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- - - - Copyright 2000 San Francisco Chronicle
- - - - A Crazy Quilt of Playfulness, Self-Consciousness, Irreverence, Grief REVIEWED BY Andrew Roe
A HEARTBREAKING WORK OF STAGGERING GENIUS
- - - - Book reviews often begin with some kind of general statement. It's a device that puts the work under consideration into a larger context, orienting the reader who is unfamiliar with the author or has stumbled upon the review but is now interested, all because of this insightful generalization. But in the case of Dave Eggers' "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" (subtitled "A Memoir: Based on a True Story"), it seems highly appropriate to skip all that and start self-referentially. Eggers' book -- part memoir, part anti-memoir, part moving meditation on death and loss -- is rife with authorial playfulness and intrusions. Before the narrative proper even begins, Eggers inserts 30 pages of hilarious, tongue-in-cheek prefatory material. First we're told that we might want to pass up the preface altogether and perhaps forgo the middle section of the book, too, which concerns "the lives of people in their early twenties, and those lives are very difficult to make interesting, even when they seemed interesting to those living them at the time." The book's major themes are then proclaimed: "The Unspoken Magic of Parental Disappearance," "The Aspect Having to Do With (Perhaps) Inherited Fatalism," "The Painfully, Endlessly Self-Conscious Book Aspect," and so on. Eggers deconstructs his audacious title as well and provides an itemized description of how much he was paid by his publisher. We get a chart of the symbols and metaphors used and a mail-in offer to receive a 3.5-inch floppy disk of the book in which all the real names have been replaced with fictional ones. Eggers, who is 29, also wonders whether this whole memoir thing is such a good idea. "Maybe memoirs were Bad," writes Eggers. "Maybe writing about actual events, in the first person, if not from Ireland and before you turned seventy, was Bad." But it's not a bad idea. In fact, it's a pretty great idea. First, because Eggers is a gifted, talented writer. Not many writers (David Foster Wallace comes to mind, Nicholson Baker and Donald Antrim, too) can match the verbal ingenuity, the sheer linguistic exuberance of Eggers' prose. And second, because some crazy circumstances befell Eggers a few years back; during his senior year of college both his parents died of cancer within five weeks of each other, and Eggers inherited the guardianship of his 8-year- old brother, Toph. Once the postmodern preliminaries are out of the way, "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" picks up with the death of Eggers' mother. The contrast is shocking, jarring. He and his brother move from the Chicago suburb of Lake Forest to Berkeley, so that they can be near Eggers' older sister. An immense pressure suddenly descends on Eggers, yet he also experiences a strange sense of libera tion, of being chosen, singled out, because of his familial tragedies. As for Toph, Eggers feels the need to be "constantly entertaining, like some amazing, endless telethon." He writes: "There is a voice inside me, a very excited, chirpy voice, that urges me to keep things merry, madcap even, the mood buoyant. Because Beth (Eggers' sister) is always pulling out old photo albums, crying, asking Toph how he feels, I feel I have to overcompensate by keeping us occupied. I am making our lives a music video, a game show on Nickelodeon -- lots of quick cuts, crazy camera angles, fun, fun, fun!" Alongside this newfound responsibility and the always-present grief over his parents, Eggers documents the Gen-X brouhaha of the mid-'90s -- of which he was a part, even going so far as to try out for MTV's voyeuristically compelling and simultaneously nauseating "The Real World." We witness the creation and collapse of Might, the San Francisco- based satirical magazine he co-founded, known most infamously for engineering a hoax about the death of child actor Adam Rich. To his credit, Eggers can be devastatingly profound one moment (so many memorable, wrenching scenes: scattering his mother's ashes over Lake Michigan, trying to connect with a friend of his distant, alcoholic father's) and wildly irreverent the next, making references to "The A-Team" and rattling off the telephone numbers of people in the book. Indeed, as promised, the self-consciousness of the book (not to mention the self-consciousness about being self-conscious) is a theme throughout. For example, Eggers' "Real World" interview, which at 40-plus pages goes on for too long, turns into a critique of the book and Eggers' motivations for writing it. Yet just when you think he's starting to stray too far into the self-indulgent and self-obsessed, Eggers hits you between the eyes with pathos, creating what A.O. Scott, in his brilliant and exhaustive dissection of Wallace in a recent New York Review of Books article, calls a "feedback loop of irony and sincerity." Yes, there's some jumping around and an unevenness to the book, and calling attention to these facts -- as Eggers does on more than one occasion -- doesn't excuse it. But that's also part of the book's baggy, blustery charm. Perhaps it helps to be of Eggers' generation, and perhaps it helps to get all the pop-culture references. But Eggers crafts something universal here, something raw and real and wonderful that transcends any zeitgeist and manages to deal trenchantly with "big issues" that often prove too daunting for younger writers: mortality, youth, the artifice of writing, the Zen of Frisbee. This is a beautifully ragged, laugh-out-loud funny and utterly unforgettable book, an achievement that is certainly both heartbreaking and staggering. And what about genius? Well, let's hold off on the hyperbole for now. Andrew Roe is a San Francisco writer whose work has appeared in Salon and other publications. - - - -
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