Your Fathers, Where Are They? And the Prophets, Do They Live Forever?

Thomas, a young man desperate for answers, kidnaps an old acquaintance, a man who now has a successful career as an astronaut, in an attempt to understand what’s wrong with the world today. The answers he receives only create more questions and set off a cycle of more kidnappings.

Don’t be mislead by the title, this is not a story about religion, although there is a little political ranting. And don’t be put off by the format either. The book is written entirely in dialog, but it works – partly because it’s a short, entertaining book, and partly because the author does such a wonderful job conveying the characters and surroundings without the use of descriptive narrative. It’s thought-provoking, witty and brilliantly show more constructed; to say more about the plot would ruin the suspense of discovery as the layers of the story unfold.

Audio production:
Read by an ensemble cast: MacLeod Andrews with Mark Deakins, Michelle Gonzalez, John H. Mayer, Kate McGregor-Stewart, Rebecca Lowman, Bruce Turk, and Marc Cashman. The audio production was fantastic. One of my favorites this year. I was so engaged in the dialog that I listened for the entire five-plus hours without stopping. It was performed like a play with each narrator taking on a different character with a distinct voice and range of emotions. The audio version is highly recommended to all listeners. show less

Eggers seems to want to solve all, or most, of the ills of modern society with this short novel consisting entirely of dialogue and little in the way of plot, setting or action. The novel suffers from too much ambition and little follow through on the issues raised. Thomas is a young man who is disaffected but does not have clear ideas about why that might be. He seeks enlightenment by kidnapping various people and imprisoning them in a defunct army installation. Thomas seems naive and spoiled--too quick to blame others for his own failings. He has taken little initiative to achieve anything in his life or address the problems with society he perceives, while the people he captures have had substantial successes in their lives. Thomas show more sets out to learn by interrogating his captives about issues but ends up arguing with them and demonstrating that his mind is made up about most things or that he is too easily manipulated; he really does not want to hear what they have to say. Thomas wants to achieve something but is ill equipped to define what that might be and thus wants someone else to articulate it for him. He seems to think that if someone would set some goals for him, he would then be able readily to achieve them. He does not seem to recognize that his captives have been able to articulate their own goals and have achieved them through hard work. With Thomas, Eggers seems to be saying that a central problem for many in our society is a failure to articulate goals and a specious expectation that if this were done, it would somehow lead to success requiring little effort. show less

I’m not sure the claim of formal daring here is warranted. Rather the novel feels like an application of one of the oldest surviving forms of art to a modern setting, concealed by form. It seems like a transposition of Greek drama to the format of the novel; a man who’s reached a crisis point confronting the gods of his life; the astronaut symbolising heroism and hope; the Vietnam vet congressman; teacher; mother; cop; administrator and a woman. Each symbolises some aspect of the system of American life the lead character grew up in but can’t quite connect to. As such there’s no real action to the book at all, just a series of conversations that reflect how the country’s changed around the protagonist and how these people and show more aspects have proven such a disappointment to him. Eggers provides a jigsaw puzzle of what’s driven the narrator to the actions he takes, why he arrives at the position where he needs to have these conversations.

As such the protagonist’s simply an avatar for the philosophical questions Eggers is looking to explore here; how we lose faith as we get older and how a generation with no great project to inspire it copes with life. Eggers, creditably, doesn’t look to provide easy answers but seeks to explore the questions and their ramifications. The book’s reluctance to fully answer the questions it poses means it’s perhaps more awkward than Eggers’s previous works, and with the satirical gauze of The Circle removed, a little more disturbing in what it implies. It certainly won’t be to everyone’s tastes but an author of Eggers’s stature trying something different should be applauded and encouraged. show less

i have a category for "worlds i did not want to leave," by which I mean I loved being there, in the place the author created. In this case, though, I mean, I couldn't wait to leave and i didn't want to leave all at once. Thomas brings a hostage to an abandoned military base: he has questions; he's trying to understand why life sucks. You could call it a page turner or talk about the incredibly skillfull handling of rising tension, nail-biting suspense, but that's not the magic. Told entirely in dialogue, yet Eggers creates characters and places so vivid you will never forget them.

This is a short novel, but my review is long because it raises many questions for the reader, although I don’t think it definitively resolved any of them at the end. I gave the book four stars because I simply could not stop listening to it. The readers were all superb, and the storyline kept me completely rapt. The device of using only dialogue between the characters kept me spellbound waiting for one conversation to end and another to begin. The only negative was that although I kept waiting for the conversations to reveal some monumental hidden goal, there never seemed to be any great disclosure. I was never quite sure whether or not Thomas’s main objective was to discover why his friend was killed or to discover why he, Thomas, show more was a complete failure. Was he trying to discover who was to blame for his shortcomings and the shortcomings of those like him? There was a point made that there are many more out there, just like him, lost souls searching for something, and most often trying to find it in the wrong way. This was a confused and angry, very disappointed, young man with a loose hold on reality. He was obviously, loosely wound, and the reader is reminded of that fact by several characters as the dialogue plays itself out.
Thomas kidnaps several people over the course of a few days. The victims range from a young man he idolized when he was at school, an astronaut with no shuttle to fly because the space program ended just after his long years of preparing for it, to a policeman who winds up coincidentally complicit in the death of his friend Don Banh, an Amerasian who was shot by police after behaving bizarrely, to a mother whom he resents for her former addiction which impacted his life negatively, to a disabled congressman who lost limbs during the Viet Nam War in an unfortunate accident, a man who had been in a motorcade car with Thomas and Don when they were students being honored, to a hospital administrator that handled the paper work for his injured and later deceased friend, whom he thought was complicit in his death because of the way the paperwork was handled, and finally to a love interest he discovers while walking on the beach. Because it is revealed that most of the characters are serendipitously connected in some way to his past and contributed to his psychological problems, it appears a bit contrived, however, making them strangers at first, then slowly revealing their connection later, for me to discover, served to grip my attention.
Thomas begins his narrative with the astronaut. The dynamics between the kidnapper and the captor is different with each victim. Their relationship, as it plays out, reveals a great deal about each of their backgrounds and how they are somehow complicit in the injustices he perceives. Thomas is searching for answers, some of which he obtains and some of which he has already predetermined in his mind, and he is really just trying to make his victims concur with his own conclusions.
He shackled each of his captives to a post, each in a separate room in a building on an abandoned military base, in a location far from a city. Several characters, coincidentally, are connected to the base in their past. Each one had been chloroformed and transported there without much memory of anything but the moment they first saw the kidnapper who looked so ordinary, they did not feel threatened. The only one who felt the slightest concern was Sarah, the love interest who was previously unrelated to him in any way. Thomas told each captive that his objective was to ask questions and it was their duty to respond honestly or he had weapons at his disposal to convince them to answer. He warned that he would taser them or mace them or do anything else he had to do to obtain their cooperation. He convinced himself that everything that played out over the few days was fated. He was somehow being guided and watched over by a higher force. He believed that he would get away with this crime. He had it all planned out and his plan was working like a charm.
This is a dark story, in many ways. Thomas has no redeeming features. He is out of touch with reality and his memory of events is different than those who experienced them with him. He denies the incidents that caused him pain and refuses to accept his own responsibility for his actions or to assume any guilt. He is searching for the reason he has been unsuccessful in his life, but he ignores the obvious reason, he has not tried hard enough, rather he has blamed everyone and everything else for his lack of accomplishment and satisfaction. To Thomas, the overriding theme is that there should be a higher power providing him with some purpose, some goal. He believes that all those young people out there in the world like him, those misfits who cause all the problems and all the crimes, should be told what to do by the government, to prevent them from causing all the troubles in the world. He wonders many times why the government didn’t just give them all a project to do, something to occupy them, to inspire them to better things. He does not believe in self-reliance or in his own responsibility to achieve. Because he is unstable, mentally, he thinks that what he has accomplished by kidnapping all of these people, to find answers, to discover clues to his misery, is finally his greatest achievement.
Thomas was concerned about the waste of money and lives lost in fighting wars that cost billions and accomplished little? He wondered, wouldn’t it be better to use that money for better purposes, like the space program, instead of having to hitch a ride with the Russians? Why create dreams for people to strive toward and then remove the opportunity after they worked so hard to achieve their goal? What of the falsified records that somehow find their way into police investigations, the cover-ups in other events? Should policemen try to find out more about their victims before they react to them or would that unnecessarily endanger their own lives, making them victims, although it prevented the deaths of potential unarmed criminals? Although his concerns were genuine, he failed to consider all of the details and, thus, drew false conclusions about the events that troubled him. Thomas had the personality of a bully on the one hand and an innocent child on the other; he was never made whole.
At times, I found the story infuriating. Thomas made me want to scream, to haul off and shake some sense into him. Essentially, I felt the same constraint as the victims. I was helpless to do anything to stop him. Thomas was arrogant and supercilious, condescending and overconfident, even as he accused his victims of being rude and condescending to him, which caused him to threaten them with the very bodily harm he promised not to inflict. He was often guilty of the same crimes he accused everyone else of committing. His grasp of reality was thin, his memory was skewed and because the other character’s dialogue sometimes contradicted his version of events, I was not sure who was remembering accurately, at times.
Eggers did not present a realistic situation regarding the needs of the victims. They all seemed to do fairly well, although they had limited food, drink, medications, mobility or toilet facilities, and were of varied age and needs. He made Thomas a character that seemed to be concerned for the victim’s welfare, reassuring each that he was not going to harm them and would eventually let them go as soon as he got all the answers to his questions, but over the period of about three days, they were largely ignored or threatened. The captives soon acquiesced to their situation and ceased resisting, trying to outwit the psychologically damaged man with their own wits, often setting unfortunate consequences in motion.
Eggers attacks the political system, but I was not sure of his message. Was he for or against the system? Did he believe that Thomas was the one being wronged, that Thomas was simply a victim of circumstances, of his environment and his upbringing? Was his failure a societal failure or his own? Was he trying to show that disturbed people were running amok in a society that reveres men of honor and power regardless of the immoral way they behave and puts valuable resources in the wrong places so the situation perpetuates itself? After all was said and done, I felt that the message was that the monkeys were running the zoo, they came in all shapes and sizes, and no powers that be existed that were able to contain them or make them suitable for civilized society. Even the so-called normal citizens were guilty of some form of bad behavior, either turning a blind eye to an injustice or by actually being complicit in its cover-up.
In the end, I believe Eggers was trying to force the reader to wonder whose fault it is when someone fails, to think about what is wrong with the system and perhaps try to fix it, but I don’t feel the message came through loud and clear. Is it the government’s responsibility to provide something for everyone to enable them to succeed, even when they repeatedly fail, perhaps for lack of making the effort, or is it the person’s responsibility to try harder to succeed when provided with the opportunity? The issues brought up were never really resolved in any way, and the conclusion was a bit of a cliff-hanger with no final resolution.
Was the ultimate message that we all witness the same events differently and never truly know each other? Was the message that we all needed to get to know each other and our needs more intimately? Does Thomas ever realize that all of his victims had mountains to climb, problems to surmount, which they did, while he complained? They did not look for excuses as he did, but worked to solve their problems. Did he ever understand the reason for his failure was himself and no one else, no other system, no other influence? I did not really know at the end. Was the ultimate message that the situation is hopeless because we continue to keep the status quo in all things? I sure hope not. show less

Here's the thing: I love Dave Eggers. I love how he plays around with form and content and perception. Similarly, I loved the content of Your Fathers...
But here's the other thing. This isn't a novel. I really liked it for what it was, all dialogue, no descriptions, having to use context clues at points to figure out who is talking. But it's not a novel. It's a play.
That being said, it was still great, like I expect from Dave Eggers. Super quick read, too. Not 24 hours later and it's done.

I've heard of Eggers' memoir but haven't read it or anything else by him yet. I picked this up at a used book store because the title was cool and based on a quick skim the dialogue only format seemed interesting and different from anything I'd ever read.
It was kind of cool and held my interest for a few chapters, but for me, it just seemed less tight as it went on. it was still compelling enough that I finished most of it in one sitting but I don't think I liked it exactly? but maybe that's the point? I think there were some interesting philosophical points/social commentary throughout but not enough to draw it out that long. the police officer one in particular seemed, idk heavy handed? maybe I just don't sympathize enough with show more straight white men?
the congressman and the astronaut parts were my favorite, it was admittedly satisfying to see him slowly piece together the story of what happened to his friend and get to make everyone who played a role in it admit to their guilt and the guilt of the system they work for, and it was definitely unlike anything I'd read before which is why I bought it in the first place so two stars ig. show less