Shelf Life — Scott Dickensheets: Eggers looks at self, Yeah Whatever Generation

Friday, Feb. 11, 2000 | 10:04 a.m.

Scott Dickensheets' books and magazines column appears Fridays. Reach him at dickens@vegas.com or 990-2446.

The personal memoir is an inherently dubious literary enterprise. Unless the author is an obssessive taker of notes on his life -- or has a well-indexed photographic memory -- there's obviously some fudging going on. Imaginative license is taken as scenes and dialogue and details are "reconstructed"; the author, in some cases, may attach a coy note admitting as much, but then goes about his confessional business hoping you didn't notice.

Now along comes Dave Eggers' first book, "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" (Simon and Schuster, $23), which is, fundamentally, a memoir at odds with its form -- an anti-memoir. That sense of the story quarrelling with the way it's told begins on the cover, with the subtitle: "A memoir, based on a true story."

The narrative itself is pretty straightforward: Eggers' parents both die of cancer, within weeks of each other; Eggers, now surrogate parent to his brother, 8-year-old Toph, moves to San Francisco, where he experiences various Gen Xical adventures with his brother and zany peer group, including the founding of a short-lived but lamented satrical magazine, Might.

Then he gives the whole tale the Eggers Treatment. Readers with photographic memories or carefully indexed back issues of Shelf Life will remember Eggers for his appearance in this space early last year, discussing his fledgling literary quarterly, McSweeney's. If you heeded that column's urgent subtext -- check this sucker out! -- you have some idea what to expect from this book.

Filligree.

Lots and lots of creatively applied filligree. Eggers has a prodigious talent for geeking up a text with every sort of gimmick and bent errata imaginable -- notes, charts, asides, typographical whimsy, power windows and door locks, custom wheels ...

Consider that before you get to Page 1 of the actual story, there are 17 pages of small type: "Rules and Suggestions for Enjoyment of this Book" (after page 109, rule/suggestion No. 6 informs us, "the book thereafter is kind of uneven") and a lengthy acknowledgements section in which, among many, many other things, Eggers A.) admits to the necessity of reconstructing scenes and dialogue; B.) offers, to readers uncomfortable with A, to send a computer disc containing the book recast as a work of fiction; and C.) presents a drawing of a stapler.

The story itself is rendered in a style best described as Slacker Baroque: Writing about his mother's cancer surgery, he notes,

"At that point, there wasn't a lot left to remove -- they had already taken out (I would use the medical terms here if I knew them) the rest of it about a year before. Then they tied the (something) to the (something) ..."

The calculated indistinctness within those brackets, their "yeah, whatever" quality, are a large part of Egger's covert mission, which is to tell his tale while subverting the conventions of the "crisis memoir" genre. Although the Dave Eggers in the story is not above exploiting his tragic situation (a little) for sympathy purposes, the Dave Eggers telling the story absolutely refuses to wring tears from it. In fact, he goes to great confessionary length to make himself look as unsympathetic as possible, even clueing us in (very briefly) as to his masturbatory habits.

Meanwhile, he continually undermines the book's pretense of reality, notably in such scenes as a bedside talk with Toph in their frat-boy-messy Bay Area apartment. Shortly into their conversation about their life together, you become aware that Eggers the storyteller has hijacked the scene and is now using Toph's half of the chat to interrogate his own motives in writing this book, explicating his sense of guilt and fear and the moral authority that comes from surviving tragedy.

It's a stunning and surreal set piece, throwing open the curtains that normally shroud such authorial machinery. He does it again later, when describing his attempt to join the cast of MTV's "The Real World." What appears at first to be a videotaped audition interview with a "Real World" producer is in fact Eggers quizzing himself once more, using this Q and A to free-associate about life, death, his childhood and his role as pseudo dad.

Such literary doodads are fun and illuminating -- as is Egger's style, which frequently borders on the stream-of-consciousness, always following some confident assertion with immediate mental backpedaling, no, no, no -- but the heart of the book is the quasi father-son relationship between the brothers.

It's a surprisingly sweet and earnest tale, a welcome bit of sincerity from the Yeah Whatever Generation. Dave and Toph are two peas in their messy pod, reveling in their parentless freedom as a way of easing the pain of their loss. There are many touching scenes, including one in which Eggers describes the guilt and fear he feels when leaving little brother with a baby sitter for a night out:

"Then, at the moment I am turning the corner, I become convinced, in a flash of pure truth-seeing -- it happens every time I leave him anywhere -- that Toph will be killed. Of course. The baby-sitter was acting peculiar ... His eyes had plans."

Recounting his subsequent evening on the town, Eggers deftly intercuts descriptions of San Francisco's hip young demimonde with passages detailing the imaginary atrocities the baby sitter is visiting on Toph ("rope, wax"). All the while he's outraged that desultory nightlife chit-chat with his friends is all he gets from such evenings in return for the risk of leaving Toph.

"This is obscene," he scoffs. "How dare we be standing around, talking about nothing, not running in one huge mass of people, running at something, something huge, and knocking it over?"

As always, he worries that every parenting misstep will result in his ruined little brother growing up to skin neighborhood cats and join survivalist cults. Just like a real parent.

The book has faults. The brothers' relationship at times seems modeled on a sitcom premise, with Toph as the preternaturally wise boy, Dave the comically incompetent guardian. And the story is a bit uneven after Page 109 -- Eggers is 21 as the story begins, and while he has done a lot in his life, it's not quite enough to fill a 374-page memoir, no matter how fancifully presented. So it doesn't quite live up to its grandiose and ironic title, but it makes a game try. It's a book you should read, and soon. Definetly a (something) work of staggering (something).

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