A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius: Pulitzer Prize Finalist

Someone suggested this book to me with the line, "this is so you. You're going to love it." They were right, at least about the loving part. I don't necessarily know whether I write or think or act like Eggers. If I do, then I consider it a compliment.

This instantaneously became one of my favorite books of all-time. Even through the first few pages I was totally hooked to the way Eggers stayed so colloquial with his reader. I can appreciate that, especially as someone who works in the law where a lot of really simple communication has to be terse and formal. Sometimes the warmest, most welcoming type of conversation is the one that's long and nuanced and complicated even when the ideas behind the words might seemingly be simple.

To me, a good book is one that makes me think rather than just follow a plot line and a story. A great book is one that makes me write in the margins, adding my own thoughts to the passages. I transformed whole pages of this book into a notepad. While narrating a really interesting story in its own right, what made the book spectacular was Eggers's musings on the things that were happening around him. Too many writers merely describe what goes on around them without offering any insights into what they think and how they feel about particular situations. These are the types of books most of us are used to, and while the plot might move us along and keep us entertained and engaged, the end product is superficial. I usually walk away from books feeling thrilled at having finished them, but then quickly having that replaced with a sense of dissatisfaction. I never understood why that was happening, how you can complete a seemingly excellent, exciting book, and feel uneasy about it. But after reading Eggers, he reminded me that there's a lot more that an author can offer besides a fun story. Now I think that authors have a responsibility to offer more.

While I don't like gimmicks, and was originally sceptical when I saw all the little random things Eggers tossed into the book (like a weird copyright page in the beginning and a strange autobiographical blurb at the end), the fact that Eggers was totally aware of his gimmicks, and made fun of himself throughout, helped put me at ease. Few things can bring you closer to a writer than their ability to laugh and shake their head at the things they say and do. This book is filled with parts like that. Particularly, Eggers warns us that the book gets kind of boring closer to the end, and he's actually right about that. When you get to that part, and you remember his introductory statement about it, you're still marvelling at how great it all is. Maybe it's because its a memoir, maybe its because Eggers brings you into his life and makes you feel like you've known him for years, maybe it's because you don't want to fall into the trap of agreeing with a statement that should seemingly discourage you from reading his book. Whatever the case, even at is most boring "Heartbreaking Work" is exactly what is claims to be - genius.

Dave Eggers: enfant terrible, possible victim of obsessive-compulsive disorder, anger-management issues, paranoia and anti-social personality disorder, to name a few of the many things that are blatantly apparent in this take-no-prisoners memoir, has written a most compelling tale. It is not for everybody, but even if one is shocked by the content and strange rants and riffs, it would be impossible to dispute the quality that is there in abundance. Dave had taken stream-of-consciousness to the next level, nesting memories along side other memories, returning to heartbreaking, visceral, soul shattering vignettes and images. The loss of both parents when Dave was in college is dealt with in a diffuse, non-linear way, has the feeling of jazz, erratic, troubling, hypnotic. He takes his “thought trains” to distant and shocking destinations, revealing more of an injured psyche and survivor at all costs. It is searingly, darkly funny at times, has the perverse quality of a wreck of some kind, a train, plane, car, or all three, or beyond to some kind of cosmic wreck. There are moments of profound and poetic rapture, which begs to be read out loud, to an audience of lovers of great literature. Within the Eggers family, there is tragedy, tarnished saint-like behavior, fearful dramas that no child should have to suffer, and the children, Dave the second-to-the-youngest, find ways of surviving, and even surviving well in spite of the major pain and adversity that was heaped upon them. Besides Dave himself, awash with noisy and disturbing thoughts, self-revelation, grandiose moments of lucidity, the other characters come to life in an interesting way, especially his mother, a complex person who, at her finest moments invokes the “divine feminine,” and at her worst, a person who needs industrial-strength anger-management. The bond between the youngest sibling, Tophe, and Dave is touching and at times dangerous, Dave in a personal war against authority, and on a journey for compensation for the tragedies the family has suffered. Placed in a parental role at too tender an age, Dave emerges at times as a puer aeternus, not always up to the challenge, but has not appeared to have harmed his younger brother, at least in a visible way. Of course, Dave is being facetious in the title of his memoir, but he really has a profound, original, at times overwhelming facility of expression, and to this reader is indeed a genius.

AHWOSG is a mostly-true tale of a man in his early twenties dealing with the death of both of his parents just months apart, and the responsibility of raising his young brother, while growing up himself. Eggers is a great writer. His prose is entertaining, and just as importantly, daring and original. But he tends to get long-winded and overly-repetitive, and his daring style at times feels undisciplined and lazy, and quite frankly does not always work (for example, his characters "break character" occasionally, to acknowledge that certain events "did not happen this way," and tell him he is using the dialogue as an obvious literary device). He is not as funny or clever as he thinks he is. And the book is not nearly tight enough -- it should have been edited much more heavily -- it should have been about 200 pages lighter. Despite those negatives, I thoroughly enjoyed it -- it was never boring, and really was one of the better books I've read in quite some time.

A note about the rating: I gave the book four stars instead of five because the star system is, as I understand, not supposed to be a sliding scale. Five stars is for say, Salinger and Hemmingway. (Who are these people tossing around five-star ratings to the fast-foodish-pop-prose likes of Grisham and Dan Brown? Are they preteens or morons?) Despite my criticism and (mere) four-star rating, AHWOSG is still one of the best works I've read in months, even if it's not a heartbreaking work of staggering genius.

Maybe a different title would've helped me enjoy this book more. When you read something called "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius", the bar is immediately set pretty high. Its a decent book. Readable. I could easily put it down- in fact it took me about six months to finish, when much longer books rarely take me more than two weeks. But, I took the time to finish, whereas a truely bad book I would've just abandoned. Its amusing at times. I never found it moving or emotional in any way, although he graphically describes having two parents die back-to-back, one of a slow and painful disease, and one quickly and suddenly. I guess I never felt any emotional attachment to the characters, any of them. Eggers doesn't take the time to develop characters for you to care about. He is the main character, and the book is about him. The supporting cast, even the little brother he raises that is with him through the entire book, do not matter that much. And he is not that likeable of a character. So, to the reviews I read that "this is the voice of the MTV generation"- no, not really. I am part of the MTV generation, and found every character in this book completely unrelatable. Some parts were a little funny, some of his experiences I found slightly interesting, some of the characters had sweet moments. But, there are thousands of better books that will be much funnier, or more insightful, or more powerful or introspective or moving or whatever Eggers was trying to be. So, if anyone asked me if I would recommend this book I would emphatically say no, but I wouldn't go out of my way to tell people it was horrible.

“But when you talk about Nabokov and Coover, you’re talking about real geniuses, the writers who weathered real shock and invented this stuff in contemporary fiction. But after the pioneers always come the crank turners, the little gray people who take the machines others have built and just turn the crank, and little pellets of metafiction come out the other end. The crank-turners capitalize for a while on sheer fashion, and they get their plaudits and grants and buy their IRAs and retire to the Hamptons well out of range of the eventual blast radius. There are some interesting parallels between postmodern crank-turners and what’s happened since post-structural theory took off here in the U.S., why there’s such a big backlash against post-structuralism going on now. It’s the crank-turners fault. I think the crank-turners replaced the critic as the real angel of death as far as literary movements are concerned, now. You get some bona fide artists who come along and really divide by zero and weather some serious s***-storms of shock and ridicule in order to promulgate some really important ideas. Once they triumph, though, and their ideas become legitimate and accepted, the crank-turners and wannabes come running to the machine, and out pour the gray pellets and now the whole thing’s become a hollow form, just another institution of fashion. Take a look at some of the critical-theory Ph.D. dissertations being written now. They’re like de Man and Foucault in the mouth of a dull child. Academia and commercial culture have somehow become these gigantic mechanisms of commodification that drain the weight and color out of even the most radical new advances. It’s a surreal inversion of the death-by-neglect that used to kill off prescient art. Now prescient art suffers death-by acceptance. We love things to death, now. Then we retire to the Hamptons.”

David Foster Wallace, he built this machine. Eggers is capitalizing on it.