Plenty of clever people have written about A.H.W.O.S.G., but Eggers himself may have done it best with the preface, acknowledgements, and even the title of his book. It all portends a memoir that is sad, funny, smart, and honest. He shrewdly pre-empts criticism about his self-obsession by professing to be self-conscious about it – a kind of meta-awareness that’s somehow more appealing. It’s clear before the book begins that he’s got that Gen X hipster axe to wield for sarcastic, irreverent purposes. Since he playfully/helpfully includes a key to the book’s metaphors in the preface, I thought I’d explain that my use of “axe” is meant as something to grind and also as something to swing as he hacks his way through the bonds of literary convention.

The story itself is about how he, as a young twenty-something, had to face the death of both parents within a few months of each other and then raise his 8-year-old brother. He’s a very protective stand-in, but not a conventional one. At times he’s mature and mindful, and at other times the slacker dude persona wins out. This much is clear, though – he truly likes his little brother.

Eggers’ other storyline – how he and some friends published a humor magazine for their own demographic – showed him to be inventive and edgy in a fittingly self-indulgent way. He played with a few devices to dig deeper into his own psyche, too. These revelations (by way of other people who had somehow managed to see his soul) were risky from a writing perspective, but worked pretty well I thought. It was like creating a Dr. Melfi to interpret Tony Soprano, but without the bother of making it realistic.

When it was all said and done, I liked the book. I’m not entirely sure I’d like Eggers himself, though, in large part because I don’t think he'd like many of us. There were times when he might have taken his dark honesty and caustic wit a little too far.

I hadn't planned to review David Eggers's "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" until Yvonne, an editor here in national news, pointed out a flattering author profile in The Boston Globe that referred to an even more flattering review by Michiko Kakutani, a critic at the Globe's parent company, The New York Times.

Ms. Kakutani has won a Pulitzer Prize, and so her praise should not to be taken lightly, except by other people who have won Pulitzer Prizes, unlike this reviewer, who desperately wants to win a Pulitzer Prize, but will continue referring to the prize committee with disdain until such time as he does.

There are so many reasons to dislike this super-hip, self-consciously ironic autobiography that it's something of a disappointment to report how wonderful it is.

One would think that after David Foster Wallace's infinite "Infinite Jest," or John Barth's unreadably sophisticated stories, or even Vladimir Nabokov's experiments,1 there wouldn't be much left for this kind of literary trickster to do.

What saves this book, which I found a heartbreaking work of staggering genius, is not the linguistic pranks (which are often very, very funny), but the tender story of Eggers's desperate love for his eight-year-old brother after the death of their parents.2 I can't think of anyone who captures the delight and terror of parenthood as well as Eggers does here. (Readers who can, should send their entries on a white index card to The Monitor, One Norway St., Boston, MA 02115. The winner will be announced in this space March 15.)3

At an age when most young men are finishing college and thinking about their tans, Eggers must choose a good school for little Toph, get him to eat something besides Freetos, and find the lizard in his bedroom. "Each day," he writes, "feels like some fantastic trick - an escape from the jaws of death, the hiding of the Statue of Liberty."

Squeezed in that parental vice of having to justify rare moments of relaxation against the infinite responsibilities of raising a child, Eggers can barely talk to his friends without being haunted by visions of the psychotic babysitter torturing Toph back at the house.4

In the rich, frenetic new world of Berkeley, Calif., Eggers and his friends start up a wickedly irreverent magazine called Might for the twentysomething set. Money is all around them, but frustratingly elusive. They court a variety of wealthy young people and struggle earnestly "to articulate the fact that we wanted to be successful without being seen as successful-successful, wanted to keep doing what we were doing, with the option of opting out if we ever got bored, wanted to conquer the world in a way that no one would be able to tell that's what we wanted, trying not to let on how tired we all were, how unsure we were that we really wanted to do any of this anymore."

Appropriately, a big chunk of the book also describes Eggers's attempt to get a part on MTV's "Real World." The faux-reality show about a group of real young people acting as though they're not really being filmed is a perfect venue for an autobiographer who's constantly watching his readers watch him watching himself.5 (Eggers is currently on a nationwide publicity tour claiming he doesn't like all this attention.)

Of course, his book isn't for everyone (people who don't speak English will find it particularly oblique), but this may be the bridge from the Age of Irony to Some Other As Yet Unnamed Age that we've been waiting for.

* Ron Charles is the Monitor's book editor.6

1 I have not actually read these works, but I was intimidated by people who referred to them in grad school.

2 Beware: The first chapter, which describes their deaths from cancer, is detailed and gruesome.

3 The Monitor disavows any connection to this unauthorized contest. All entries will be returned unopened.

4 Note to my babysitter: Yes, that video camera is on. Do not touch it till we return.

5 I can see you rereading that tortured sentence.

6 Please clean out your desk before leaving today. - David Cook, editor in chief

http://www.csmonitor.com/2000/0302/p2...

The arch tone of the title and the wit of the preface may blind readers to the real wonder of Egger's book: he's telling the truth. In a world of air quotes and the constant misuse of the word "ironic", Eggers is trying very hard to tell a difficult story. He writes of the death of his parents in the most unflattering terms, without the soft focus and belabored sentiment our culture has lead us to expect. The slow death of someone you love is sometimes horrible, and this story never denies that, or the way your mind escapes from that horror and focuses on trivia. While the writing may be self-conscious, it isn't pretending to be anything else, and the wonder is that Eggers is willing to accept everything that comes into his head, regardless of whether it seems appropriate. No other book has so honestly touched me since the death of my father, or more accurately captured what his dying meant to me.

Several reviewers have written of the way the book loses focus after the first section, but to me that is one of its strengths. In fiction the protagonist doesn't wander around pointlessly, especially not after a significant event like the death of a parent, but in the real world lives are untidy. As a new parent I appreciated the author's experimental attitude toward child rearing as well as his attempt to create a fascinating life for himself. The quality of the writing made his business woes, his menus, and his Frisbee obsession equally fascinating. The memoirs of a man who isn't afraid to show his own warts, but is touchingly considerate of those closest to him, this is a kind and engaging book.

This book has not aged well.

I read it when it first came out, somewhere around 2000, and I remember loving its high-energy sentences and how Eggers shared his emotions about losing both his parents to cancer and taking guardianship of his youngest brother, Toph (short for Christopher). I was in my 20s back then, and I could relate to the author's angst about life, his career, his relationships, blah blah blah.

Fourteen years later, I picked it up again as a book club assignment. My reaction this time was almost the total opposite: I hated the author and how narcissistic he was, I thought his writing was pretentious and too clever by half, and the book was SO LONG and tedious that it needed a better editor. I'm talking about someone who would slash and burn more than 200 pages from this sucker. This person should have the guts to tell Eggers, “Dude, not every word you think needs to be written down. Maybe you should self-censor.”

Some parts I would cut are the longwinded preface and acknowledgments (DO NOT READ! It is a waste of time and paper!), and also the unnecessary addendum to the paperback, called "Mistakes We Knew We Were Making." All of that junk is Eggers trying to be funny about his writing process and his wild and crazy group of friends in San Francisco, but it just comes across as annoying. (And when you get to his interview for MTV’s Real World, skip ahead 20 pages. It’s just him spewing nonsense.)

What was interesting about rereading this book (now that I am older and slightly wiser) was noticing how much Eggers imitated David Foster Wallace's writing. It's a meandering and detail-driven style that one either loves or hates, so if you are a fan of DFW’s fiction, you might like this book more than I did.

Dave, Dave, Dave, Dave. What can I say? I can sort of remember picking up this book in a bookstore somewhere and reading the first few pages… now, not the first few pages of the story, but I’m talking about the copyright page. Freaking Dave Eggers is writing his novel starting with the copyright page? Wild man, wild man!
So, I read it. I liked it. It was this nonstop stream of consciousness kind of thing, which I found a bit comforting, cause that’s how I think. I mean, of course that’s how I think, cause my mind will just sometimes ramble on and on and on about nothing in particular. It could be about donuts that my mind is thinking about, it could be about women. Maybe it’s about basketball. I miss Michael Jordan. 1992 was the year they first made the Dream Team for the U.S. Basketball Olympic team. Do you remember all 12 members? I do. Swear to God I’m not looking this up: Magic Johnson, Larry Bird, Michael Jordan, Scottie Pippen, John Stockton, Karl Malone, Charles Barkley, David Robinson, Clyde Drexler, Chris Mullins, Patrick Ewing, and the one college player Duke’s very own Christian Lattner (I don’t know how to spell his name… okay, I looked it up- it’s Laettner) And really what ever happened to that guy? How did he get on the dream team? One shot? He hit the winning shot in an NCAA basketball tournament. That’s it. That’s all he ever did. Shaq O’neill was waiting in the wings. Hell Isaiah Thomas could have been that last player, but apparently Michael Jordan didn’t want Isaiah on the team. Who knows if that rumor is true? Certainly not me.
Anyway, a friend of mine read the book and she didn’t like it so much. Which almost made me question how I felt about the book, but then I thought, “No, stay with your belief system man! Don’t let someone else’s opinion sway you.” But that did get me to thinking if there were books that men preferred over women, and vice versa. I don’t mean sexist misogynistic type books, but I’m talking the writing style specifically. Is there a cadence to writing that men prefer? Is there a cadence that women prefer? Maybe someone should write a thesis about that. I know it’s not going to be me. I didn’t major in psychology, though looking back I wish I would have because there were so many cute girls in the psychology department.
In conclusion, I enjoyed this book.

I hated loved was totally frustrated by was sucked into couldn't stand couldn't put down dreaded picking up wanted to like was attacked by wanted to burn finished this book.

Alternative title: A Self-Indulgent Work of Festering Genius

The worst book I couldn't put down; the best book I've ever wanted to set on fire.

Updated: Found in my bedside reading journal:

- it's self-conscious & pretentious, but pretentious in the way that smart kids are when they're trying to be cool but are still riled up by grammatical slips etc. — betrayed by their own proclivities

2.5*

I had problems with Dave Eggers for a long time. Having never read a word he'd written, I immaturely thought I had every right to hate him. He was young, successful, and adored by critics. That was enough right there. When it first came out, I would see AHWOSG in the bookstore and grimace at it (more than once, I even gave it the evil eye). My loathing was out of sheer jealousy. I recognized it as such back then, but still carried on. It's hard to let go of things sometimes.

OK. Fast forward three or four years. I still have a lot of pent up animosity for those writers who are so far ahead of me. However, this fear, thinly cloaked as a juicy eccentricity has dissipated a great deal upon reading Eggers' triumphant, naked, brutally pure and dramatically veracious window into a life bereft of normalcy.

What is normalcy? Nobody knows (and quite frankly, nobody should care), but I'll tell you what it's not: having to deal with the death of both your parents within mere months of each other. That just doesn't happen to people. On the rare and awful occassions when it does, the children involved are devastated. It happened to Eggers and his siblings. When his mother died, he was left to share custody of his younger brother Toph. Still just a child, Toph grew up under the sometimes bizarre, always concerned eye of his older brother Dave.

The center of AHWOSG is truly the great and hilarious relationship Eggers has with Toph. To try to describe how they both grew up together in the strange and bumpy post-parental freedom-for-all (with strict rules of obtaining said freedom) would be detrimental to the experiences you can have in Eggers' world. So we won't venture further. Rest assured, there's a seal-tight bond there, one few can probably relate to.

Smirking just on the borders of the author's fatherly/brotherly/friendly/loving/do-right-for-the-little-jerk attitude is the fully-aware-of-everything-that-is-and-is-not persona that he is constantly invoking and daring to take him just one step further... just to the brink... just to push him off. His emotions are bloody rare, like a T-Bone rippling with E. coli. His running, inner monologue and occasional tabooed thoughts are cut from his heart with a dull spork and served to the reader à la mode--as if the sweet, cold vanilla sub-thought could lighten the mood. It does. And his words never fail to render a heartbreaking, poetic, screaming justice for his soul.

I ate it up. I wanted more. I swallowed my jealousy and loved it.

I have to confess that I skipped the preface, and found the start of the book tough going. Further in it picked up momentum and for a while I was hooked. I also have to say that I skimmed through the MTV interview part of the book as I found this section rather tedious.

I was overwhelmed by Dave's parental responsibility towards his younger brother. He seemed to have taken on the mantle, including the guilt, which I had assumed was exclusive to actually being a parent! The most uplifting parts of the book, for me, was the descriptions of the floor sliding and frisbee playing, as I felt Dave could let go and be a child himself.

I could feel the author's need for closure regarding his parents' untimely deaths, especially his mother, and found the section concerning his return home and the finding and disposing of her remains to be quite literally heartbreaking.

I mostly enjoyed the narrative which at times the style reminded me of J D Salinger and quite often the 'Beats' such as Kerouac.

Such self indulgent rambling! Started promisingly, went downhill...

"Gli unici che hanno avuto dei ruoli significativi, sono quelli che hanno avuto un'esistenza travolta dal caos..."

L'esistenza di Dave Eggers è stata davvero travolta dal caos e, forse proprio per questo, il romanzo risulta essere di così forte impatto. Ma, andiamo per ordine. Questo libro segna il mio approccio con l'autore che, con il suo stile coinvolgente, riesce a farti entrare immediatamente nella storia e nelle sue fila.
Il titolo descrive molto bene la storia e la vita di Dave Eggers stesso dal momento che si tratta di parte della sua biografia romanzata. Una opera struggente perché in breve tempo si riscopre orfano e, insieme al fratellino Toph, a cui deve badare, cerca di mettere insieme i vari cocci. Una opera che alterna momenti esilaranti ad altri struggenti, delicati proprio come sono i colori della vita che Dave Eggers ha saputo descrivere e raccontare così bene.

P.S. Spendo due parole sulla lunga prefazione che, per quanto esaustiva, mostra alcuni lati pretestuosi e saccenti, rischiando di stancare il lettore. Piccolo consiglio: leggetela alla fine.

It's been years since I read this. I'm erring on the side of generosity with the three stars (somewhere between two and three feels about right). Some amusing scenes and one LOL description but little that has stayed with me over the intervening years.