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Loading... A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Geniusby Dave Eggers
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. Is there such a thing as a writer being too honest? Or a memoir being too good at remembering the details -- the every thought and feeling and the wallow of the most awful moments of one's life? That's the sense I got from A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. I am a fan of Dave Eggers, having read and loved What is the What (and glad I read it first!), so have been wanting to read this book -- greatly hallooed -- for a long time. It is a Pulitzer Prize finalist and many critics raved aboutt, but I had a very hard time finishing it. The rawness and the humor didn't quite blend. And really, even in a memoir, there are some things, as I told my children, that it's ok to do in private, but don't do them in public. Maybe that's just me, or maybe it's a generational thing. I had the feeling that perhaps Eggers' life experiences, like Sebold in her book Lucky and Harrison in her book Kiss, are so traumatic that the writer has to deal with them, get it on paper and to a degree out of the way, before being able to go on to write their really good work, which is on themes they construct rather than the things that have shaped and almost broken them. (  ) MarthaHuntley | Jan 4, 2010 |  Unaccustomed as I am to public fawning, I adored this book. It seemed to be concurrently arch and authentic; cerebral and emotional. The form was new to me, familiar as I am with postmodernism, but it was not the novelty that appealled. (  ) TheoClarke | Dec 17, 2009 | I liked it, despite the overstatement of the title (on both counts). I liked the frenetic pacing, the cathartic rambling peppered with the immediacy of random observations/musings interrupting but not derailing the train of thought, the postmodernist(?) arguments with the character John, and yes, even the solopsism. I'm sensing a pattern of fascination with fictionalized/amalgomized personal tragedy by Eggers, between this, What is the What, and his (newest?) book on Katrina victims, which I am interested to read now. (  )2  bfertig | Dec 3, 2009 | My love for this book is improbable at best. I usually can't stand this kind of style. In the summary above, Mary Park calls it memoir as metafiction. I call it McSweeneyism. I find it excruciating.So the fact that I love AHWOSG -- can still remember the first line, in fact -- perplexes me. I try not to dwell on it. Maybe you don't need a reason to fall in love, with a book or anything else. ( )1 catalogthis | Nov 24, 2009 | The most well written book in recent years. Memoir-ish in structure, full of all the emotions that make up living. ( ) jwcooper3 | Nov 15, 2009 | 
 ''A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius'' is a book of finite jest, which is why it succeeds so brilliantly. Eggers's most powerful prose is often his most straightforward, relying on old-fashioned truth telling for its punch.  Dave Eggers's new book, ''A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius,'' is part autobiography, part postmodern collage, a novelistic ''memoir-y kind of thing'' that tells the sad, awful, tragic story of how the author's mother and father died within weeks of each other and how he became a surrogate parent to his 8-year-old brother, and tells it with such style and hyperventilated, self-conscious energy, such coy, Lettermanesque shtick and such genuine, heartfelt emotion, that the story is at once funny, tender, annoying and, yes, heartbreaking -- an epic, in the end, not of woe, though there's plenty of that too, but an epic about family and how families fracture and fragment and somehow, through all the tumult and upset, manage to endure. 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. Eggers delivers a worthwhile story told in perfect pitch to the material. Eggers' seemingly flippant, but piercingly observant style, allows hilarity to lead the way in a very personal and revealing recounting of the loss of his parents.
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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.
All this self-consciousness could have become unbearably arch. It's a testament to Eggers's skill as a writer--and to the heartbreaking particulars of his story--that it doesn't. Currently the editor of the footnote-and-marginalia-intensive journal McSweeney's (the last issue featured an entire story by David Foster Wallace printed tinily on its spine), Eggers comes from the most media-saturated generation in history--so much so that he can't feel an emotion without the sense that it's already been felt for him. What may seem like postmodern noodling is really just Eggers writing about pain in the only honest way available to him. Oddly enough, the effect is one of complete sincerity, and--especially in its concluding pages--this memoir as metafiction is affecting beyond all rational explanation. --Mary Park
(retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:18 -0400)
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