Dave Eggers’ name alone conjures images of literary
superstardom, and the dread of a sophomore slump.
Eggers began his career welcoming readers into his life in the
memoir, “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.”
Two years later, that book’s shadow continues to envelop the
author’s movements.
With last month’s release of Eggers’ new book
“You Shall Know Our Velocity,” published by his
company, McSweeney’s Publishing, the author embarked on the
momentous task of moving beyond the hype of his initial success in
the pursuit of creating new, invigorating literature.
The critics, however, seem unwilling to let Eggers go. Even
Michiko Kakutani of the New York Times, who has previously praised
his writing, called the work “less inventive, less daring,
less affecting and less intense” than AHWOSG.
The blame partly falls on Eggers. In some ways, he himself
hasn’t moved on. The book is full of biographical
resemblances ““ most notably, the narrator Will has recently
fallen into a large sum of money, reminiscent of the author’s
situation after writing AHWOSG, motivated by his parents’
deaths. Thematically he retreads the death, guilty privilege, and
purging redemption that abound in his previous work.
What the critics seem to miss, however, is that Eggers has
changed the context. No longer is he recasting real life in memoir
form, but is now transforming the characters of his mind into
unrealistic fiction.
It’s the way he does it that is so fun. The book follows
Will and Hand’s attempts to give away $32,000 across the span
of two continents and five countries, in hopes of making sense of a
friend’s death through random charity.
Nowhere is Eggers more exciting than when recounting his two
characters racing through the alleys of Marrakesh, with Will
fearful that the cars on the road have plotted their deaths, when
the characters suddenly explode back into the open.
The excitement isn’t in the action, but in the
narrator’s imagination. The running commentary in
Will’s hyperactive mind, hovering “on hummingbird
wings,” can twist a car ride into a John Woo action
flick.
Eggers pulls his readers into the torment of Will’s
crowded head, where “a large staff of humanoid people, oily
and pale and without hair” gather files from the library of
his mind, in which pain is “filed near the front.” The
metaphor is brilliant, at once a vision of a perverse
“Fraggle Rock” underground and the mental landscape of
angst. It is this type of writing that makes the book both
emotional and entertaining, pushing the reader through tears and on
to gales of laughter.
On its own, “You Shall Know Our Velocity,” is a work
of energetic prose that discusses, as freelance writer John Freeman
has pointed out, the arbitrary quality of wealth and the difficulty
of redistributing that wealth in a non-arbitrary way.
The book’s Kerouackian enthusiasm transforms this
difficulty into a pleasure. And although Eggers may never escape
the shadow of his debut, this book makes it obvious that he is no
one-hit wonder.