Fast and Right Through Me
Dave Eggers's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Nate Barksdale
January 1, 2000
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, by Dave Eggers
(Simon and Schuster, 2000), 375 pp., $23.00.
This is a book review. As such, it will make the pretense of being primarily about the book in question. But as the reviewer pursues the task of informing you, the reader (hi!) whether, and in what ways, the book in question is good, or bad, or interesting, he is also working towards a second end, which is to let you know that the reviewer's own ideas are, in fact, both good and interesting—perhaps even more interesting than the aforementioned book. And so, fair reader, be warned: for although this review may attempt to weave together common threads, citing the odd example in order to reveal, with astute and impeccable logic, what a certain four-hundred-page tome says and means, both in itself and as it concerns the life and ideas of its author (who is only in his late twenties, and may yet change his mind), it is still the work of a reviewer who is himself only in his middle twenties, who still has a lot to learn, and—in truth—who harbors the secret hope that the book's author will one day read this review, and be so impressed, or moved, as to beg the reviewer to come and write for his current magazine, or will maybe want to hang out sometime. Ahem.
It is difficult to criticize A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Dave Eggers's thoroughly postmodern memoir, not so much because of the touchy subject matter (the struggles of the newly orphaned) as because the book is so full of confessions and qualifications as to render further comment pretty much unnecessary.
A Heartbreaking Work concerns Eggers's life in the years after, at age twenty-two, he lost both parents to cancer, and was left on his own (more ...
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