disinclined's Full Review: Dave Eggers - You Shall Know Our Velocity!
Note: this is a review of the hardcover edition. The paperback edition contains "significant changes" and additions; the new material so fundamentally alters the existing text that I consider the hardcover and softcover editions to be more or less two distinct books. You can go here to see mfunk75's fine review of the softcover edition.
Giving to the needy is terrible. Oh, I don’t mean the idea of giving – that’s fine. But the actual act is awful, full of awkwardness and shame. You want to feel good about giving money to somebody who clearly needs it, but you also want to make it crystal-clear that your donations don’t imply a condescending or patronizing attitude toward the recipient; that you still think of both of you as equals, despite the fact that you’re the one holding the purse strings; that, in fact, you’re not thinking about it at all, not hyper-analyzing it or trying to attach more significance to the act than it deserves. And it never comes off right. The one time I tried giving money to a homeless guy, it was a total fiasco. As soon as he saw the cash, he started reeling off this awful, canned speech in a creaky monotone: “Thank you miss I am very grateful and God bless because of you I will have a place to sleep tonight.” I grinned nervously and told him to have a good day, and immediately hated myself, hated the fake-cheery, money-saturated voice of privilege coming out of my mouth. What a demeaning, undignified mess, and for what? A couple of lousy bucks? Have a good day! Jesus.
So this is the story of Will and Hand, two youngish men indirectly mourning the accidental death of their friend Jack by taking a philanthropic whirlwind tour around the globe. Will, a handyman, has received $88,000 in royalties for the use of his likeness on light-bulb packaging, but the windfall makes him deeply uncomfortable. So he conceives a plan, along with Hand, to buy around-the-world tickets (one price, any number of stops, but you have to keep heading in one direction), stopping off at far-flung locations to hand off cash to the deserving poor. It seems like a good idea at the time.
Immediately, problems arise. The tickets don’t allow for whims; you have to plan your entire trip before leaving home. So that idea gets scrapped. Then it turns out that many of the third-world countries demand visas, or shots, and Will has no time for any of this; it has to be right now, this week, for reasons even he doesn’t fully understand. Eventually, with a heavily modified itinerary, Will and Hand get off the ground, heading to Senegal with a fat stack of traveler’s checks. More problems: flights are delayed, flights are cancelled. Reservations clerks are bewildered, then annoyed at the scruffy men who want to book a flight but don’t know where to. Delays are everywhere, and with only a week to make it around the world, every second spent waiting in a hotel room or an airport feels even more grossly wasteful.
The giving doesn’t go so well, either. Initially, Will and Hand make a rule that every impulse, however wacky, must be followed up on: taping money to livestock, leaving flowers and cash on a kitchen table. But nothing seems to go as planned; if they try to tape cash to a goat, people inevitably walk by and interrupt. Entering homes when people are away feels creepy and weird. And even when they do manage to hand off cash, it feels tainted and bad; the recipients grin slyly and vanish, as though gleeful at having pulled one over on the rich Americans, or else they stare at the money unhappily (nevermind effusive thanks in foreign tongues). The idealized notion of charity – an ephemeral but profound connection between two people, generosity meeting gratitude halfway – never happens. Hand starts acting like a typical American asshole, speaking loudly in pidgin English for no discernible reason. Nothing is the way Will had imagined it; only when he begins to examine his motivations for the trip, and what he’d expected to gain, does Will start to understand the connections between this wild goose chase and his long-delayed mourning over his lost friend.
Dave Eggers is much the same here as he was in his fictionalized memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius: wildly uneven, often funny but frequently off-key, trying way too hard to be clever. Narrator Will sounds uncannily similar to Narrator Dave from A.H.W.O.S.G., full of the same vicious self-interrogation and loopy stream-of-consciousness ramblings; it’s interesting, but difficult to read, and the narrative similarities make it tough to separate Will from Eggers. The character development is understated to the point of nonexistence; it’s never explained how an obviously intelligent and articulate (though prone to babbling) guy has ended up installing light bulbs for a living. We bounce from childhood memories of the three friends to the present day; Will’s only defining characteristic is grief, expressed in wild rants, fugue-like flashback episodes, and strange behavior. His sorrow feels genuine, but it’s expressed in a rambling, haphazard fashion that renders it abstract and difficult to understand.
I originally read portions of this in the New Yorker, and it worked much better in excerpted form as short fiction. After a few hundred pages, the routine gets tedious: Will and Hand arrive in a country that’s not like how they imagined it; they get hit up for cash by smirking natives; they run out of time and hurriedly throw money at the nearest person, repeatedly asking each other for confirmation, later, that they did the right thing. Eggers is great in small doses, but his full-length books can be vexingly fractal: identical patterns of self-obsessed, self-chastising self-loathing that are exactly the same right down to the most microscopic scale. But he’s right about one thing: charity is ugly, self-important hubris dressed in well-intentioned clothing.
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