A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius was for many years one of those books...I had heard about it, made a mental note to read it, forgot about it, and went through the same process over and over again. But then, on one of my forays into a thrift store book aisle, I saw a pristine copy of AHWOSG and knew that it was about time to give it a shot.
From the copyright page to page xlv (page 45 of the introductory notes for those of you who, like me, can't be bothered to remember those Roman numerals), AHWOSG is vintage Eggers in style and tone. As a sometimes reluctant memoir reader, I especially loved his comments on the genre itself in relation to his own book. Eggers assumes that his readers have the same misgivings about the memoir form that he might. Is it really true? Is the author aware that memoirs can be self-absorbed, "look at me, I'm a victim, too" playgrounds for self-aggrandizement? Eggers is aware of this skepticism and plays with it:
This is a work of fiction, only in that in many cases, the author could not remember the exact words said by certain people, and exact descriptions of certain things, so had to fill in gaps as best he could. Otherwise, all characters and incidents and dialogue are real, are not products of the author's imagination, because at the time of this writing, the author had no imagination whatsoever for those sorts of things, and could not conceive of making up a story or characters...especially when there was so much to say about his own, true, sorry and inspirational story, the actual people that he has known, and of course the many twists and turns of his own thrilling and complex mind.
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While the author is self-conscious about being self-referential, he is also knowing about that self-conscious self-referentiality. Further....he also plans to be clearly, obviously aware of his knowingness of his self-consciousness of self-referentiality. Further, he is fully cognizant...in terms of knowing about and fully admitting the gimmickry inherent in all this, and will preempt your claim of the book's irrelevance due to said gimmickry by saying that the gimmickry is simply a device, a defense, to obscure the black, blinding, murderous rage and sorrow at the core of this whole story, which is both too black and blinding to look at....
And he is right on this point. Dave Eggers's story IS often too black and blinding to look at, but because of the power and energy of his writing, you can look at it and see that beauty lies within it, too. Once Eggers drops the ironic pose adopted in the introduction and preface to AHWOSG and takes up his own unique tools as a memoirist, you are pulled in to the tragic story of a family of young adults who have lost both parents to cancer in the space of just a few weeks. Eggers, at 22, is left with the responsibility of raising his 8-year-old brother, Toph. Because he is at a more flexible point in his life than his older brother and sister, Eggers drops out of college and, after selling the house, cars, and most of the family property, moves with Toph to California to put their double tragedy behind them.
What readers more seasoned than college dude Dave Eggers know as they read of the family's plans to move on with their lives is that sorrow, grief, anger, and confusion will follow you no matter how hard you try to run the opposite way. Eggers knows this, of course, but he's also very young during the time he's writing about and moves between fear and confidence more times a day than is fair.
This memoir is not all tears and gloom. It is also laugh-out-loud funny and completely irreverent. The most wonderful scenes in it are slices of the life that Eggers and his little brother share, partly as brothers, partly as parent and child. On one day, they are playing frisbee on the beach, being boys, terrorizing unsuspecting beach goers with practical jokes. The next, Eggers is chastising Toph for dressing sloppily for Parent-Teacher night at school. On one of his rare nights out with friends, Eggers obsesses about the dangers that could plague Toph while he's alone with the babysitter (What if the babysitter is a psychopath?); the next night Eggers is tucking Toph neatly into bed. At one point, Eggers groans, "I feel like I'm 10,000 years old," and you stop chuckling and remember that this is the story of a young man in his 20s, who is suddenly the single parent of a growing boy.
There are, naturally, some flaws in ASWOHG. Many readers find that the middle section, one that chronicles Eggers's attempt with friends to found a magazine, drags a bit. But you forgive him because, as New York Times reviewer Michiko Kakutani puts it,
"Although his accounts of their antics (like persuading a former child star to pretend that he is dead) can grow tiresome -- like watching too many Conan O'Brien shows in a row -- his writing is so tactile, so hot-wired to his subconscious, that the reader breezes even through these parts."
I couldn't put this book down, but in some areas I wanted more. More scenes with Toph, more understanding of their older siblings, who seem to appear more rarely than they ought to. Eggers never leaves the impression that Bill and Beth aren't at all involved with raising Toph, they just aren't mentioned very often. I wondered several times if Bill and Beth are largely absent from the book because Dave Eggers is protecting them from scrutiny. That protection may have the opposite effect, however, because to some readers they seem uninvolved.
I'm going to offer a longer quote from Kakutani's review of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius because she says better than I could what Dave Eggers accomplishes in this remarkable story:
...Mr. Eggers demonstrates in this book that he can pretty much write about anything. He can turn a Frisbee game with his brother into an existential meditation on life. He can convey the wild, caffeinated joy he feels after seeing a friend wake up from a coma. And he can turn his efforts to scatter his mother's ashes in Lake Michigan into a story that's both a lyrical tribute to her passing and a crude, slapstick account of his ineptitude as a mourner, lugging about a canister of ashes that reminds him, creepily, of the Ark of the Covenant in the Spielberg movie.
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius may start off sounding like one of those coy, solipsistic exercises that put everything in little ironic quote marks, but it quickly becomes a virtuosic piece of writing, a big, daring, manic-depressive stew of book that noisily announces the debut of a talented -- yes, staggeringly talented new writer.
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