Irony with Soul: Dave Eggers Writes the Hippest of Memoirs

Dave Eggers, the 29-year-old author of one of this season's hottest books, "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius," thinks people do not understand the word irony. "Nobody knows what it means," he says. "And it is used to describe, well -- if somebody uses footnotes, that's called irony; and if somebody has a character address the reader out of character, that's called irony; if someone's sarcastic, it's irony; if someone's nihilistic, it's irony. I think people have gotten really lazy about the definition."Eggers is defensive on the subject of irony because of what it can connote -- moral turpitude, coy escapism and, in the case of literature, a cleverness that grates -- and because it has been used to describe almost all of his literary endeavors. Might, his defunct San Francisco-based Gen X zine best known for falsifying the death of child TV star Adam Rich, was hailed by Newsweek as "funny, knowing and wryly on-target." McSweeney's, the chic literary quarterly he now runs out of Brooklyn, is, to Eggers' dismay, constantly being described as ironic. And his first book, an anti-memoir about raising his kid brother after the death of his parents, has received the same adjectival treatment ("goofy and intensely ironic" are the words Vince Passaro used in a Harper's Bazaar review)."Making light of something is the opposite of irony," says Eggers. "People take making a magazine very seriously and they take, you know, the writing of a book very seriously and all that garbage. I'm just out to sort of lighten it up."Lighten it up he has. "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" has no sacred cows. It is at once a spoof on self-reflection and a rigorous attempt to upend the conventions of memoir writing. In a relentlessly self-mocking, irreverent style, reminiscent of the jocular blitzkrieg of early Tom Wolfe, Eggers describes the events he can never forget but refuses to sentimentalize: the death of his parents from unrelated cancers within a five-week period; his assumption of fatherly duties at age 21 to his 8-year-old brother, Toph; and their tragicomic journey in Berkeley, and later San Francisco, as the most bizarre and extraordinary of American families.

"Toph and I are the future," writes Eggers, "a terrifyingly bright future, a future that has come from Chicago, two terrible boys from far away, cast away and left for dead, shipwrecked, forgotten, but yet, but yet, here, resurfaced, bolder and more fearless, bruised and unshaven, sure, their pant legs frayed, their stomachs full of salt water, but now unstoppable, insurmountable, read to kick the saggy asses of the gray-haired, thickly bespectacled, slump-shouldered of Berkeley's glowering parentiscenti!"Eggers clearly has no interest in prose that sounds self-righteous or self-important. Yet because he writes mostly about himself, his thoughts and his most personal experiences, his memoir is bound up in a literary conundrum whose Houdini-like escape is the most staggering and ingenious aspect of his work. Nothing is spared for the sake of seriousness here, not the phlegm that pours from his dying mother's mouth, not his terror at entering adulthood as a father to his brother.

His memoir is even prefaced with "Rules and Suggestions for Enjoying this Book," a meandering treatise that offers such prankish bon mots as "an incomplete guide" to the book's metaphors and symbols; a flow chart, detailing the psychological consequences of his parents' deaths; and, yes, an ironical summary of the book's "major themes," such as "The Knowingness About the Book's Self-Conscious Aspect."Even the copyright page is an attempt to undercut the seriousness that a published book portends: "Published in the United States," it reads, "by Simon & Schuster, a division of a larger more powerful company called Viacom Inc., which is wealthier and more populous than eighteen of the fifty states of America, all of Central America, and all of the former Soviet Republics combined and tripled."People in the publishing business are giving the book raves and applauding his skewering of their industry. Time magazine has done a spread. The New Yorker has published an excerpt. And Michiko Kakutani, the New York Times book critic who makes and breaks young writers' careers, has called Eggers "staggeringly talented," his book "a virtuosic piece of writing, a big, daring, manic-depressive stew."What is so fascinating -- and for some readers, so intensely annoying -- about "A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius" is that Eggers writes page after buoyant page without ever letting up on the war with himself, his project and everyone else in his crowded head. His book falls into the queer category of postmodern autobiography, which makes an art out of anticipating criticism and a farce out of sincerity. It is also, like much of David Foster Wallace's work, consumed with verbal high jinks and the often benumbing goal of inventiveness.