A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers

"We have advantages. We have a cushion to fall back on. This is abundance. A luxury of place and time. Something rare and wonderful. It's almost historically unprecedented. We must do extraordinary things. We have to. It would be absurd not to." 

I feel like people have a lot of opinions about Dave Eggers for being, well. Dave Eggers. Personally, I have no idea what all the fuss is about. He supports good authors, he wrote a movie with his wife that I like (although the world seems to disagree with me on “Away We Go”…), and his name is being bandied about as one of the most influential contemporary authors of our day.

Since I sort of study contemporary authors (emphasis on ‘sort of’), it has looked pretty bad that I haven’t read him at all until a month ago. Happily, I borrowed his first book, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, from a coworker, and now the masses can stop mocking me behind my back.

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is a memoir, kind of. It’s Eggers’ real story as told by him, and is mostly based on fact and experience. The story itself is (as the title indicates) a heartbreaking one. When Eggers is twenty-one, his parents die within a few months of each other. He and his siblings are left trying to reconstruct their lives in the wake of this loss, and Dave is given the burden of taking care of their youngest brother, Toph. By itself, this story is an interesting, sad one that shouldn’t be dismissed as fictional trite nonsense. Because, well. It’s real life.

But Eggers doesn’t stop his memoir there. He goes on to show clearly how the rest of his life is changed due to the deaths of his parents. Eggers and his brother living in the Bay Area, his going through various jobs (including his founding of Might magazine,  Eggers’ claim to fame before moving to New York and making a name for himself through McSweeney’s – an independent publishing house that is the place for new authors to be published), hobbies and women, his paranoia and anxiety regarding every aspect of Toph’s upbringing and future - all of it is drastically impacted by the deaths that reshaped his life.

This is all well and good, and I could tell as I was reading the book that Eggers was talented author, but that didn’t make me like the novel all that much. Eggers doesn't paint himself out to be the normal type of self-effacing martyr, and while I found his stream-of-consciousness fascinating and impressively vast, it wasn't necessarily charming. But around the point when Eggers’ friend sustains a serious head injury, I think I finally saw the novel for what it really is.

It’s a trauma narrative.

A highly self-conscious and very postmodern trauma narrative, sure, but still finding it’s grounding in the strain and distress that comes about when the universe delivers a blow to you that leaves you a bit crippled.

After coming to that (rather obvious – the guy did loose both of his parents) realization, I found it a lot easier to enjoy this book. I wanted to like it from the start, but Eggers doesn’t make that easy for readers. Everything is expanded upon in great detail, everything is honest (even if it isn’t necessarily ‘true’), everything has a multitude of meanings, and everything is raw. When framed as a sort of catharsis, this makes a great deal of sense. When simply reading the book for the hell of it, it becomes overwhelming.

Regardless of how off-putting I found the narrative, even before I was able to place the book in a comfortable pigeon hole I was enthralled despite myself. There’s a dark sense of humor about the whole thing, a feeling of false bravado (note the title) that is quickly called out within the novel itself. The best example is the book’s preface – thirty pages when Eggers simply lets loose, obsessively going over his work and detailing the mistakes, the omissions, his process, how one should go about reading it, and drawing a stapler (because why not?). At later points in the novel, Toph and others break out of character to point out how pretentious the intro was, how parasitic the whole book is, how pathetic (and evil) Eggers is for writing the thing is in the first place, and so on.

It’s honest, even if it’s calculated. It’s honest because I have no doubt that Eggers really did believe these terrible things about himself as he was writing. It’s calculated because this is a final, published version of a heavily drafted piece of work. It’s clever, it’s touching, it’s artificial, it’s postmodern… It’s too damn much.

But that’s why you have to read it!

Because there’s something fearless about a book that won’t hold back when it should. That won’t tell you the story you want to hear, or let you know about the people you want to know about. That's overwrought to the point where it's almost uncomfortable to read. There’s something admirable (and slightly irritating) about an author who won’t let himself get away with anything, and who will curse you out with the last lines of the text.

So you may not like A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius – honestly, I’m not certain if you’re supposed to – but I still think it’s a book worth reading for its skill, it’s audacity and uniqueness. And it definitely has me interested enough to pursue Eggers’ actual pieces of fiction, which I can only hope will also swear at me right before I close the back cover…

Dammit.