Why can’t I be Dave Eggers? It’s a question every writer between the ages of 20 and 40 has been asking for the last five years. An understandable question. The 32-year-old Chicago native has been blessed with two rare gifts: the ability to compose hilarious prose about virtually anything, and an uncanny knack for self-promotion. Together, these gifts have made him the Vin Diesel of literature, if that’s not too ridiculous to say.
It all reached critical mass two years ago, when his memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius was published. It didn’t matter that he was about 30 years too young to pull off a credible memoir. The book was great and annoying at the same time, filled with touching personal anecdotes and history, long passages of self-conscious musings, highly inventive narrative gymnastics. In terms of the literary canon, it planted a flag in the heart of the memoir form, claiming it as safe territory for a generation (his and mine) most often noted for its cover-all-flanks irony, its nothing-is-sacred cynicism.
Whatever else it might have been, Staggering was the culmination of a short but spectacular rise through the ranks of popular publishing. The book itself told the first half of Eggers’ story, as a superstar journalist: When he was in his 20s, both his parents died within weeks of each other. Underwritten by their generous life insurance policies, he moved to San Francisco, parented his younger brother Toph, and launched a magazine that was the Gen-X equivalent of Spy—a hilarious and smart monthly magazine with no real readership beyond the magazine industry itself. It was a project that was doomed to failure, but the best kind of failure. Every self-respecting magazine editor in the country was an avid fan—if only because Eggers knew precisely where to send complimentary copies, and hilarious press releases. It didn’t hurt that the whole thing happened in mid-90s San Francisco, just at the crest of the Internet boom. Eggers was a part of that Soma coterie of the time—the flourishing publishing scene centered on Wired magazine, Suck.com, Salon, and all the other storytellers and ringleaders of the digital revolution. After Might was shuttered (nothing becomes a publishing legend more than premature death), Eggers was summoned to New York City, where he was enrolled as an editor at Esquire magazine. He spent some unhappy months there, and got out after he sold his idea for a memoir to Simon and Schuster. At the same time, he founded McSweeney’s, first as a glorified blog for him and his small entourage, then as a quarterly journal of growing reputation and substance, and finally as a publishing house with such notable authors on the rolls as Stephen Dixon, Jonathan Lethem, and Nick Hornby.
Eggers was anointed a curly-haired Adonis of literature long before he published Staggering. But don’t blame him for a system that tends to fixate on one person at a time, making superstars of some, while ignoring legions of others who are just as deserving. Most reporters and critics prefer to cover someone who has already been written about at length. (Here we go again, right? Well…) It makes our jobs so much easier, it protects us from looking silly, and we get to interview someone who is already positioned as a celebrity. Okay. But who gets to be famous? In the end, of course, there is no single answer. From the outside, it looks like the equivalent of winning the lottery, and the only real obscenity about the whole process is how many dozens of truly deserving artists lose the war of attrition, and never create the masterpiece that is in them, or reach the audience ready to receive them. That, in a nutshell, is why so many people find Eggers so annoying.
It’s not his fault, of course, and to his credit, Eggers really has used his powers for good. Money is power, but more important, it’s freedom, and there’s nothing as sad as a successful artist who doesn’t use his freedom to push his own creativity forward. Eggers, by contrast, has spent most of his adult life in a position of financial comfort and creative agitation. Perhaps his most ambitious, and reckless, pairing of the two is his new novel, You Shall Know Our Velocity. Growing the McSweeney’s operation to the point where it now publishes a handful of hardcovers per year, he walked away from million-dollar contracts with the big publishing houses of New York, and decided to publish Velocity in his own house. This, of course, allows him to do precisely what he wants, while getting in his licks about how screwed up the book industry is today, and probably keeping a bigger slice of the pie for himself and his projects. On top of all that, every move he makes seems to incite more publicity and interest. He is having his cake and eating it too. Another reason people find him so irritating.
There are downsides to his go-it-alone approach, of course, some of which may come back to haunt him. The first edition of his new book was limited to 10,000 copies, available to readers exclusively from McSweeney’s web site; Velocity starts, for no apparent reason other than the novelty of it, right on the front cover, and there are no end papers; publishing information and acknowledgements are printed on the inside of the back cover. But these are all trivialities. Most serious, from a reader’s point of view, is that the novel could have been better edited. Typos proliferate, and design elements are capricious. (Random images appear in the text, neither often enough nor rare enough to create any sense of purpose at all.) The last 100 pages are redundant, and would have made the novel better in their absence.
This is generally what happens when the owner of a book company writes a book. He is the boss of his editors, and even if he’s a benevolent dictator, they will inevitably become proof-readers and rubber-stampers, instead of collaborators the way great editors are meant to be.
The bottom line, of course, is that Eggers is incredibly gifted. It occasionally happens that a complete moron achieves this kind of acclaim—often enough, I guess, to make it possible to say that it doesn’t matter whether a person has any talent or not, just whether they have the connections and the marketing muscle. But it’s not really like that in the rarified world of hardcover literature, and it still takes a very special person to come up with 300 pages of publishable material and call it, without smirking, a real contribution to literature.
That said, You Shall Know Our Velocity is a problematic work. It’s the story of two young men who attempt to fly around the planet in a week, looking to get rid of about $30,000 by giving it away personally to people they think can use it. A clever enough premise, but pretty lightweight. Eggers leavens that basic reworking of On the Road with a familiar backstory: Will and Hand are driven and haunted by the memory of their third musketeer, Jack, who was randomly and cruelly killed in a car accident a few months prior to their misadventures. Though Eggers has written much short fiction over the years, he has never written anything of this length and scope that wasn’t based directly on experience. (Indeed, the most convincing moments in the book are the ones that are apparently scribbled directly out of first-hand experience.) He falls back on a few well-used tools: You can see his magazine instincts at work, hitting on a great idea for a magazine story—two twentysomethings try to fly around the world in one week! Giving away thousands of dollars in cash!—and then translating that to novelistic form. The beauty with this approach is that you get to make it all up. The problem is, you have to make it all up. And where he has to invent whole episodes and narrative devices (Will and Hand on the top of a cold, dark, silent mountain—death! Get it?), you can definitely see the man behind the curtain. His account of the fatal car accident is car
dboardishly two-dimensional, and the whole narrative accounting for the title of the book—a faux history of a flight-obsessed primitive people, who ran around with their mouths open—is lazy and unlikeable.
In its best sections, all of Eggers familiar conventions come into play: the pitch-perfect dialogue between young males of a certain time and place; the ugly duckling narrator—a stand-in for himself; the autodidactic, undependable Neal Cassady character—Hand. There’s the essentially superficial plot, lent seriousness by guest appearances by the Grim Reaper. There are the author’s personal obsessions, lightly veiled discomfort with money, the demise of his parents and (more recently, tragically) his sister. It’s all well-traveled stuff, in some senses covered more honestly and directly in Staggering.
The chronically envious should know that Eggers is not getting a free ride from critics this time. What looked like a real lovefest in the case of his first book is not happening with Velocity. The Time magazines of the world will continue to fawn, focusing more on the phenomenon of Dave Eggers than on the work itself. But the Roger Ebert of the literature world, The New York Times’ Michiko Kakutani, hated it. Kakutani concedes, at least, that Eggers’ real virtue is that he can write about anything, and make it sing. I imagine he can spin golden prose out of his grocery list, and here he “turns somersaults” on almost every page. More to the point, what attracts readers to Eggers’ work is Eggers himself, and this can be a problem for someone who wants to write fiction. What made him a great memoirist may become a liability as a novelist—an inability to imagine realities, characters, situations outside his own head and his own experience. But his dazzling gifts as a writer, and his honorable efforts as a publisher, will forgive a multitude of youthful sins.