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Notes From 21 South Street: The Catastrophe Man “What matters is that the Flaming Lips's new album is ravishing and I've listened to it a thousand times already, sometimes for days on end, and it enriches me and makes me want to save people.” – Dave Eggers In You Shall Know Our Velocity!, Dave Eggers' first novel, Will and his best friend Hand are driving in their car, chased by men they are certain will kill them. As the two try to negotiate narrow, crowded, streets, Will notices men pushing carts in the road and says, “I was worried about running over their feet.” The episode is one of many episodes that comprise Will and Hand's attempt to fly around the world and give away $32,000. Will has unexpectedly received the money and feels uncomfortable keeping it, and like any energetic young man with a psychotic dose of liberal guilt and some imagination, he decides to distribute it all over the world to the needy and downtrodden. He feels in some way responsible for their being so, and his mindset as he undertakes the mission seems to be, “You are just as important a person as me and therefore deserve my money more than I do.” This is a mindset that should give one pause, but while Will experiences reservations about the goodness of his plan, none are so compelling that he stops giving away the money. When he says, “I was worried about running over their feet,” it's difficult not to feel a little embarrassed for everyone involved. In Eggers' new book What is the What –a novel, a fictionalized autobiography, or both, depending on who you talk to–charity makes another prominent appearance. Valentino Achak Deng is the novel's protagonist, a real person who was once one of the Lost Boys of Sudan. He tells the novel from his home in the U.S., and early on he is robbed by a man and a woman who find their way into his apartment with a story about car trouble. As he lies bleeding on the floor of his apartment, Deng contemplates that in the Sudan robberies were not as important because there was not much to take, whereas his possessions in America have real value: “Now I own a television, a VCR, a microwave, an alarm clock, many other conveniences, all provided by the Peachtree United Methodist Church here in Atlanta. . . . To look at them, to use them daily, provoked in me a shudder–a strange but genuine physical expression of gratitude.” Here, Eggers evokes the dual nature of charity with remarkable agility: charity provokes both genuine revulsion and genuine thanks. Set off from the end of the sentence by the long dash, the “shudder” acquires a place of much greater prominence than it ever has in You Shall Know Our Velocity.
Eggers, a very prominent novelist (particularly among college students), is interviewed, listened to, adored, and dismissed with equal interest and enthusiasm. But the dramatic changes that Eggers has made between YSKOV and What is the What usually go unnoticed, because Eggers' readers seem to be too busy either loving or loathing his work to read it. Opinions on Eggers – and his work - formed mostly in response to his 2000 memoir A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius– a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize–and they do not tend to change easily. There are, of course, reasons why Eggers is such a cultural lightning rod. First among these is his wide range of extracurricular activities. He publishes the equally beloved and reviled McSweeney's Quarterly Concern (a quirky literary journal) and oversees the operation of writing centers for young people in cities across the country. He has traveled to the Sudan with Valentino Achak Deng, and he is producing a series of oral histories concerning various human rights issues. These endeavors require that Eggers frequently meet with celebrities and other public figures, and enough have signed on to his projects that Eggers can be described–for better or worse–as the figurehead of a kind of social-literary movement. This movement, based more on a vague ideology of optimism than anything else, has distracted those who might otherwise pay close attention to what Eggers writes. Even for many of those who love what Eggers does, it's not the writing that matters. It's the attitude. (Not everyone buys the attitude. If you do not like Dave Eggers, it is understood that you are above all someone who is serious about literature, someone unimpressed by goofy metatextual knick-knacks like a drawing of a stapler within the text of a memoir. You do not fall in love with a novelist's work just because all your friends had a great time at that reading last week. You are not someone who is taken in.) In April of 2000, an interview with Eggers via email appeared in the pages of this magazine. The interviewer's questions indicated that he had not been “taken in”. Some were flippant, even a little passive aggressive (“Selling out? Good? Bad? Not the issue?, and “If [AHWOSG] became a television series would it be an hour-long drama, half-hour sitcom (with laugh track or without?) or some hybrid?”); others were more overtly aggressive (“Are you taking any steps–are there any steps to be taken–to keep shit real?”). Eggers' response, which comprised specific answers to each question and a concluding “rant” (Eggers' own description), was by turns funny, boring, self-loathing, and angry. The rant's opening salvo is the stuff that bloody literary feuds are made of: “You actually asked me the question: ‘Are you taking any steps to keep shit real?' I want you always to look back on this time as being a time when those words came out of your mouth.” Two main intellectual threads emerge over the course of some 4,000 words. The first of these is Eggers' belief that criticism is largely an illegitimate practice born of psychological depravity and loneliness. Eggers writes, “criticism, more often than not, completely misses the point, yes. The critical impulse, demonstrated by the tone of many of your own questions, is to suspect, doubt, tear at, and to take something apart to see how it works. Which of course is completely the wrong thing to do to art.” His fans would enthusiastically agree. Like Eggers argues in the interview, they believe that artists should be trusted above everything else, that each instance of art is a beautiful thing to be appreciated, not captured and locked in a display case. If Eggers does think that any work of art is a failure, he does not think it's appropriate to say so; that would be to discourage the process of making art. The name of an Eggers-associated magazine The Believer is evidence of this attitude – that faith has no need for empirical evidence, since it justifies itself – as is the fact that the magazine only publishes reviews of books it likes. Therefore if you like Eggers, it is understood that you are someone who likes to like things. (You like celebratory indie-rock music like that produced by the Flaming Lips of Clap Your Hands Say Yeah! You acknowledge that people frequently do terrible things, but you consistently hope that they will do good things instead. You also like all children and all literature with a metatextual bent because they are both made by people who want to try things. You are also attracted to Eggers' belief in the real moral value of art.) Eggers likes art that makes things happen in the world, and What is the What is unquestionably an instance of this kind of art. Eggers himself isn't making a cent off of the book; all of the proceeds from sales are controlled by Deng and his charitable foundation. Much of the money goes to Sudanese refugees currently living in America, but Deng has said that he wants to return to the Sudan and fund the construction of libraries and schools. As What is the What still holds a respectable place on the New York Times bestseller lists six months after its release, these are not insignificant sums that Deng has at his disposal. I'm not looking to make Eggers into a hero because of this act of philanthropy–others have given much, much more to equally urgent causes–but there aren't many novels that build schools and libraries. But Deng would have no money to spend if Eggers had not agreed to try and write a book, and that's what matters: the trying. So it offends Eggers that a Flaming Lips appearance on “Beverly Hills: 90210” or Kurt Vonnegut's role in a Discover Card commercial might cause fans to regard their more serious work with a more suspicious eye: “Jesus, son, you have got to stop tearing apart and doubting the people who are obviously, obviously doing good work.” Point well taken. But if reading through a permanent haze of suspicion turns out to be an indulgent, mean-spirited exercise, it is also true that a blunt, inarticulate ideology of trust isn't productive. The relentlessly suspicious reader assumes that novels recommended by less suspicious friends aren't worth the time, while the reader of blind faith needs nothing more than a book's existence to confirm its worth. As it turns out, neither stance requires much reading.
One of the goals of What is the What is to transform the violence of the Sudan into something with real emotional presence. The theory goes that historical world events do not become tragedies until someone you know becomes a victim of that tragedy. Here, Eggers does an admirable job of introducing Deng to an American audience without any of the exploitative showmanship that frequently accompanies similar stories. It is difficult to read the novel without feeling that one has come to know Valentino Achak Deng. Eggers' tone is measured, serious, born of a deep sense of responsibility to Deng and love for his subject. Eggers' characteristic directness is used to great effect throughout What is the What, a necessary virtue for an author who tries to communicate physical and emotional events that the vast majority of his readers will never have occasion to actually experience. As Deng slowly starves to death at an Ethiopian refugee camp, he begins to have waking dreams; visions of his dead father, or his stepmother's baby, or his bed back home. He also has a vision of his best friend Moses, killed when the murahaleen swept through his village on horseback. Deng has witnessed Moses' death, and now his vision will not leave him:
I went back to my washing, expecting the vision to disappear at any moment. That this one was speaking to me was disconcerting, but not unprecedented. I had once woken up to my baby stepbrother Samuel talking to me about horses. Had I seen his new horse? he wanted to know. He accused me of stealing his new horse. –Achak, don't you know me? I knew the boy in front of me to be Moses, but the real Moses had been killed by the murahaleen. I had seen him in the moment before his death. –Achak, talk to me. Is it you? Am I crazy? I gave in and spoke to the vision. –I won't talk to you. Go away. And with that, the vision of Moses stood up and walked away. This was something I had never seen a vision do before. –Wait! I said, raising myself and dropping my shirt. The vision of Moses kept walking. –Wait! Moses? Is it you? As I ran closer to the vision of Moses, he seemed more and more a real Moses and not a vision of Moses, and my heart jumped around, as if looking for a way to exit my body.
It is, of course, actually Moses, who miraculously survived after disappearing from Deng's sight, and his physical reality redeems the tragedy of the passage's central line, “I gave in and spoke to the vision.” What is the What is filled with such moments of surrender, moments of laying down, forgetting to eat, forgetting to be hungry. There is less courage than fear, less ingenuity than dumb luck, and it is to Eggers' credit that he so consistently reverses the traditional logic of the survival story. More than a disingenuous “I wanted to die, but I kept going,” the book contains moments in which Deng sincerely wants to die and a reader cannot help but agree. It is frustrating to watch a friend come along and make him keep walking. One feels he's earned the right to die. But lest Eggers' readers get cocky about their empathetic capacities, there are also moments of genuinely incomprehensible strangeness. Descriptions of violence and its aftermath are arresting without provoking feelings of horror. After Deng and his fellow lost boys are bombed by fighter planes in the middle of the desert, one boy named Monynhial is lost for good. He stops walking, says simply, “I'll see you some other time,” and steps down into a crater. Eggers writes, “Our group walked on while Monynhial stayed in the hole for three days, not moving, enjoying the silence inside the hole. He dug himself a cave in the side of the crater, and with thatch from a half-burned hut, he created a small door to cover the entrance, hiding himself from animals. No one visited Monynhial; no animal or person; no one knew he was there.” Three days later, Eggers writes, Monynhial “decided to die in the hole, because it was warm there and there were no sounds inside.” Monynhial, emptied out by violence, eludes both the reader and even the other boys who have traveled with him (who only know the story of his death, not the actual event). When Eggers writes, “no one knew he was there,” he means it. Monynhial is what Deng could have become had his autobiography not been written: a lede in a newspaper article, a place-holder for tragedy. Instead, Eggers' aligns his reader with Deng; neither can make Monynhial's death intelligible, safe, or anything other than itself. Monynhial is a hole, like his grave. An inability to redeem the failures of the larger world is not unfamiliar territory for Eggers, whose hand-wringing and white, liberal guilt are well-documented in AHWOSG and YSKOV. Fortunately for Eggers, this frustration is productive; his writing feeds on its own anger. AHWOSG, which was surely written in a sustained, seething rage, ends with a passage that effectively treads the line between exhilaration and fear: What the fuck does it take to show you motherfuckers, what does it fucking take what do you want how much do you want because I am willing and I'll stand before you and I'll raise my arms and give you my chest and throat and wait, and I've been so old for so long, for you, for you, I want it fast and right through me – The passage is a little overdone, the line about his chest and throat a bit too proud of itself, but its weaknesses complicate its force rather than diminish it. The final line, “I want it fast and right through me,” has some of the visionary psychosis of the best old American folk songs. Eggers has not figured out how to write affection, or boredom, or annoyance, or any of the other middle-ground emotions that fill up most of everyday experience, and even if he's not interested in those things it is a problem that dogs all of his writing. But he has a much better feel for extreme states; his rage is instinctive, something he did not need to learn how to write. The experience of reading Eggers' anger has always been one of reading “Eggers is angry” as opposed to “this novel is angry.” He is at the center of his rage, and after a while the moments of explicit self-loathing are transformed into narcissism under their own collective weight. But the relationship between what Eggers feels and what actually happens on the page is very different and much more complex in What is the What. The anger still flashes out, but the angry person has been somewhat submerged. So while you can still feel Eggers rumbling beneath the pages of What is the What, there is very little of the hysterical shrillness that sometimes characterized AHWOSG and YSKOV. Consider, for example, one of Deng's asides on the West's relationship to the refugee camps that are a staple of front-page photographs:
There is a perception in the West, that refugee camps are temporary. When images of the earthquakes in Pakistan are shown, and the survivors are seen in their vast cities of shale-colored tents, waiting for food or rescue before the coming of winter, most Westerners believe that these refugees will soon be returned to their homes, that the camps will be dismantled inside of six months, perhaps a year. But I grew up in refugee camps.
Two books ago, I think this passage would have read much differently: “What the fuck does it take to show you motherfuckers, what does it fucking take what do you want how much do you want because I grew up in refugee camps.” Now, the situation is enough to make a reader angry about the West's willful ignorance of a situation, but the anger does not come from Eggers or Deng. In fact, what's wonderfully complex about the passage is its final line, which hints at a kind of defensiveness on Deng's part about the camps, which he knows are horrible places. “I grew up in refugee camps.” Disavowing the place that made you - particularly when that place no longer exists - is to refuse yourself. In a place where the grass would be greener almost anywhere else in the world, Deng cultivates what shrubs he can find. He has no choice—life imposes itself upon Deng, and this, paradoxically, is the source of the novel's hope. What is the What is about many of the same big, fiery, metaphysical things that YSKOV or AHWOSG were about. It is not a radical departure from his previous concerns, but it is his best rendition of those concerns to date, and Eggers has given no indication that he has written something he would not change in a few years. So while his angry hope continues to be the driving force behind his writing, Eggers has started to pay more attention to how he applies that force. It is as if Eggers has traded in his steamroller for a sledgehammer. And if a sledgehammer still seems a little imprecise, that's fine, because Eggers can still be too blunt. The novel's first sentence, for example, is the kind of thing Eggers is too fond of, a sentence that repeats much of itself in the hopes of sounding distinctive. Here, as elsewhere, it is only annoying: “I have no reason not to answer the door so I answer the door.” One could argue that the sentence is Deng's, that he is someone who thinks in distinct cognitive blocks, and while that might be true the sentence still belongs to Eggers because there is no comma between “door” and “so.” As he does in this opening, Eggers frequently tries to beat a little unnecessary swiftness into his already swift prose. There is another, more complicated example of Eggers' lingering bluntness. Near the exact half-way point of the novel, Deng stumbles into the hut of an older woman who feeds him. She hears his story–he is living in a refugee camp at the time–and says “Until your people leave, you can come here any time. Come alone and you can eat with me any day, Achak.” Deng's response:
When she said that, Julian, she touched my cheek as a mother would, and I crumpled. My bones fell away and I lay down on her floor. I was in front of her, heaving, my shoulders shaking and my fists trying to push the water back into my eyes. I was no longer able to know how to react to kindness like this. The woman brought me close to her chest. I hadn't been touched in four months. I missed the shadow of my mother, listening to the sounds inside her. I had not realized how cold I had felt for so long. This woman gave me her shadow and I wanted to live within it until I could be home again.
The emotional density of this passage is astonishing. Though the prose is clearly Eggers' own, he does not impose himself; a line like “listening to the sounds inside her” is at least shared if not exclusively Deng's. Deng's release, his crumpling, is prompted by the fact that he finally connects his fading, happy memories to the waking death that he can barely resist accepting. He sees the distance between the things he connects and is throttled by that which he has forgotten, how to react to a simple kind act. The disparity between Deng's past and present lives is echoed in the disparity between Eggers' physical descriptions of Deng, the brute force of “my fists trying to push the water back into my eyes” (note how “trying” really twists the phrase into itself) and the grace of “my bones fell away and I lay down on her floor.” The connection made between Deng's two lives is precise. “I hadn't been touched in four months” falls into the passage like a drop of water. It has one small problem: the name “Julian.” Julian is a man behind a desk at a hospital where Deng goes to receive treatment for the wounds he receives when his Atlanta home is robbed. (Deng frequently addresses parts of his story to characters in the United States, though only in his head.) By including the name in the passage Eggers comes close to making a heartbreaking paragraph into an accusatory one that says “You need to listen to this because you do not understand!” But the passage doesn't need “Julian” because the reader doesn't need to be told to pay close attention to such writing. But this is the kind of small thing that a good editor would fix immediately, and if Eggers needs anything it is an editor. Eggers' strength is the degree to which he is invested in both the stories he tells and how he writes them, but this is also frequently his weakness. What he needs is someone less invested. Not a friend, not someone whose life was changed by McSweeney's—just someone who would make sure that Julian stayed in the hospital. But it's a good editor that he needs, not a muzzle. And in that Eggers is not unique.
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