Dave Eggers In Review

I can't review it. Eggers is a friend of and occasional contributor to this paper. Reviewing his book would be a bit like reviewing Jim Knipfel's, or Amy Sohn's, or Terminator's this spring. We liked Eggers' work a long time before we met him (always dicey), back when he was doing Might, the smartest and funniest of what they were then calling "Gen-X magazines." I've written that McSweeney's is the best literary startup in ages, that it drives me nuts when lazy journalists equate it with visionless knockoffs just to fill up their I-cover-the-literary-waterfront columns. You cover it all right. Like a thick blanket of fog.

So Eggers is not family, but he is like a neighbor we're friendly with, and I can't review his book, which is unnecessary anyway because everyone else indeed will, so I'll review the reviews. Of the first three I read last week, Michiko Kakutani's in last Tuesday's Times was, happily for Eggers, the most enthusiastic, an almost total bj winding up with a grand money-shot of a blurb: "...a virtuosic piece of writing, a big, daring, manic-depressive stew of book that noisily announces the debut of a talented?yes, staggeringly talented new writer." Oh, baby.

Kakutani can sometimes review like a blind person feeling her way around a duckbilled platypus?she identifies some of the parts but can't quite say what they all add up to. This time I think she did the opposite, dropping the ball on some particulars but getting the outline right. In an e-mail later that day, Eggers wanted to make sure that I wouldn't feel like I now had to say the book sucks just to be contrarian. Don't worry, I told him, if I say it sucks it won't be just to be contrarian. Writers are so easy.

Novelist Daniel Handler, reviewing the book in the VLS, was more cautious in his praise. He started out trying to match the McSweeney's guy for smartass tone and hyper-self-aware irony, being the first among what will surely be many to roll over for the easy lede:

OK, the thing you should know about Dave Eggers's book A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is that it's not. Well, maybe it is. It has lots of really good parts, which is one of the earmarks of genius, right? I guess it depends on what sort of person you are...

He sustains this Eggers impersonation through the entire review, which is mostly?if skittishly, almost flinchingly?positive, even to an eggeristic parenthetical in the last line:

By eschewing (Simon & Schuster, you can quote me as saying "avoiding" if you'd rather) the temptations of cynicism, slackerdom, and navel-gazing, Eggers may end up becoming something he richly deserves and probably does not aspire to be: the voice of a generation.

That sounds like a writer who would rather avoid pissing off the McSweeney's guy he might have to run into someday at one of those New York we're-all-writers-here soirees, yet he wants to leave himself a little maneuvering space should Eggers be up for a Quentin Tarantino backlash any time soon. Which if he is, Benjanin Anastas can say he started it. He wrote the first pan of the book I've read, in last week's Observer. He began actually by panning McSweeney's, calling it "the minor experiments of major scenesters" and likening it, in one of the ugliest metaphors I've read in some time, to Egypt Air Flight 990, because it "raises expectations skyward just to dash them in the sea, and the longer one stays aboard, the clearer it becomes that something spooky is happening in the cockpit." The book itself he dismisses as the shallow and facile indulgence of a Gen-X superstar pandering to his market; even the cover art by Komar & Melamid (whom he peckishly de-gilds by association as "Russian kitsch artists") is too much of a muchness for him. Then he returns, oddly, in his final lines, to dissing McSweeney's again:

Watch out below! his book warns us, and I've been checking the sky for falling objects ever since I put it aside. Leave it to the editor of McSweeney's, on his first long-distance flight, to commandeer the controls for a strange, extended dive and take the rest of us down with him.

In sales they have this thing called "the doorknob conversation," aka The Columbo, where, as you're leaving the room at the end of the meeting, your hand on the knob, you turn back to your mark, as though just remembering something trivial, and ask for what you really wanted out of the meeting all along. One might've gotten the impression that Anastas was reviewing Eggers' book just to trash McSweeney's, and wondered if he's got some undisclosed issues with the magazine, some reason to be green, or bitter. A returned ms., something.

One thing all three of them had issues with was the book's discursiveness, its meandering nonlinearity, its outrageously long asides and shaggy dogs and McSweeney's-like fine-print overexplanations and self-consciously self-conscious meta-narratives and passages that look to be there just because the author had a story to tell. Anastas seemed the most flummoxed by the book's refusal to walk a straight plotline, and even Kakutani found "his use of pomo gimmickry" "intensely irritating." But I mean, lookit, it's not as if the book didn't tell you in its title that it was going to stagger, and it's not as if the tangled narrative?and you'd have to be fairly lowbrow to read the entire thing and miss this?isn't a strategy for conveying the way the author has spent his adult life staggering around and around that gaping hole mentioned above, that centrifugal double-tragedy.

At the dawn of the 21st century there's something?oh I don't know, can I call it shocking? at least wearying??about book reviewers who can get so upset with an author introducing a little Chaos into the form. If that's just pomo gimmickry I guess Kakutani doesn't think much of Harry Mathews either. Mathews is one of those late-20th-century fictional experimenters, along with Coover and Sukenick, et al., that generation first called "postmodern" in the 1960s and 70s. Dalkey Archive has gradually been releasing paperback reissues of his books over the last year or so?Tlooth, Cigarettes, the more recent Singular Pleasures, and now one of his best-liked, among those who like this sort of thing, The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium, originally published in 1971 (197 pages, $11.95).

Like all of Mathews' best books, it's a wacky, fantastical comedy written for readers who have the time and inclination and education and sense of humor and patience to spend with a "novel" that makes no fucking traditional-novel sense at all, that seems to go nowhere in a linear-narrative way, that's packed with stories told for the sheer enjoyment of telling them. (Think Tristram Shandy. The Decameron. The Arabian Nights. Moll Flanders. Alice in Wonderland. Ulysses... Man, it's not like Mathews and Coover were dropped here from the 31st century to startle us with the future of fiction.)

Ostensibly it's a series of letters between newlyweds: Zachary McCaltex, a librarian in Florida, and Twang, his "Pan-Namese" bride, who's in Italy. They're both looking for a map or other clues that may lead them to a sunken Spanish galleon that went down off the Florida coast with a king's ransom in treasure. The longer they search for clues to this elusive fortune, the farther they drift away from each other, through various mystery-novel-style murders and betrayals, and McCaltex loses his mind to boot.

This is just the frame tale, the excuse, you might say, for Mathews to play around with the form. As I've written before, one of the things I love about the experiments these guys were doing with the novel in the 70s was the sheer playfulness. It allows him, for instance, to spend the first half of the book joking around in Twang's ridiculous, gradually improving Pan-Namese/Italian/English pidjin:

You mild concil is to late. Went to Prince Voltic table and spake in a big public sound. I've say godbye duvaï tharaï for ever to that one! I say, first, Italy is a moundain of laï mud. Then Florenze is dhum pristwei vini, so, as a stingk of demon's horpse. The cultura is no thing, only for balance of pagments. I say those opere of Verdi and Pucci are uüax [vomit]. I say, Duccio was a pornograph and Fra Angelico is a jew. Then, his grand mother is a cooked egg, his mother a post-nose drip. At last I call him a hommunist and one hommosessuale...

It lets him invent Pan-Namese?and remember, this is 1971, so just the notion of "Pan-Nam" is funny?love poems with stanzas like:

Here's a peehock. O pee cock I'll chew each little-twig bone then I spit your plumes in to the breezes, the tiger sings this, the pecock al-ready have gone.

The couple's research into the background of the treasure leads them into a labyrinth of medieval mysticism and Renaissance papal intrigue that's like a goofy extended commentary on Holy Blood, Holy Grail. In Florida, McCaltex is initiated into a ludicrous secret society, the Knights of the Spindle, one part guardians of ancient truths, five parts Shriners; one of their funnier rituals is a surrealistic baseball game (a favorite Mathews device) against the Sovereigns of the Egyptian Temple, a silent brethren who go by secret nicknames like the Calcium Nut, the Locus Solus Kid, Christ Tracy, Mushnick the Second, Cortisone Moonface and Omnibus Hesed. Midway through the book, McCaltex is taken under the wing of a wealthy antiquarian and bibliophile, and visits his "domain, or at least that part of it devoted to scholarship":

We visited a room where students were repairing prints of old movies, among them an early lost Laurel; another where three ham sets busily whined?one operator announced excitedly, "I've got the Dahomey Die Schwärmer!"; a third where a battery of computers blinked away at translations of middle Bactrian; and at last the immense library, where many young people were at work. Mr. Hood explained their tasks as we circled the room. "...clear text of Boethius... fodder for my theoretical teas... Chomskian refutations... Here is the star of the show."

Indeed. That silly, dream-logic clutter of scholarly and cultural referents could be a description of the entire book, or of Mathews' entire oeuvre. You either enjoy roaming around in the pomo mess or you lose patience and go watch tv. "Bonzo and I have escaped Florence," Twang sighs in one of the book's funniest lines, shortly followed by one of the saddest: "We are spending the night in Lucca, charming renaissance city waiting for the next flood." That's language defying the obvious logic in service of a higher one. That was a key experiment of the time and, I think, given book reviewers out there yet who don't get it, still a relevant one.