slaughterboard's Full Review: Dave Eggers - A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering G...
Compared to Kirkegaard (as on the book jacket,) Heartbreak is foolhardy at best. A long, laboring memoir powdered liberally with tongue-in-cheek-isms, elbows-to-the-ribs, smarmy winks and perpetual one-ups. For being non-fiction it is filled with obvious falsehoods. For being a memoir it is self-conscious and apologetic.
Eggers stunts the reader immediately with his grandiose Preface and Acknowledgements which beg, bow and belittle the reader into staving off criticisms; admitting the flaws, in fact pointing them out, page number and all, setting up a 'you're just picky' feeling that makes a reader guilty for not being amused or inspired. Eggers is very clear that in no point of the text is he impressed by himself, his obsessive musings or paranoid fascinations.
Beginning with the dual cancer-caused deaths of his parents, Eggers follows himself as he raises his little Brother, Toph. He gets by with minor help from friends and older siblings, until several years later he finds the cremains of his mother and depicts himself alternating from happily playing Frisby with Toph to thinking psychotically.
"How lame is this, how small, terrible. Or maybe it is beautiful. I can't decide if what I'm doing is beautiful and nobel and right, or small and disgusting. I want to be doing something beautiful, but am afraid that this is too small, too small, that this gesture, this end is too small - is this white trash?"
Samuel Johnson (Rasselas, 1759)would be proud of Eggers pizazz towards capturing the freshness of his mental state. Unfortunately, his pandering hipsterisms and sob stories, layered with obviously devised plot-generating conversations (usually he pulls a like like, "You're breaking out of character again.") horribly abuse any stylistic trickery he thinks might pull a smile from his readers' lips.
The finer points to the memoir are during Eggers' years creating the infamous Might magazine, but that doesn't make up a fourth of the book, leaving readers with "the melding of two or more cultural elements, ideally one high and one low, the smugly clever, utterly meaningless result."
The literary sensation of the year, a book that redefines both family and narrative for the twenty-first century. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering G...More at HotBookSale
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