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A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius : Based on a True Story (2000)

You've got to give Dave Eggers this, if nothing else, he knows how to market himself. First he wrote this memoir, loaded with irony to appeal to Gen-Xers, continually self-referential to appeal to postmodernists, and centered around his efforts to raise his little brother after their parents both died of cancer, a sure chick magnet. Then, having exposed most of his and his family members' lives to public view (at least in theory) he adopted a Pynchonesque/Sallingeresque reclusive pose, and feigned personal agony at having to discuss the book. All this while cashing in big time on the supposedly "tragic" events of his life. For these savvy ploys alone he deserves to be called a "staggering genius."

The book itself uses a host of postmodernist, ironical, satirical, self-conscious, etc., etc., etc...techniques, which are rather hackneyed and, given the ostensible topic of the book (his family tragedy), quite off-putting. A fairly representative passage comes when he's heaving his mother's ashes (or cremains) into Lake Michigan :

Oh this is so plain, disgraceful, pathetic--

Or beautiful and loving and glorious! Yes, beautiful and loving and glorious!

    But even if so, even if this is right and beautiful, and she is tearing up while watching, so
    proud--like what she said to me when I carried her, when she had the nosebleed and I carried her
    and she said that she was proud of me, that she did not think I could do it, that I would be able to
    lift her, carry her to the car, and from the car into the hospital, those words run through my head
    every day, have run through every day since, she did not think I could do it but of course I did it. I
    knew I would do it, and I know this, I know what I am doing now, that I am doing something both
    beautiful but gruesome because I am destroying its beauty by knowing that it might be beautiful,
    know that if I know I am doing something beautiful, that it's no longer beautiful.   I fear that even
    if it is beautiful in the abstract, that my doing it knowing that it's beautiful and worse, knowing that
    I will very soon be documenting it, that in my pocket is a tape recorder brought for just that
    purpose--that all this makes this act of potential beauty somehow gruesome. I am a monster. My
    poor mother. She would do this without the thinking, without the thinking about thinking--

Yeah sure, I get it, the way he's having this discussion shows that he understands what's going on, yadda, yadda, yadda... But unfortunately, the point he's making is more accurate than his style is clever. There simply is something gruesome about this kind of mannered irony and the way, throughout his life, that he seems to interpret his experiences through the filter of the book he plans to write.

At the point where every thought, emotion, and action in your life must be considered for how it will appear in print, you've become a fictional character rather than a real human being. And by creating so much distance between the character of Dave Eggers and the supposedly tragic events of his life, Eggers (the author) makes it really hard for the reader to care much. I finished the book unstaggered and heart unbroken, but grudgingly forced to admit that the literary world has a potential new genius, a writer with a genius for self promotion the likes of which we've not seen since Norman Mailer; and we all know how the Norman Mailer story has gone : badly.

(Reviewed:17-May-01)

Grade: (C-)

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A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius : Based on a True Story (2000)

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