers’ self-critique had hijacked his own story, had become the story.
Which would be fine, in a meta kind of way. Except I’m not sure I buy the self-critique. First of all, both Eggers the character and Eggers the writer love to play at being worse people than they really are. For instance, one of the former’s favorite games is to try and scandalize the neighbors by pretending he’s hitting Toph with a belt. The joke serves to highlight that Eggers is actually an outstanding brother-parent: nurturing, entertaining, dutiful, strict, and lenient in the right places. Eggers the writer does something similar. He is constantly reminding us of his guilt about exploiting his own family’s tragedy. But the book doesn’t feel exploitative at all–in fact, Eggers doesn’t write much about anyone but himself, and he seems so terrified of false emotion that he dodges around the real thing. Eggers is apologizing for writing a story that isn’t cheesy or mawkish in any way, that is obviously bursting out of him–and that I and everyone else are extremely eager to read. I’m sure his anxieties are real, but they read as if Eggers is begging for compliments.
The other problem with the constant self-critique is that it doesn’t make sense. Eggers delivers astringent reviews of his own book. He explicitly tells readers that the latter part of the book “is sort of uneven” and “increasingly self-devouring” and “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.” Eggers is exactly right: The sections on being young and creative in San Francisco in the early ‘90s are the only clichéd and whiny ones in the book. But if Eggers knows the chapters are weak, why didn’t he cut them down, rewrite them, delete them? (Did his editors at Simon & Schuster demand a Gen X angle?) Acknowledging the book’s flaws and leaving them in is far worse than being unaware of them.
How about you, Mike? You’re Slate’s duke of irony, our most trusted consultant on knowingness, and I’m very eager to hear what you have to say.
Over to you,
Jodi
P.S. You and I have each had various professional brushes with Eggers, and I suppose it’s necessary to disclose them here. I recruited him to write this “Diary” for Slate, which I would have edited, had it needed any editing.
