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Unconventional memoir nearly lives up to title
Sunday, April 2,
2000
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering
Genius
by Dave Eggers. Simon & Schuster. 375 pages. $23.
Dave Eggers' "A Heartbreaking Work
of Staggering Genius" is a memoir that also makes fun of the
genre.
It tells the story of how, when
Eggers was 21, both of his parents died of cancer within one
month, leaving him to raise his 7-year-old brother. It also
wonders how to tell this story without becoming maudlin,
without exploiting the author's pain (and the lives of his
parents, siblings, friends), and without its self-conscious
style sounding too cute. Surprisingly, the book comes close
to living up to its title.
As many contemporary commercials
do, Eggers' memoir/anti-memoir uses irony to convey
sincerity. For example, the book's 20 pages of
acknowledgments admits "the Painfully, Endlessly
Self-conscious Book Aspect" and "the Knowingness About the
Book's Self-consciousness Aspect," adding that in "admitting
the gimmickry" of this tactic he hopes to "pre-empt your
claim of the book's irrelevance due to said gimmickry." Like
advertisements that parody themselves, winking at viewers
who (the commercials imply) are too smart to be watching a
commercial, Eggers flatters his readers' intelligence to
coax them into adopting his perspective.
He goes on to acknowledge his fee
for writing the book, voting for Ross Perot in 1996,
Palestinian statehood and the "implicit logic of the instant
replay rule." Were Eggers to continue in this manner, the
joke would grow very old very quickly. Wisely, the remainder
of the work is more - though by no means entirely -
conventional in its narrative style, mixing bathos with
pathos, and metafictional musing with heartfelt feeling.
The narrator's acute awareness of
artifice ought to make the story appear less real, but
actually makes it seem more so. When what appears to be a
transcript of an interview with the producer of MTV's "Real
World" suddenly acknowledges that it is just a narrative
device, we sense that we have been invited to peek at the
author's creative processes, watching - over his shoulder,
perhaps - as he writes the book. A maneuver that should feel
manipulative instead feels intimate.
Not all of his experiments work,
but Eggers, former editor of the defunct "Might" magazine
and current editor of the eccentric literary journal
"McSweeney's," knows what he's doing. His prose can be quite
lyrical, his shifts in tone emotionally effective, and only
a rare 20-something could write "I am 24 but feel 10,000
years old" and make us believe it.
PHIL NEL
(Phil
Nel is a visiting instructor of English at the College
of Charleston.)
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