A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (review)

Book Previews193 A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers Simon & Schuster, 2000 375 pages, cloth, $23.00 When Dave Eggers was a senior in coUege, both his parents died of cancer within five weeks of each other. Soon after, Eggers and his nine-year-old brother Toph (short for Christopher), moved from the suburbs of Chicago to Berkeley to be closer to their sister and to escape the burden of the "black, blinding, murderous rage and sorrow" that their parents' deaths had left them to shoulder. In California, Eggers raised Toph with a mixture of haphazard discipline and unwavering devotion. He founded Might, a highly praised but short-lived humor magazine; jockeyed for a spot on The Real World, MTV's monument to post-adolescent self-absorption; and bore witness to the personal tragedies of his friends while never losing sight of his own. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is an anecdotal yet masterfuUy complete account of these events, but it is also much more than that. It is, for lack of a more appropriate word, a meta-memoir, a book that is so selfconscious —so self-admittedly conscious, in fact, of its own self-consciousness —that very little is said without being unsaid, qualified, and then said again. On the copyright page, for instance, a simple legal disclaimer spawns a 190-word essay that essentiaUy disclaims the previous disclamation. In the acknowledgments section, the author offers a dissertation on the book's major themes, UteraUy outUning them, then UteraUy mapping them out, causing the reader to wonder if the book's true significance may Ue somewhere outside of a strictly hermetic interpretation. In the narrative itself, characters often break out of character to chaUenge Eggers's version of a story, question his authorial intentions, or simply berate him. Surprisingly, the effect is far from grating. Instead, this egg-headed approach often lets the air out of emotionaUy bombastic situations and aUows the author to steer clear of sentiment in order to redeem rather than to evade genuine feeling. Eggers is wise to understand, however, that these techniques are not without their gimmicky limits, and he is equal to the task of simply telling his story and teUing it weU. The book begins at the end ofhis mother's Ufe, and the oppressive physicality of her final days is presented in excruciating detail. Here are the terry-cloth towels into which she spits green fluid. Here is the plastic half-moon receptacle, "like a piece ofan air-conditioning unit," 194Fourth Genre into which she spits blood and bile. Here are the freckles in her weU-tanned back and the veins in her hands. Rather than pausing to question his motivations in writing, Eggers simply shows what he sees and feels without flinching. His father's death is reported quickly, as quickly as the family has learned ofthe seriousness ofhis condition. It is never quite clear which parent dies first, but Eggers is more concerned with conveying his complete devastation in the face of this heretofore-impossible loss. This is the core of his pain, after aU, the rage and sorrow that he cannot face for long. So he moves, although he has not even begun to move on. He andToph speed off to California, and the narrative speeds the reader through the first few months of their giddy, newly-minted freedom. In lieu of a regular childhood, Eggers struggles to give Toph a happy, almost-maniacal one. He christens their mediocre dinners with funny names, calculates the best way to skid across their apartment floor, and generally treats his young brother like gold. For, you see, Toph is beloved. Through him, Eggers is able to remake himself, or at the very least repair himself, and he is not ashamed to profess, unabashedly, to the beauty in this. The reader almost cannot help but agree with him. I, for one, could not help but feel whisked through the book's entire first half. Eggers's urgent and effective use of the present tense, his limber way with metaphor, and his gift for telegraphing what seems like his every fleeting thought give the reader Uttle choice but to rest...