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- - - - Copyright 2000, The Charlotte Observer
- - - - Title: `A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius,' by Dave Eggers; Simon & Schuster (375 pages, $2
- - - - `A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius,' by Dave Eggers; Simon & Schuster (375 pages)
- - - - By Polly Paddock Gossett If the title of Dave Eggers' new book gives you pause, hold on to your hat. "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" may not live up to its hyperbolic name - but it is a dazzling, high-wire act of a book from a stunningly talented new writer. In its most stripped-down form, the book is a "memoir-y kind of thing" written by a young man who loses both parents to cancer in just 32 days - and then, at 21, takes on the job of raising his 8-year-old brother while working at a hip San Francisco magazine. But that doesn't begin to do justice to "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius." Eggers, now 29, has written a book both hilarious and moving - a mediation on living life fully when death lurks just around the corner. And it's a book as defiantly different, and wildly innovative, as they come. That's obvious in the book's first dozen pages, a marvel of wit and invention. On the copyright page, in place of the usual boilerplate nobody reads, Eggers notes that his publisher is a division of Viacom, "which is wealthier and more populous than 18 of the 50 states, all of Central America and all of the former Soviet Republics combined and tripled." We move into the author's "Rules and Suggestions For the Enjoyment of This Book," including his advice to skip various sections entirely. There's a most untraditional preface, then an acknowledgement in which Eggers thanks backers including NASA and the Marine Corps, and confesses that until recently, he "thought that Evelyn Waugh was a woman and that George Eliot was a man." He also offers actual phone numbers of several friends and, inexplicably, a drawing of a stapler. It's like a trip through the fun-house mirrors. What, you wonder, is going on here? It soon becomes apparent that Eggers - full of himself like many twentysomethings, yet wise and articulate beyond his years - has several things in mind. One is simply to tell the story of what happened to him and brother Christopher ("Toph") after they found themselves "in a world with neither floor nor ceiling." Another is to write a send-up of the contemporary memoir, blithely skewering literary conventions and pretensions as he goes. Finally, Eggers is trying to come to terms with his parents' (especially his mother's) deaths. All his verbal dashing-about, all his frantic hijinks and madcap hipness, can't obscure the ache at this book's core. For Eggers is "an orphan raising an orphan" - and trying to make sense of what happened, during "that winter of ours," to his middle-class suburban family. After their parents' deaths - one expected, one not - Eggers and his older brother and sister sell the family home in Lake Forest, Ill., and start over in separate domiciles in California. Brother Bill will handle the finances; sister Beth will go to lawschool and pinch-hit in Toph's raising. Eggers himself will drop out of college and become a single working parent. And despite his self-doubts and fears (the baby sitter will turn out to be a psychopath; Toph's family traumas will make him "grow up to sell crack or sing in a harmonizing pop group from Florida"), Eggers revels in the role. Together, he and Toph devise a messy but functional household routine. Together, they engage in sword fights and sock-sliding. Together, they create a family, with the Gen X "dad" proving surprisingly old-fashioned in his child-rearing notions. Eggers' descriptions of his work at Might magazine - a self-satirizing San Francisco magazine he helped found - are the least interesting chapters. It doesn't take long to tire of 20-year-olds yammering about their mission ("to help people and start things and end things and build things"). But in Eggers' account of his life with Toph - and of a poignant trip back to Lake Forest to dispose of his mother's ashes - there is something approaching greatness. As he writes, near book's end, of his journey with Toph through this mortal world: "And we will be ready, at the end of every day will be ready, will not say no to anything, will try to stay awake while everyone is sleeping, will not sleep, will make theshoes with the elves, will breathe deeply all the time, breathe in all the air full of glass and nails and bloodso when it comes we will not be angry, will be content, tired enough to go, gratefully" It might not be "staggering genius." But it's not far from it. (Polly Paddock Gossett is book editor of The Charlotte Observer.) (c) 2000, The Charlotte Observer (Charlotte, N.C.). Visit The Charlotte Observer on the World Wide Web at http://www.charlotte.com/ Distributed by Knight Ridder/Tribune Information Services. - - - -
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