A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

Amazon.com
Dave Eggers is a terrifically talented writer; don't hold his cleverness against him. What to make of a book called A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius: Based on a True Story? For starters, there's a good bit of staggering genius before you even get to the true story, including a preface, a list of "Rules and Suggestions for Enjoyment of This Book," and a 20-page acknowledgements section complete with special mail-in offer, flow chart of the book's themes, and a lovely pen-and-ink drawing of a stapler (helpfully labeled "Here is a drawing of a stapler:").

But on to the true story. At the age of 22, Eggers became both an orphan and a "single mother" when his parents died within five months of one another of unrelated cancers. In the ensuing sibling division of labor, Dave is appointed unofficial guardian of his 8-year-old brother, Christopher. The two live together in semi-squalor, decaying food and sports equipment scattered about, while Eggers worries obsessively about child-welfare authorities, molesting babysitters, and his own health. His child-rearing strategy swings between making his brother's upbringing manically fun and performing bizarre developmental experiments on him. (Case in point: his idea of suitable bedtime reading is John Hersey's Hiroshima.)

The book is also, perhaps less successfully, about being young and hip and out to conquer the world (in an ironic, media-savvy, Gen-X way, naturally). In the early '90s, Eggers was one of the founders of the very funny Might Magazine, and he spends a fair amount of time here on Might, the hipster culture of San Francisco's South Park, and his own efforts to get on to MTV's Real World. This sort of thing doesn't age very well--but then, Eggers knows that. There's no criticism you can come up with that he hasn't put into A.H.W.O.S.G. already. "The book thereafter is kind of uneven," he tells us regarding the contents after page 109, and while that's true, it's still uneven in a way that is funny and heartfelt and interesting.

FROM OUR EDITORS

The Barnes & Noble Review
It's an all-too-rare book that can be said to break new ground, but Dave Eggers's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius does just that. Rather than take its place in what is now a seemingly unending queue of memoirs by people whose lives have been altered by tragic events, tough times, and difficult lessons, Eggers's book starts a new line altogether, one that very few authors will be allowed to join.

Yes, Eggers lost both his parents to cancer within a matter of months when he was only 22, and yes, it is left to him (with the aid of his older sister and, to a lesser degree, his older brother) to raise his eight-year-old brother. Yes, he and Toph pick up and move from their Chicago-area hometown to the San Francisco Bay region (as though their lives had not already been seen enough disruption), where Eggers fashions for Toph a safe -- which is not to say traditional -- environment. But the reader who buys this book expecting a sort of "Party of Two" soap opera is bound to be disappointed. And those looking for a good cry would be well advised to look elsewhere, too.

Which is not to say that this work is not...well, heartbreaking. But Eggers avoids the bathos so often associated with the "I got it bad and that ain't good" school of memoir-writing. You'll laugh as often as you cry, perhaps more often, and even when Eggers does focus on the grieving and sense of loss he and his siblings naturally endured, his thoughtful, introspective approach avoids navel-gazing. He's as hard on himself as on anyone else (well, almost), and that frank self-assessment serves the book well.

Eggers's deft blend of outrageously amusing tales and implied social commentary is also winning. We follow his progress as he strives to be a part of the San Francisco cast of MTV's "Real World" (a goal he is more than a little conflicted about), as he and a small but intrepid group of friends with little combined experience and even less capital launch a magazine intended to change forever the world of periodical publishing, and even, on occasion, as he tries to get over on a young woman.

But it all works, and in a fashion quite unlike anything you've ever read before. You'll likely begin the book thinking the title an amusing and ironic overstatement, but by the time you've finished reading it, you might just decide, as I did, that it is instead an admirable example of truth in packaging.

--Brett Leveridge

ANNOTATION

Dave Eggers' memoir of bringing up his younger brother after his parent's death, has been shortlisted for the Guardian First Book Award, which aims to recognise and reward new writing across fiction and non-fiction.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Well, this was when Bill was sighing a lot. He had decided that after our parents died he just didn't want any more fighting between what was left of us. He was twenty-four, Beth was twenty-three, I was twenty-one, Toph was eight, and all of us were so tried already, from that winter. So when something world come up, any little thing, some bill to pay or decision to make, he would just sigh, his eyes tired, his mouth in a sorry kind of smile. But Beth and I...Jesus, we were fighting with everyone, anyone, each other, with strangers at bars, anywhere -- we were angry people wanting to exact revenge. We came to California and we wanted everything, would take what was ours, anything within reach. And I decided that little Toph and I, he with his backward hat and long hair, living together in our little house in Berkeley, would be world-destroyers. We inherited each other and, we felt, a responsibility to reinvent everything, to scoff and re-create and drive fast while singing loudly and pounding the windows. It was a hopeless sort of exhilaration, a kind of arrogance born of fatalism, I guess, of the feeling that if you could lose a couple of parents in a month, then basically anything could happen, at any time -- all bullets bear your name, all cars are there to crush you, any balcony could give way; more disaster seemed only logical. And then, as in Dorothy's dream, all these people I grew up with were there, too, some of them orphans also, most but not all of us believing that what we had been given was extraordinary, that it was time to tear or break down, ruin, remake, take and devour. This was San Francisco, you know, and everyone had some dumb idea -- I mean, wicca? -- and no one there would tell you yours was doomed. Thus the public nudity, and this ridiculous magazine, and the Real World tryout, all this need, most of it disguised by sneering, but all driven by a hyper-awareness of this window, I guess, a few years when your muscles are taut, coiled up and vibrating. But what to do with the energy? I mean, when we drive, Toph and I, and we drive past people, standing on top of all these hills, part of me wants to stop the car and turn up the radio and have us all dance in formation, and part of me wants to run them all over.

FROM THE CRITICS

James Poniewozik - Times

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genuis is a sad yet high-spirited story.

Joshua Klein - Onion AV Club

Memoirs are tricky for any author to tackle. Inherently narcissistic, the triumphs described are too often boastful and the tragedies too often exploitative. Dave Eggers knows this: The first 30 pages of his book--the preface, which Eggers tells impatient readers to skip--provide an incisive and hilarious dissection of the 300-plus fast pages that follow. It's clear from the elaborate pre-preface bibliographical information that this is no ordinary memoir. Rather, the (mostly) non-fictional A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius is a postmodern memoir in the mold of Laurence Sterne's fictional The Life And Opinions Of Tristram Shandy, a meta-narrative that turns in upon itself and tricks the reader almost every chance it gets. Eggers, one of the founders of the much-missed Might magazine, has seen enough death in his short life (including the faked murder of former child star Adam Rich) to fill such an experience-fueled endeavor, but the way he goes about doing it is what makes Staggering Genius work. When he was 21, both his parents died of cancer, and with his older brother out of the house and his sister in school, he was put in charge of his 8-year-old brother Toph. Instead of wallowing in guilt or depression, Eggers handles tragedy with sheer audacity, finding humor in the most dire situations and refusing to resort to self-pity. He and Toph live the perverse, parents-free fantasy many children fleetingly harbor, with Eggers sharing his bad habits even as he's forced to assume most of the responsibilities. The writing is never quite as clever or novel as in the virtuoso preface, but Eggers constantly finds ways to make even standard self-analysis interesting. At one point, a bedtime conversation with his younger brother morphs into a psychoanalytic session, with Toph suddenly wresting away the proxy-father-figure position and addressing Eggers with omniscient authority. Later, a casting call-back for The Real World (which actually happened) develops into a long confessional about suburban upbringing. The love of minutia and marginalia Eggers brought to Might makes even the most conventional prose inventive; ironically, this includes the relatively rote chronology of the magazine's creation. While Staggering Genius is admittedly uneven, that's paradoxically part of its unpredictable charm: Eggers would never go about things the standard way, and the book--at times both heartbreaking and genius--ably reflects his idiosyncratic, hyper-casual, pop-culture-saturated worldview.

Publishers Weekly

Literary self-consciousness and technical invention mix unexpectedly in this engaging memoir by Eggers, editor of the literary magazine McSweeney's and the creator of a satiric 'zine called Might, who subverts the conventions of the memoir by questioning his memory, motivations and interpretations so thoroughly that the form itself becomes comic. Despite the layers of ironic hesitation, the reader soon discerns that the emotions informing the book are raw and, more importantly, authentic. After presenting a self-effacing set of "Rules and Suggestions for the Enjoyment of this Book" ("Actually, you might want to skip much of the middle, namely pages 209-301") and an extended, hilarious set of acknowledgments (which include an itemized account of his gross and net book advance), Eggers describes his parents' horrific deaths from cancer within a few weeks of each other during his senior year of college, and his decision to move with his eight year-old brother, Toph, from the suburbs of Chicago to Berkeley, near where his sister, Beth, lives. In California, he manages to care for Toph, work at various jobs, found Might, and even take a star turn on MTV's The Real World. While his is an amazing story, Eggers, now 29, mainly focuses on the ethics of the memoir and of his behavior--his desire to be loved because he is an orphan and admired for caring for his brother versus his fear that he is attempting to profit from his terrible experiences and that he is only sharing his pain in an attempt to dilute it. Though the book is marred by its ending--an unsuccessful parody of teenage rage against the cruel world--it will still delight admirers of structural experimentation and Gen-Xers alike. Agent, Elyse Cheney, Sanford Greenberger Assoc.; 7-city author tour. (Feb.) Copyright 1999 Cahners Business Information.

KLIATT

This fierce, funny memoir lives up to its tongue-in-cheek title. When Eggers was a senior in college, his parents both died of cancer, only five weeks apart, and he found that he had inherited his eight-year-old brother. He and young Toph (short for Christopher) leave Chicago for Berkley, California, to live near older siblings, but Eggers is the one who serves as chief surrogate parent. The two set up a slovenly bachelor household together, and Eggers attempts to start a career while taking care of his brother, undertaking both endeavors in a rather haphazard but energetic and deeply felt manner. The brothers play Frisbee endlessly and practice sock sliding in their various abodes, eating dishes like "The Mexican-Italian War" (ground beef sautéed in spaghetti sauce, served with tortillas), arriving late to everything but somehow, just barely, keeping it together. The first half of the book, relating the death of Eggers' mother and the move west, is particularly powerful. Wild black humor pops up at the oddest points, however, and Eggers is nothing if not self-conscious, as he keeps pointing out to the reader. Eggers and some friends started a magazine named Might, and much of the second half of the book has to do with keeping this venture afloat. The paperback edition includes a lengthy new appendix, "Mistakes We Knew We Were Making," correcting and annotating parts of the text, and the preface and acknowledgements sections—and even the information on the verso page—are quirky and funny. Eggers is a talented writer, and the story of his patched-together family and his forays into magazine publishing are well worth reading, but strap yourself in for a wild ride. Adultlanguage. KLIATT Codes: SA—Recommended for senior high school students, advanced students, and adults. 2001 (orig. 2000), Random House/Vintage, 544p, 21cm, 00-043832, $14.00. Ages 16 to adult. Reviewer: Paula Rohrlick; May 2001 (Vol. 35 No. 3)

Library Journal