a brainbreaking work of staggering procrastination

dave eggers, judith crist, over-inflated egos

I edited this in literally ten (10) minutes. It's not like J.C. knows who Eggers is anyway. And it's not like I care!


Manic-depressive, narcissistic and messy as hell: Dave Eggers, the author of the memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius (’01), has used this self-important style consistently throughout his different works, though it appears in varying degrees of intensity, in proportion to the length of his stories; the longer they get, the more he digs in, until he’s burrowing under your skin and scratching his name in the bone.
Eggers is always either soaring or wallowing. It’s exhausting, all this bouncing between extremes with little if anything in between; it’s just like a real life manic-depressive friend off their meds, needy and cloying. Its his own brand of what some critics have coined “hyperactive realism”: He loves and lives life to its fullest, from hunger and desire to glorious athleticism and physical movement to his over-detailed and often beautiful physical descriptions.
He chews over the beauty of life in long passages saturated in color and sensation. Everything is warm or cold, loud or quiet, “sad and sickly or glamorous and new” (AHWOSG). Everything is intense and there is little, if any, middle ground. One moment he’s sure that he and his brother Toph could escape from their car were they to careen off a cliff on Highway 1, and the next he can’t leave Toph home alone without being obsessed with visions of his brother’s death.

Out the door, down the steps and into the car and as I’m backing out of the driveway there is the usual euphoria –
Free!
– which pretty much overtakes me. Often I laugh out loud, giggle, bang the steering wheel a few times, grinning, put the right tape in the stereo – This time lasts for ten, twelve seconds. Then, at the moment that I am turning the corner, I become convinced, in a flash of pure truth-seeing –it happens every time – that Toph will be killed. (AHWOSG)

Eggers starts this scene off proud of himself for getting out of the house, and ends up fantasizing about all the gory details of Toph’s death (“handcuffs, floorboards, clown suits, leather, videotape, duct tape, knives, bathtubs, refrigerators”) and wallowing in his guilt and self-loathing.
Eggers’ protracted thoughts on death and violence are just as obsessive in their language and extremity as his happier visions. In one of the stories from his collection How We Are Hungry (’05), he describes the short life of a somewhat maniacal dog. This is how the fast dog introduces himself to the reader:

Oh I’m a fast dog. I’m fast-fast. It’s true and I love being fast I admit it I love it. You know fast dogs. Dogs that just run by and you say, Damn! That’s a fast dog! Well that’s me. A fast dog. I’m a fast fast dog. Hooooo! Hoooooooo!

This story is titled After I was Thrown in the River and Before I Drowned, and in the end, the loveable, arrogant fast fast dog dies in this river, dirty and alone.
Death lurks from the beginning of Eggers’ first novel, You Shall Know Our Velocity! (’03): on the very first page, the reader is told that the principal character Will is already dead. In one of Will’s post-mortem flashbacks, he, Hand and Jack, the main Velocity! Characters, are riding high after a successful junior high school dance, complete with making out and light petting. To celebrate, they go to a farm, douse a cow in gasoline and burn it alive “with total detachment.” Fifteen years later, Will is still consumed by his guilt over the dead cow. Sometimes this earnest brooding can be amusing, such as the first couple times Eggers fantasizes about his brother’s death (not the second dozen) but it usually just stumbles along, puffed up and unwieldy.
Eggers and his narrators speak of this desire and depression directly to the reader. “Please look. Can you see us? Can you see us, in our little red car?” he pleads with his reader (AHWOSG). Can you see him? Do you feel sorry for him yet? And do you like the book? He’s writing it for you, you know.
Eggers’ work isn’t intolerable without exception. In his short story The Only Meaning of the Oil-Wet Water, Eggers periodically interrupts the story to humorously deconstruct his work for the reader, in “There is almost no sadness in this story,” “This story is not about Pilar and Hand falling in love,” and “The horses had no symbolic value” – there’s just a few too many of these proclamations. In You Shall Know Our Velocity!, Hand explains to the reader that “on the surface this story is ludicrous and all of its terms are absurd.” And if you were wondering, as Eggers is sure you were, “the pig symbolizes nothing,” just like those horses.
Eggers’ dialogue often feels authentic, and his quirky metaphors and similes can be charming, such as when he and Toph “lose weeks like buttons, like pencils” (AHWOSG). These are diamonds in the very rough, and partly redeem the otherwise rambling, self-important and affected. Most of Eggers’ writing feels like a messy notebook that hasn’t been edited or even proofread. This aesthetic can be great in small doses, but it’s difficult to not get sick of it after a while, the constant ups and downs, the narcissism, the need to be innovative and new, even if it means using cheap and easy gimmicks. These tricks might compelling if they were one in a dozen pages, but Eggers over salts his writing until it’s bloated with tricks – drawings, diagrams (AHWOSG), photographs and scanned notes (Velocity!). They’re not incorporated enough to sustain interest beyond their novelty, but they cloud and distract from Eggers’ good moments. Eggers would be wise to work shorter, and have the guts to edit his stream of self-conscious down to its best.