Naming his first book A HEARTBREAKING WORK OF STAGGERING GENIUS
is an audacious move that puts an author in the unenviable position
of having a lot to live up to. Fortunately, Dave Eggers is well up
to the task. He'd have to be to consider writing his memoirs at the
tender age of 29. You're lead to wonder what someone that age could
possibly have lived through that would be worth telling.To
start with, when Eggers was 21, both of his parents died five weeks
apart, of separate cancers, leaving him with custody of his
eight-year-old brother Toph (short for Christopher). Both brothers
soon move, with their older sister Beth, from Chicago to San
Francisco, where Eggers and some high school friends start the
alternative magazine Might. But even in San Francisco they can't
escape tragedy: a friend tries to commit suicide, and another
friend's girlfriend dies suddenly. Dave and Toph now live in
Brooklyn, where Eggers publishes McSweeney's, a literary
quarterly.Throughout the story, Eggers cuts the pathos with a quirky wit,
keeping the reader alternately crying and laughing. His unique
situation of being young, hip, single, and a parent leads to some
memorable scenes, such as the one in which he tries to score at
Open House at Toph's school. "My goal, a goal I honestly thought
was fairly realistic, was to meet an attractive single mother and
have Toph befriend the mother's son so we can arrange playdates,
during which the mother and I will go upstairs and screw around
while the kids play outside."In
another chapter, Eggers lists all the reasons for which a woman
won't be asked on a second date. If she "expresses any reservations
about bringing Toph along...questions anything about the state of
the house...does not ask about the passed-on parents...assumes that
it was a car crash..." she's likely to be labeled a "bad
person."His
parents' deaths haunt Eggers. He is torn between maintaining their
possessions, and thus their memory, or tossing everything out and
starting fresh. "I want to save everything and preserve all this
but also want it all gone --- can't decide what's more romantic,
preservation or decay." In a failed attempt to make it onto MTV's
"The Real World," Eggers is interviewed by one of the show's
producers. A transcript of the interview reveals his father's
alcoholism and the shadow it cast on his family. Eggers is
determined to be a better parent to Toph than his were to him, but
isn't above a little "experimenting."Eggers uses a variety of devices like the transcript, a menu of
the 8 different meals he and Toph eat, and drawings to help him
tell his story. His sense of irony is sharply intact, yet he
manages to temper his cynicism. Very aware of his sometimes
too-clever style, Eggers disarms the reader by pointing it out
right from the start. The preface includes sections on Rules and
Suggestions for Enjoyment of this Book ("You can also skip the
table of contents, if you're short of time"), a list of the major
themes of this book ("The Toph Dialectic II: He serving as both
magnet and, when the need arises, wedge vis-à-vis relations
with women"), a flow chart on the structure of the book (available
as a wall chart for $5), an accounting of the ways the publisher's
advance was spent, an incomplete guide to symbols and metaphors,
and a pretty nifty drawing of a stapler.A
HEARTBREAKING WORK OF STAGGERING GENIUS is an astonishing debut.
But still, there's that title. Heartbreaking? Definitely.
Staggering? Sure. Genius? I'd say.