Sic Semper Tyrannis

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

About a minute and a half ago, I got done reading A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers. Wow! What a great book! It was really not what I was expecting. At all. I was expecting a self-referential, droll, NPR hipster manifesto a la John Hodgman or some other unfairly intelligent person.

But this…this was something so much more.

First of all, the main narrative is sad. I mean monumentally sad—-two parents die of cancer and the son’s new life as surrogate father of his little brother. In describing the new resultant responsibility and his life of mourning and remembrance of things past, all related alongside the concerns and egomaniacal thoughts of a fairly libertine twenty-something, Eggers creates a narrator that was hard for me to like, but yet I couldn’t wait to see what happens next and more importantly, what he thinks next.

And there are some witty metatextual moments where a character or two will castigate the narrator as the writer and argue with him about the themes in the book- a device which I totally enjoy. But this book has a lot of heart to go with its headiness. There are a lot of beautifully sweeping passages that attempt to articulate that certain…something..that draws us all together…that makes sense of everything, despite all the hopelessness, etc. Which of course, never happens. This is a postmodern novel to its core.

Eggers is really good at presenting thoughts on paper as if there were no mediation—-straight from narrator’s brain to the printed page. No middleman. That’s a gift, in my estimation. Similarly, his realistic, snappy dialogue reads as if it was transcribed from a recording- also a gift.

I really enjoyed this book.

I wish I could have read the last ten pages or so without the phone ringing…

posted by Mike @ 1:27 PM