UNDERSTANDING DAVE EGGERS UNDERSTANDING CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN LITERATURE Matthew J
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UNDERSTANDING DAVE EGGERS UNDERSTANDING CONTEMPORARY AMERICAN LITERATURE Matthew J. Bruccoli, Founding Editor Linda Wagner-Martin, Series Editor Volumes on Edward Albee | Sherman Alexie | Nelson Algren | Paul Auster Nicholson Baker | John Barth | Donald Barthelme | The Beats Thomas Berger | The Black Mountain Poets | Robert Bly | T. C. Boyle Truman Capote | Raymond Carver | Michael Chabon | Fred Chappell Chicano Literature | Contemporary American Drama Contemporary American Horror Fiction Contemporary American Literary Theory Contemporary American Science Fiction, 1926–1970 Contemporary American Science Fiction, 1970–2000 Contemporary Chicana Literature | Robert Coover | Philip K. Dick James Dickey | E. L. Doctorow | Rita Dove | Dave Eggers John Gardner | George Garrett | Tim Gautreaux | John Hawkes | Joseph Heller Lillian Hellman | Beth Henley | James Leo Herlihy | David Henry Hwang John Irving | Randall Jarrell | Charles Johnson | Diane Johnson Adrienne Kennedy | William Kennedy | Jack Kerouac | Jamaica Kincaid Etheridge Knight | Tony Kushner | Ursula K. Le Guin | Denise Levertov Bernard Malamud | David Mamet | Bobbie Ann Mason | Colum McCann Cormac McCarthy | Jill McCorkle | Carson McCullers | W. S. Merwin Arthur Miller | Stephen Millhauser | Lorrie Moore | Toni Morrison’s Fiction Vladimir Nabokov | Gloria Naylor | Joyce Carol Oates | Tim O’Brien Flannery O’Connor | Cynthia Ozick | Suzan-Lori Parks | Walker Percy Katherine Anne Porter | Richard Powers | Reynolds Price | Annie Proulx Thomas Pynchon | Theodore Roethke | Philip Roth | Richard Russo | May Sarton Hubert Selby, Jr. | Mary Lee Settle | Sam Shepard | Neil Simon Isaac Bashevis Singer | Jane Smiley | Gary Snyder | William Stafford Robert Stone | Anne Tyler | Gerald Vizenor | Kurt Vonnegut David Foster Wallace | Robert Penn Warren | James Welch | Eudora Welty Edmund White | Colson Whitehead | Tennessee Williams August Wilson | Charles Wright UNDERSTANDING DAVE EGGERS Timothy W. Galow The University of South Carolina Press © 2014 University of South Carolina Published by the University of South Carolina Press Columbia, South Carolina 29208 www.sc.edu/uscpress 23222120191817161514 10987654321 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Galow, Timothy W. Understanding Dave Eggers / Timothy W. Galow. pages cm. — (Understanding Contemporary American Literature) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-61117-427-4 (hardback) — ISBN 978-1-61117-428-1 (ebook) 1. Eggers, Dave—Criticism and interpretation. I. Title. PS3605.G48Z76 2014 813'.6—dc23 2014023116 Jacket illustration by Ellen Fishburne Triplett http://fishburnearts.wordpress.com For Amy This page intentionally left blank CONTENTS Series Editor’s Preface ix Chapter 1 Understanding Dave Eggers 1 Chapter 2 A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius 10 Chapter 3 You Shall Know Our Velocity 27 Chapter 4 What Is the What 43 Chapter 5 Zeitoun 64 Chapter 6 Short Stories, Short Short Stories, and Films 82 Chapter 7 A Hologram for the King 96 Afterword: The Circle 115 Notes 127 Selected Bibliography 131 Index 137 This page intentionally left blank SERIES EDITOR’S PREFACE The Understanding Contemporary American Literature series was founded by the estimable Matthew J. Bruccoli (1931–2008), who envisioned these volumes as guides or companions for students as well as good nonacademic readers, a legacy that will continue as new volumes are developed to fill in gaps among the nearly one hundred series volumes published to date and to embrace a host of new writers only now making their marks on our literature. As Professor Bruccoli explained in his preface to the volumes he edited, because much influential contemporary literature makes special demands, “the word understanding in the titles was chosen deliberately. Many will- ing readers lack an adequate understanding of how contemporary literature works; that is, of what the author is attempting to express and the means by which it is conveyed.” Aimed at fostering this understanding of good literature and good writers, the criticism and analysis in the series provide instruction in how to read certain contemporary writers—explicating their material, language, structures, themes, and perspectives—and facilitate a more profitable experience of the works under discussion. In the twenty-first century Professor Bruccoli’s prescience gives us an avenue to publish expert critiques of significant contemporary American writing. The series continues to map the literary landscape and to provide both instruction and enjoyment. Future volumes will seek to introduce new voices alongside canonized favorites, to chronicle the changing literature of our times, and to remain, as Professor Bruccoli conceived, contemporary in the best sense of the word. Linda Wagner-Martin, Series Editor This page intentionally left blank CHAPTER 1 Understanding Dave Eggers Dave Eggers rose to national prominence in 2000 with the publication of his first book, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius. The work, which the Times of London subsequently cited as one of the fifteen best books of the decade, quickly became a best seller and inspired a range of conversations about the author, postmodernism, and the state of literature in the twenty- first century.1 Over the next decade, Eggers’s works consistently climbed the best-seller lists and garnered nominations for both the National Book Critics Circle Award and the National Book Award. For his literary and extraliter- ary endeavors, he has also received honors as various as the Heinz Award for outstanding contributions to the Arts and Humanities (which comes with a $250,000 cash prize), the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, and the National Book Foundation’s Literarian Award. The film industry has helped to expand Eggers’s renown, particularly in recent years. The film rights for Eggers’s first two books were sold in 2002 and 2007, respectively, but the first film bearing his moniker did not appear until he wrote an original screenplay with his wife, Vendela Vida. Away We Go, a comedy about a couple looking for the ideal place to raise their first child, appeared in the summer of 2009, just a few months before Eggers’s adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are was released. More recently, Eggers’s stories have been adapted for Gus Van Sant (Prom- ised Land, 2012) and Jonathan Demme (Zeitoun, currently scheduled for a 2014 release). Despite or perhaps in part because of Eggers’s growing cultural promi- nence, his work has generated widely divergent responses in popular and critical circles. For some, Eggers’s experimental bent and progressive activi- ties make him a literary icon, a figure rightfully included in The Outlaw Bible 2 UNDERSTANDING DAVE EGGERS of American Literature. A group of critics at the Utne Reader, to give just one example, named Eggers one of “50 Visionaries Who Are Changing the World.”2 Others see him as an ardent self-promoter whose public persona is a calculated façade. From this perspective, Eggers’s string of awards and nominations is less a sign of some unique talent than it is a product of his popularity or, in a more extreme form of the argument, the literary establish- ment’s insularity. The Underground Literary Alliance, a group of writers and critics who claim to be committed to exposing corruption in the publishing industry, had a brief (though periodically revisited) exchange with the author early in his career.3 Debates about Eggers’s “true” commitments have only been exacerbated by his literary texts, which often interrogate the boundaries between fiction, memoir, and biography. Debates around his third major work, What Is the What (2006), have been particularly heated. In the book, Eggers retells the story of Valentino Achak Deng, a refugee from the Sudanese civil war that raged throughout the 1980s and early 1990s. The story, which emerged out of discussions between Deng and Eggers, is told in the first person. The work, however, is not just a mediated autobiography. Eggers freely admits inventing characters and events in the book, and he claims to have significantly altered the chronology for narrative effect. Some critics have found the postmodern underpinnings of the book a powerful way to convey horrors that might otherwise be incommunicable. The author Gary Krist has called the book “extraordinary” and claims that the unusual form yields “a document that— unlike so many ‘real’ autobiographies—exudes authenticity.” It is worth noting that even in this positive review, Krist couches his praise in terms of Eggers’s supposedly enormous ego: “the secret of the book’s credibility lies in its author’s success at excising his own oversized personality from the nar- rative.”4 Many others have disagreed. Perhaps the most vociferous attack on What Is the What has come from the cultural critic Lee Seigel, who claims that the book’s “innocent expropriation of another man’s identity is a post-colonial arrogance.”5 To back up this charge, he says, “the eerie, slightly sickening quality about What Is the What is that Deng’s personhood has been dis- placed by someone else’s style and sensibility—by someone else’s story. Deng survived his would-be killers in the Sudan, only to have his identity erased here.”6 The tenor of these claims suggests something of the passion that Eggers has inspired in both his fans and his detractors. Debates about Eggers’s per- sonality, his literary politics, and his aesthetics have become so entrenched that even his first avowedly fictional book, You Shall Know Our Velocity! UNDERSTANDING DAVE EGGERS 3 (2002), is often read as a thinly veiled autobiography. The literary scholar Sarah Brouillette reads the novel “as a text about Eggers’ career and his over- riding concern with the idea of ‘selling out.’” She concludes that the work “comes to exemplify one peculiar way in which Eggers’ entire career is built circularly on reflections on itself, and the seeming impossibility of escaping such solipsism.”7 With all the attention devoted to Eggers and his expanding literary con- cerns, a work specifically devoted to his texts is overdue. This is not to say that the current work attempts to address Eggers’s books in an ahistorical vacuum.