A HEARTBREAKING WORK OF STAGGERING GENIUS. Dave Eggers. Simon & Schuster. $23. 375 pp.
Dave Eggers' new book, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, is part autobiography, part postmodern collage, a novelistic "memoir-y kind of thing" that tells the sad, awful, tragic story of how the author's mother and father died within weeks of each other and how he became a surrogate parent to his 8-year-old brother.
It tells it with such style and hyperventilated, self-conscious energy, such coy, Lettermanesque shtick and such genuine, heartfelt emotion, that the story is at once funny, tender, annoying and heartbreaking -- an epic, in the end, not of woe, though there's plenty of that too, but an epic about family and how families fracture and fragment and somehow, through all the tumult and upset, manage to endure.
It's the sort of book David Foster Wallace, Frank McCourt and Tom Wolfe might have written together if Wallace had never heard of Thomas Pynchon, if McCourt did not grow up poor in Ireland but middle-class in the suburbs of Chicago, if Tom Wolfe weren't the sort of writer who wears white suits and ice-cream colored shirts but were a 20-something slacker with a taste for shorts and T-shirts and lots of postmodern pyrotechnics.
There is a self-conscious knowingness to Staggering Genius that announces itself in the book's opening pages: The story is prefaced with "Rules and Suggestions for Enjoyment of this Book," an extended discussion of "the major themes of this book," "an incomplete guide" to the book's metaphors and symbols and a flow chart detailing the emotional consequences of the deaths of Eggers' parents.
In addition, the book's narrative is peppered with asides that pre-empt, in a Rothian sort of way, any criticisms the reader might have, aside from chastising Eggers for being self-absorbed and self-pitying, for milking his family tragedy for sympathy and attention, for cannibalizing others' lives for a book.
Although Eggers' eagerness to continually footnote his narrative -- like a smart-aleck kid telling you why he knows he's going to get into trouble, so you can give him points for being clever and cute -- can be intensely irritating, his use of gimmickry does not undercut the emotion of his story but somehow heightens it by throwing the passages of earnest sentiment into high relief.
We become aware that Eggers is not simply wielding high-tech devices to create a hip, experimental narrative, but that these self-annotating mechanisms are part of his sensibility, that they are defensive survival tactics, like his love of hyperbole, invoked to deal with his chaotic childhood and the horror of losing his parents. They are part of his constitution as a writer, enabling him to stand apart from his experiences and turn them into art.
This is why his mother's long, slow, agonizing death elicits not only fear and grief but also a grisly, stream-of-consciousness riff on cancer: "The tumor is a light tumor, empty, a balloon. The tumor is rotten fruit, graying at the edges. Or an insects' hive, something festering and black and alive, fuzzy on its sides."
As Eggers lets us know through a Q-and-A session shoehorned into the middle of the book, he grew up in Lake Forest, the monied Chicago suburb depicted in Ordinary People. His family never really fit in: "We were always so oddly white-trashy for our town, with our gruesome problems, and our ugly used cars, our Pintos and Malibus and Camaros, and our '70s wallpaper and plaid couches and acne and state schools."
In the second half of the book, Eggers devotes more and more space to chronicling his and his Bay Area friends' efforts to found a Gen X magazine called Might. 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.
In fact, 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.
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.