A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
by Dave Eggers
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Book Summary Information
Author: Dave EggersEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 2001-02-13
ISBN: 0375725784
Number of pages: 485
Publisher: Vintage
Product features:
- ISBN13: 9780375725784
- Condition: New
- Notes: BRAND NEW FROM PUBLISHER! 100% Satisfaction Guarantee. Tracking provided on most orders. Buy with Confidence! Millions of books sold!
Book Reviews of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Book Review: Generation Y speaks?
Summary: 3 Stars
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is, as its title immediately suggests to the reader, a highly self-conscious product of a post-modern age in which pastiche, posturing and the pursuit of a wryly ironic and self-deprecating celebrity blend to create a `memoir' that seeks to combine a meditation on the meaning of life with a meditation on mortality. The comic sections of the `memoir', which include the lengthy and highly self-conscious introduction, while unusual for the genre the book purports to belong to, are typical of Eggers' style.
Eggers typically exploits many of the narrative conventions of post-structuralist literature, compressing time for dramatic effect, engaging in fantastic (if not pure fantasy) scenes, having his characters acknowledge their own existence within the text, thereby disrupting the usual narrative convention and enhancing the text's own sense of its artificiality. As author, Eggers effectively turns each character, or significant event in the narrative, into a tool for exploring his own sense of loss and his thoughts and feelings. In this respect, the characters he introduced into the text, while based on real individuals, become fictional vehicles through which Eggers may articulate his moments of self-doubt, self-criticism and conduct an internal dialogue which, in the ironic style of the text, is conducted in the most public forum possible.
The sense of self-consciousness, which is developed to the point of exhibitionism, that dominates the text both captures and satirises the emphasis laid upon instant celebrity, as opposed to fame, in late twentieth-century and early twenty-first century Western culture. It also means that the persona presented to the reader is not necessarily an authentic one, just as the events presented to the reader, while being based in reality, are not necessarily authentic in their mode of presentation in the text. This artificiality is a device deliberately used to distance the reader from the author while appearing to create an illusory sense of intimacy between author and reader. The blending of fact and fiction is, as with other works of this nature, used to distance the reader from the author as an individual and to engage with him as a literary construct that approximates a set of `truths' about the human condition. In this sense, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius may be seen as what the New York Times dubbed as `faction'--the blending of fact and fiction--, a typical feature of post-structuralist narratives.
The most fundamental aspect of Eggers' narrative, apart from being the only true subject of his own story, is that the humour and comedy so often invoked by Eggers is itself a brittle thing; it is almost his only defence against the tragedy of his parents' untimely deaths from cancer, the enormous change this created in his life and those of his siblings (although any real sense of this is minimised to the extent that they appear only as flat, supporting characters in what is, fundamentally, Eggers' drama) and, above all else, from the criticism and judgements of others. This brittleness makes Eggers' self-consciousness a technique that begins to pall as the narrative extends itself into an examination, if not a justification, of the minutiae of the protagonist's pursuit of a creatively provocative level of celebrity; ultimately, there is little that Eggers does not write about that is not about himself. While, perhaps, capturing a sense of the egocentricity with which the modern world now operates, it is not an entirely endearing egocentricity and the brittleness of the humour, the febrile nature of the wit is something that invokes a more insipid version of the brittle wit of Oscar Wilde in The Importance of Being Earnest, where identity and the rights of a particular identity ultimately is all that matters.
Put more bluntly, and to echo one critic's comments, the book may be characterised as being `self-indulgent, whiney and age-appropriate' and that `Dave as Peter Pan is not particularly appealing with his creative facial hair (his description), sexual indiscrimination and age-appropriate language'. Eggers creates a composite character of himself as a contemporary Peter Pan, a Generation X tragic Everyman, that conceals any sense of himself and makes his work a `memoir' of what might have been rather than of what was. This certainly fits more closely with the recurrent narrative use of stream-of-consciousness which becomes something of a relentless tide that sweeps the reader away from an event based narrative and into one that is composed purely of the swirling thoughts of Eggers' fictionalised self, or the self-criticisms voiced through his equally fictionalised real characters. Even the existential angst to which the book pretends is often reduced in its meaning as it becomes a platform on which Eggers is able to compete for our attention against the television, the Internet and the latest celebrity scandal. In the sense that there is very little that may be regarded as being sacred, that everything--and everyone--is simply grist to the mill in the pursuit of personal aggrandisement, this is very much a product of its time.
In a sense this is one of the few books that may, perhaps, lay claim to being truly `post'-post-structuralist because it simply treats every device, every authorial and narrative structure and approach, as possessing value only when it brings attention to the author himself. This extends to the self-mocking approaches he adopts toward himself although, in reality, it is toward his role, as author and the status such a role may be understood to confer upon him. As a narrative strategy, it is one that is supposed to remove the traditional status of author as `expert' in relation to his work and strike a more a more `convincing' democratic note that suggests the author is, in fact, just like his readers. This democratic ideal, which is based in the notion of a spurious egalitarianism where celebrity is a celebration of the ordinary, the familiar, even the banal, is captured in the equally self-conscious eschewing of literariness in the text while manipulating its various features to the text's advantage.
One such example is the partially developed motif of the `lattice' that is extensively referred to in Chapter VI. While lacking the substance of considered thought or reflection, which is itself another narrative technique, it presents a plausible narrative response to the personal, social and moral complexities of the world that has the illusion of complexity while being sufficiently simplistic to fit the demand for immediate consumption. In much the same way, the haphazard narrative structure of the text, with its various comic non-sequiturs, self-conscious interruptions and interpolations, presents a structure that may be claimed to mimic the lack of structure of existence. In other words, this is a narrative that presents itself, on an existential level, as art imitating life or, in other words, art holding up a mirror to life. The lack of resolution means, of course, that it is up to the reader to ascertain, or even decide, if there is any central revelation in the text, or whether it is merely the literary version of MTV's Real World, with the difference being that Eggers got on the show this time and that he is the producer as well. If this latter assumption is true, the entire `memoir' is simply an extended retelling and reformulation of everything that can be read quickly and with relative ease in Chapter VI alone.
The notion Eggers develops in various forms throughout the book of him and Toph being `God's Tragic Envoys' (cf. p.73) presents the reader with a difficult choice: if this is indeed true, what value do others in similar situations have in relation to this claim? If the reader chooses to regard the claim as being nothing more than hyperbole, to what extent does this mean that death has little meaning beyond its effect on the living and the way in which the living may justify all sorts of behaviour under the guise of grief? Essentially, the reader must decide to what extent this notion of being `God's Tragic Envoys' is simply another self-serving fiction created by Eggers to maintain the reader's focus not so much on the death of his parents and its affect on his family as on himself, his `existential howling' and to remind the reader that there can only be one actor in this drama and that it will be, unequivocally, Eggers and his self-fictionalised selves.
There is an uncomfortable sense in which this work is simply another example of Eggers `greedily cartwheeling toward everything we are owed' in the guise of being `God's Tragic Envoys'. This underlying aspect of the work is another element the reader must confront and make a decision upon. If this is the case then absolutely everything serves only one calculated purpose, even Toph, whom he purports to love dearly, that unswervingly moves towards to the goal of Eggers' personal celebrity. Or, it may be argued, that Eggers is indeed the spokesman for his time, for his Generation Y.
Summary of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
National BestsellerThe literary sensation of the year, a book that redefines both family and narrative for the twenty-first century. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is the moving memoir of a college senior who, in the space of five weeks, loses both of his parents to cancer and inherits his eight-year-old brother. Here is an exhilarating debut that manages to be simultaneously hilarious and wildly inventive as well as a deeply heartfelt story of the love that holds a family together.
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is an instant classic that will be read in paperback for decades to come. The Vintage edition includes a new appendix by the author.
Dave Eggers is a terrifically talented writer; don't hold his cleverness against him. What to make of a book called A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius: Based on a True Story? For starters, there's a good bit of staggering genius before you even get to the true story, including a preface, a list of "Rules and Suggestions for Enjoyment of This Book," and a 20-page acknowledgements section complete with special mail-in offer, flow chart of the book's themes, and a lovely pen-and-ink drawing of a stapler (helpfully labeled "Here is a drawing of a stapler:").
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
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