Jodi, I shared some of your consternation at this book. But before going further down this road, it must be noted how thrilling Eggers is as a pure writer. His sentences perform pirouettes, charge ahead, stop short, do little jukey things, stamp their feet and sing, dammit. He’s able to give his writing a physicality that you see rarely these days–I felt reading A Hearthbreaking Work the way I felt reading Angela’s Ashes, that the writer was smart enough to anticipate my every readerly quiver, expectation, dose his seriousness with self-deprecating humor when appropriate, hit me straight on when inappropriate. Eggers is terrifically self-conscious in that he seems to have been able to place himself outside his narrative, to integrate the reading experience into the flow of his writing. That said, he is also terribly self-conscious. I agree with you, Jodi, that this book’s much vaunted “irony” is less a brilliant bit of auto-paracritique than a nervous tic born of what seems to be a fear of being seen as not getting it, of being another one of those 30ish people who write memoirs.
Readers of Might and McSweeney’s (the first of which Eggers co-founded in San Francisco in the early ‘90s; the second of which is his self-produced “anti-magazine”) will be familiar with Eggers’ tendency toward prolix reflexive reflexiveness (“post-post-post-modernism,” as the Observer snippily put it). Where Spy was a Herculean exercise in making every sentence, graphic, charticle reinforce Spy’s “brand attributes” (as the marketers put it), Might was the quintessence of indie inventiveness: bravura editing and make-every-page-count wit nicely overcompensating for the semi-polished articles. The marginalia was the message. McSweeney’s has taken this one step further. The actual stories continue to be uneven, but the all-type covers, tables of contents, subscription info, and the like are obsessive-miniaturist brilliance–Eggers may well be the Henry Darger of agate type.
I guess, though, that I’m rather underwhelmed at this point with postmodern literary high jinks. We’ve been through–among many, many others–Barth and Nabokov and Calvino and Amis and Roth and Borges and Nicholson Baker (whose less schticky U and I was far more compellingly alive than his over-architected, hyper-footnoted The Mezzanine) and Coupland and Wallace, not to mention Mad and Spy and Letterman and Might. Studying literature and criticism at Columbia some years back, I was urged to regard metaconsciousness as some kind teleological miracle–songs of sentient life, a system of meaning amid the barren plains of mere literature. We picked through Conrad and Lawrence to find the secret voice whispering beneath (playing distaff counterpoint to) the senseless blare of prose and plot and character.
But, I mean, so what? Good writing remains good writing remains good writing. And with some very, very notable exceptions, “postmodernism” (whatever that means) and “irony” (whatever that means) seem more like over-compensatory throat clearing than brilliant masterstroke. This has left me with something of a reactionary mindset toward tricked-out narratives like Eggers’. You’re entirely right, Jodi: He’s so smart and real and to-the-point and he has an actually enthralling story to tell–a thunderingly traditional story, to boot; one with interwoven plot points that crescendo to a remarkably rendered moment of release and redemption–that the self-conscious gyrations amount to less than zero.
I guess I’m ready to bequeath my dukedom, Jodi. Any takers?
