THERE’S AN AUTHOR named Dave Eggers. He just put out a slightly-fictionalized memoir, immodestly titled A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.
It’s gotten a lot of press attention.
Some reviewers criticize Eggers’s audacity for daring to publish his life story at age 29; and then for writing it in a modified PoMo, self-reflexive, hip-ironic manner.
Other reviewers praise all that.
For the most part, neither group of reviewers seems to know what Eggers’s book is really about.
It’s not about Eggers being a smarty-pants hipster.
It’s about his journey through that stance and finding a way beyond it.
The plot in brief: Eggers is a 21-year-old college grad who returns to his home in a patrician Chicago suburb to tend to his cancer-striken mom. Only his dad turns out to also have the Big C, and both parents die within weeks of one another.
Dave, his big sister Beth, and his orphaned seven-year-old brother “Toph” (short for Christopher) then head out for hyper-hyper San Francisco. There, Dave takes a day job in P.R. while spending much of his inheritance starting Might, a magazine that’s first going to have been The Voice of A New Generation but which quickly turns into typical S.F. fare: Attitude-overdosed hipsters proclaiming how with-it they are and how out-of-it the Rest of America is.
The Might years are rightly disclaimed in Eggers’s long intro as the dullest section of the book. He says they “concern the lives of people in their early twenties, and those lives are very difficult to make interesting, even when they seemed interesting to those living them at the time.”
Indeed, the book ends with Dave realizing the meaningless treadmill his life and work had become, as he returns to Illinois for a friend’s wedding and reconnects with the world of his past. The book’s story, Eggers’s personal journey from extended post-adolescence to budding adulthood, ends there.
This personal journey corresponds with Eggers’s professional journey–from merely sneering at mainstream media to exploring a pro-active alternative, and finding it in Lawrence Sterne-esque serious whimsey.
After folding Might and moving to N.Y.C., he took a day job at Esquire. Then, after signing his book deal, he quit that job and started Timothy McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern, a beautifully-made occasional paperback journal of gentle (but never wimpy) humor and pro-social texts of many types.
In a cultural milieu that values bad-boy hipster Attitude ahead of all other possible values, A Heartbreaking Work and McSweeney’s are attempts to reconnect with what’s great and eternal about human communication and community.
The Eggers of Might was a writer-editor of his period; the Might book collection already seems quite dated indeed.
The Eggers of McSweeney’s is a writer-editor of the timeless.
Perhaps he’s not really a “staggering genius.” But that’s not really what we need right now.
MONDAY: Literary lessons from the business papers.
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