Dave Eggers: An Appreciation (I of III)

A HEARTBREAKING WORK OF STAGGERING GENIUS

The funniest books I’ve read as an adult are Mark Twain’s Autobiography, T.C. Boyle’s The Road to Wellville, and Dave Eggers’s A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. Of the three, I find Eggers’s book the funniest.

In this three-part series, I am going to write about four of Eggers’s books: his serious novels The Circle and The Every as well as Heartbreaking and his nonfiction book Zeitoun.

In the year 2000, when he was 34, Eggers burst onto the national scene with Heartbreaking. It was both popular and respected in literary circles: it hit number one of The New York Times bestseller list and was nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.

The book is a memoir covering his life from 1991 to 1997 — with some flashbacks to his youth — but it’s a memoir in which he took so many liberties that it could qualify as a novel. It has so many fictional elements that it’s probably most aptly called a novelistic memoir.

The book tapped into the GenX zeitgeist. The characters talked the way we GenXers talked, using many of our shared cultural references — a remark that “sounded a little too Fonzie”, “a Mary Lou Retton arm-raise and back-arch”, house parties with “keg beer in shiny red cups”.

Like many GenXers, Eggers was alert, perceptive, knowing, and worldly-wise. We encounter Eggers’s wandering, over-active imagination, his irreverence, his cleverness, and the flow of his thoughts, of his fluid mind, as he flows through his daily experiences. And Eggers is so self-aware and so aware of others — and he so keenly peers through all artifice — that the book is loaded with psychological insights.

The comic mind gives us a sense of intelligence and wisdom along with a certain knowing self-confidence, even a sense of superiority. Eggers delivers this and more. He leaves us in a state of mirth for 437 pages, with not one bad page or even one slow page. He never misses a step.

The book opens in his senior year of college, as his father and mother both die of cancer, five weeks apart. Eggers at 21 ends up the guardian of his 8-year-old brother Toph, for whom he strives “to keep things merry, madcap even, the mood buoyant”. Much of the book’s humor involves the interactions between the two brothers.

They move from suburban Chicago to the Bay Area, and Eggers and his friends do their day jobs with “radiant acuity” while launching a quirky satirical magazine called Might. Their goal? “All we really want is for no one to have a boring life, to be impressive, so we can be impressed.”

By the end of the book, I was filled with respect for Eggers’s sensibility — totally alive, whimsical, and profoundly intelligent. And there is his talent, his style, his mastery of the craft of writing, including perfect pacing, timing, and rhythm.

I’ve read every book Eggers has written since, including what I regard as his two great novels, The Circle (2013) and The Every (2021). Which I will focus on in my next post.