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Rating: There are certainly worse things than a memoir.
It's not that I'm particularly eager to start with somewhat mmm mmm introductions, like: Dave Eggers is quite difficult to review because blah and blah. (Or like what you've just read, which is already a bit mmm mmm but in a different way and dishonestly masked as something else.)
I mean. It's not that it's so difficult to review in itself, and anyway not because blah and blah. It's just that you don't know how to venture a word without looking foolish in some way. Because it's a book that speaks for itself, and not in that way, not with the aura of compact holiness of the Sacred Brick that can ultimately not say a damn thing. No, it speaks of itself literally. Starting with the preface, which fabulously made me burst out laughing on a sleepless and bewildered morning, between a cold sanitary fixture and a face wash, after - days before - I had orphaned it from a bookstore shelf, irresistibly attracted by the cover quote. I admit it, I fell for it, the cover quote, and I don’t know if the fact that the positive comment was signed by David Foster Wallace ("Great, great writing. A book that leaves no escape.") can justify me at least a little.
We could start talking about it with - no, already this paragraph starts badly.
Oh well.
A few random notes:
1) The title is spot-on and the effect it provokes is much more studied than it might seem.
2) Eggers has more in common with Foster Wallace than just the first name, and you can feel it stylistically. But only a little.
3) This is a unapologetically autobiographical and essentially sad book. It talks about dead parents. You know? Dead parents. Cancer. Both of them. In a short span of time and due to extremely unfortunate coincidences. And then the emotional and practical consequences. Youth scattered around San Francisco and nearby or not too distant places, including an unreal but actually real countryside. Tons of pop culture. Underground magazines managed by post-hippy collectives. Postmodernism. Post-Generation X. Very post-everything. Reflections. Awareness. Life. Memories. Those things there. And an eight-to-ten-year-old little brother with whom to conquer the world without hesitation, and in spare time, while trying and undoubtedly succeeding, engage in epic, truly epic frisbee duels on the beach.
4a) This book makes you shamefully burst out laughing.
4b) And this is in no way incompatible with the fact that it is a Serious & Substantially Sad Book.
5a) This book, like all the most interesting books, mainly consists of mental masturbations.
5b) In fact, this book is a continuous mental masturbation.
And now we can gear into the rest, always in no particular order.
Dave Eggers is the tragicomic triumph of self-awareness (nice, I'm jotting this down). One of those who simply can’t just say that Johnny eats the apple, but must compulsorily wonder if the choice of the sentence is appropriate and for what and for whom, what impression people have of someone expressing such an objectively damn concept (and if perhaps there is someone who doesn't agree on the objectivity of the fact that it is an objectively damn concept, but this - incidentally said - is honestly not probable), why this concept sounds so damn bad and how and in which of the possible worlds could it not sound bad, what connections link the person expressing that damn concept to Johnny included in the damn concept above, and if Johnny really exists or if he somehow resembles a real person and if so, to what extent he is faithful as a literary projection, and then how all this fits into the geographic-sociological context in which Johnny and the one who formulated that absolutely damn concept have grown up and if the context is the same and what all this has to do with a small, tender and vacuous raccoon drowned near the coast of Virginia just a couple of minutes ago (and especially how the hell it became known that it drowned, and if anyone really cares about such a thing).
And the tone is more or less this, for a good part of the book.
A book in which, if it hasn't been clear yet, Eggers talks about himself with adherence to real-life experience that - according to the very contorted and comic disclaimers inserted in the preface (a preface of about thirty-five pages, incidentally) - should even be frightening, and provoke in the reading audience especially the following two reactions:
a) Oh poor thing, how many things he went through, all together, and how strong he is, and how interesting!
b) What kind of monster exploits the death of his own parents to put it in a book and sell it and also expects compassion?
And more or less the whole book revolves around this. Also around this. Among other things.
The rest? The rest is a story brimming with conscious megalomania and even more tremendously conscious self-analysis, but above all, it is a story that - beyond everything - is beautiful to read in all its hysteria, its drama, with all its bursts of even excessive and often blatantly forced irony (yes, you guessed it, there are also reflections on this), but hilarious and bittersweet. That imprints within you the contours of a surreal picture, small and immense at the same time, halfway between the individual and the generation, and you don't know precisely what effect it gives, if sad, comic, poignant, grotesque, disarming, total, annoying, heart-rending - heart-rending, indeed, and...
And then that's it.
There are worse things than a memoir. Certainly.
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