Work that staggers and stumbles, sans genius

Imagine for a moment that nothing makes sense. That there's a crisis—death in the family, rejected affections, neglected academics, runaway pet, lost keys, stained shirt—and a panic. Frantic, you race through a thicket of abortive possibilities, your usual approximation of a single, rational logic fragmented by worry into a million whims, shattering each others' kneecaps into a million more. And thus pulled everywhere, you feel that you can't move, that you're paralyzed by self-consciousness, that it's a nightmare from which there's no reprieve...

COURTESY SIMON & SCHUSTER Life as a slacker zombie with a huge ego isn't just for Yalies.

Wait a minute. Maybe, just maybe, lost keys don't throw you into gibbering idiocy. Maybe you look calmly for your lost dog. Maybe you get a crush on someone new. Maybe it's a matter of degree: death paralyzes, deadlines panic, and dirt...? Well, shirts get washed in the next load. Maybe you're awake most of the time.

And even while truly nightmaring, you act: you write the paper or heal or get a new dog—or don't. And then it's over. Unconscious, you've sleepwalked your way through a hyper-conscious fever dream. And maybe the dream lasts seconds, hours, days, or years, but you wake up, and approximate reason once again.

In his semi-fictional memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Dave Eggers doesn't understand that, or he can't, or he does but he ignores it. Or—as he claims—all of the above: so many synapses are firing in his head as a defense against the world that there's no room for sanity. All that remains is a paralyzing self-consciousness used as self-defense, a never-ending life as a slacker orphan and an undying urge to tell us all about it.

By now, you've heard the hype. Or you've heard that you've heard the hype. Dave Eggers, the literary vanguard. Or: Dave Eggers, the man they are calling the next David Foster Wallace. He's the metafictionist with a difference; the one with a story that real people can relate to. Endured parents' near-simultaneous deaths from cancer, raised young brother alone, started Might magazine, auditioned for The Real World (the one with Puck!!!). Talk shows, bestseller lists, profiles, "How do you deal with your newfound fame," hype!!!

And the book? Well, it moves from a Library of Congress page duded up with lists of allergies and sexuality charts (clever), to a preface studded with charts and deleted passages (clever clever), to a self-acknowledged 109 pages of pathos (poignant), to 266 more of My Life as a Gen-Xer Who Raises My Little Brother and Sometimes has Sex (clever clever clever). Like McSweeney's, the wonderful literary quarterly and Internet daily that Eggers edits, the book crams itself with stuff—minutiae overflowing—and refuses the punchline.

However, in this large a dose, Eggers' inability to focus or decide seems like a dearth of ideas, rather than a cornucopia. A typical passage of Eggers': "Watching [The Real World] is like listening to one's voice on tape: it's real of course, but however mellifluous and articulate you hear your own voice, once it's sent back through this machine and is given back to you, it's high-pitched, nasal, horrifying. Are our lives like that? Do we talk like that, look like that? Yes. It could not be. It is. No."

A typical passage of my own: "Eggers races away with one decent idea, drags it out and out and out (like this sentence—here), commas, commas, and ands and ands —interjects (parentheticals)—Then he breaks off, on, off, only to come back to the racing. Self-affirms. Yes. Self-contradicts. No. Fragments. Then, postmodern tricks like: a) diagrams; b) elaborate, fake meta-dialogues; c) lists. And around again, self-aware, racing, self-aware-aware, always racing...up his own ass." This isn't style—no, it's ever-less-charming tics. He's not as smart as Wallace, nor as formally interesting.

Book

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers Simon & Schuster 375 pp. $23

But it's not a bad book. Eggers impresses whenever he isn't as nasal as The Real World. That is, when his self-awareness is enlightening, when his panic makes sense—as in the affecting scenes with his dying parents, and some of those with Toph, his brother—and is not irrelevant—as in the endless dissections of the plight of himself and his generation. That's because, despite his avant striving, Eggers is best at sincerity. His story appeals because he's the über-Regular Guy (as Wallace blurbs, Eggers "po-mo comic bits" are all well and good, but his sentimentality-verging "arias of grief [are] the book's best art)."

And the accolades? People like the book precisely because they can project their egos onto it. Because what Eggers writes—rather than being wildly experimental, as some have claimed—is the apotheosis of self-centered conventionality. Read his book, sure—it has its kicks and poignancies—but know what you're getting into: yourself yourself yourself to the nth, and only sporadically much else.

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