Issue #07/88, April 13 - 27, 2000  

By John Dolan

KILLING YOUR PARENTS FOR FAME AND PROFIT: THE DAVE EGGERS STORY

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers New York: Simon and Schuster 2000 / 375 pp. >

With the Dave Eggers infestation entering its second year, scientists are at last beginning to understand how the Eggers-spawned virus, the "novel" known as A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius or AHWOSG, managed to cut such a terrible swath through America's not very intelligentsia. How could this unthinking lump of literary protoplasm, this primitive organism composed of nothing more than a young workshop writer's eagerness to make literary fodder of his parents' terrible deaths, spread so quickly? How could a writer so devoid of invention, pursuing so formulaic a topic, infect so many people in so short a time?

The answer, say researchers, lies in the fetid jungles of Iowa City, Cambridge, and Chapel Hill, in the steamy Writing Workshops where the virus was born. These pockets of thwarted ambition and bitter envy have been allowed to grow unchecked for generations, becoming little more than Darwinian "virus breeders," as untalented writers cannibalized the deaths of their fathers, mothers, dogs, cats, rats, parrots, imaginary siblings and falsified grandparents for literary gain - creating, in the process, huge mounds of rotting carrion, callously tossed on the nearest dumpster once the poem or story commemorating the dead relative or pet was published.

With the advantage of hindsight, it seems obvious that these open-air graveyards would spread disease. With literary corpses piling up on campuses all over America, it was only a matter of time before contagion appeared. "We should have cleared those places out a long time ago," admits Dr. Lazlo Toth of the Center for Disease Control. "If we'd intervened the very first time a would-be writer with no imagination wrote a tearjerker about his dad's heart attack or his tragic visit to the old-folks' home where his grandmother lay dying, we wouldn't have an Eggers problem today." Asked what form the intervention might have taken, Toth is brutally frank: "Napalm, fuel-air bombs, tac nukes, whatever." In Toth's view, our failure to clean up the Writing Workshops ensured that a literary virus like Eggers' AHWOSG would sooner or later escape into the general population.

Toth sees Eggers as possessing something almost like human intelligence: "We now believe that when the culture of the Writing Workshop reaches a certain age, say the tenth generation of MFAs, it develops a 'hive brain' like the Bugs in Starship Troopers." At this stage, he posits, the hive produces an "Eggers," a cortex-sucking "Brain Bug." Toth explains "Basically, it's just a grotesque mound of starving literary ego, but it does seem to possess some sort of self-consciousness."

Research now focuses on the life-cycle of the Eggers, or "Brain Bug." After cocooning as a white grub in a posh suburb of Chicago, the Eggers emerges, enters an MFA program at an expensive university, and immediately kills off its parents in an autobiographical elegiac memoir, devouring their corpses to make a crude sort of novel. The novel is spread through the trackless Amazon wastes by word of mouth, coughing, and careless book reviews. Once loose in the population, the novel lays more Eggers in the mid-brain of gullible critics and eager undergraduates, thus perpetuating the terrible cycle of parricide, cannibalism, and family-oriented memoirs for generations to come.

One mystery of the disease has been how something so simple as a dead-parent narrative could overcome the immune systems of jaded, cynical critics. Scientist have at last begun to "decode" the way in which Eggers bypasses his victims' defenses. The virus, they say, uses a method as simple as it is effective. While other writers who attempted to exploit their parents' and friends' deaths for literary advantage tried to hide their crime, Eggers admits it and even glories in his cannibalism. For the Eggers virus, "honesty is the best policy" in a very real, Darwinian sense.

For example, Eggers spends twenty pages squeezing tears from the reader over the accident that befell his token non-white friend, then admits that he didn't care about her anyway and in fact hardly knew her. In the same way, after spending a hundred pages telling that cliche of cliches, that Everest of workshop drivel, the "Mom's Slow Death by Cancer" narrative, he admits that he began submitting short stories about his mom's death before her body was cold. In another episode, Eggers repeatedly bails a friend out, then admits that he would prefer that the friend die, providing more fodder for his sentimental narrative.

For Eggers, literary success is the result of a very simple arithmetic: one corpse equals one chapter. Two corpses - his mom and dad, who die with all violins playing in the first hundred pages of the book - provide the momentum to get the "novel" underway. Unfortunately, Dave's surviving relatives show no signs of croaking, so he spends the bulk of the novel sniffing around for a whiff of gangrene among his trust-fund friends, who migrate with him from Lake Forest to the Bay Area, doing a sort of Summer of Love thing three decades late.

But Dave's friends are a frustratingly robust bunch - up until the point when his token non-white friend, this Indian doctor's daughter, has her accident. And what an accident it is! She gets conked by falling timber in the collapse of a deck at a party in Pacific Heights. It's a somber reminder of our mortality: one moment you're sipping cocktails and comparing offshore accounts while admiring the view of Marin, and the next you're just a very wealthy tuber occupying a hospital room of one's own. Truly, this world is but a vale of tears.

Dave, who could get a job as a corpse-sniffing Earthquake dog no questions asked, no sooner catches the scent of the injury to his "friend" (well, they met once or twice, anyway) than he's powerin' over to that hospital bed: "I leave. Shalini [token non-white friend] could be gone." In a narrative instant, told in gripping simple present-tense: "I pick up Marny. Moody meets us at the hospital," Dave is there, shoving the tearful sari-clad mom outta the way, using his elbows as he learned to do on the mean asphalt courts of Lake Forest to get to his sweet spot: at the bedside of the soon-to-be-departed, notebook in hand. But you can't call him on it, because HE ADMITS IT! OK? Got it? He admits it, and that makes it OK. Damn, this honesty thing is brilliant! In fact, he takes you with him in his most Dostoevskian moments, when he confronts his own acts with searing frankness: "It is OK for me to have sex with the sexologist while Shalini is in a coma." Thank God we got that settled. Dave wrestles with that one for, like, minutes, before he and the sexologist go at it. And even then, see - even then, he's got this Catholic conscience thing (Dave is about as Catholic as Madonna) - we know this because he keeps TELLING us. Yeah, so he's got this conscience so harsh that even while he's SAYING that "It is OK" to fuck the sexologist, it isn't REALLY. Even while he's coming all over the bed, he's deep in a Catholic guilt thing. Searing. That's the only word for it. Searing. Scathing. Dark.

But Dave is not improvident enough to wait around for another friend or relative to die. He has an ace in the hole: his little brother, the annoyingly-named "Toph." Short for "Christopher." After Mom and Dad die, Toph is left as Dave's pathos-device. It's a terrible burden for one so young - Toph is eleven years old - but Dave has faith in little brother's dramatic talent. Toph is called on to be, by turns, vulnerable, stoic, clinging, vulnerable, and...uh, vulnerable. I guess it's mostly, you know, "vulnerable." Dave becomes little Toph's guardian, and Toph isn't really as toph as he likes to pretend. So Dave worries about the little lad, every time he's out on a date, fucking one of the 32 "people" he informs us he's fucked, No matter how much it might seem that he's just a pampered midwestern brat spending his inheritance in Berkeley, in reality, every moment he's pumping away atop the sexologists or whomever, half his mind is back in the apartment where little Toph waits. He wonders if Toph's babysitter is a pervert, or a druggie. (Interestingly, Dave assumes that the "druggie" and "pervert" are equivalent. He's quite the prude about drugs, going out of his way to urge the incarceration of all moms who do pot. What a guy! What a wonderful old Republican he'll make, after a few years of tempering!)

And the best part is, Toph doesn't even have to die! A breakthrough! At least, that's how Dave had it planned. Sadly, it doesn't quite work out. The first hundred pages of AHWOSG work pretty well, in a workshoppy way, milking the parents' deaths for every little droplet. After that, Toph's vulnerability and Dave's tender conscience have to carry the load, and the drop-off is so stark it makes the Marianas Trench look like a handicapped ramp. Wile E. Coyote has fallen off cliffs which didn't drop off this dramatically. If this novel were a T-shirt - and it is, kind of - it would read, MY PARENTS DIED SLOW HORRIBLE DEATHS AND ALL I GOT WAS A HUNDRED PAGES.

As Dave admits in his Preface, "The book thereafter is sort of uneven," since it covers "...the lives of people in their early twenties, [whose] lives are very difficult to make interesting..." Yeah, you can see his predicament. Who ever heard of a good novel about the lives of people in their twenties? Talk about barren ground! Dave does his best with this thankless material, always depending on ol' Toph to keep the audience reaching for their hankies every time his tales of upper-middle-class careerist banality gets too obviously banal. If you had to make a T-shirt out of pp. 110-375, it would be worn by Dave, with one of those arrows pointing toward Toph, and reading I'M TAKING CARE OF STUPID, ALL BY MYSELF, or perhaps, HE AIN'T HEAVY, HE'S MY TICKET TO FAME!

These latter 270 pages of the novel describe Dave's attempt to become famous. It is just plain awful, folks. Just impossible-to-convey awful. While Dave can keep his parents' corpses on stage, he's a passable writer; once they're gone, we're left with, and I mean this literally, Real World wannabes. That's right: Dave auditions for The Real World and doesn't make it. You can wrap that fact in as many layers of irony as you want, and it's still going to stink.

Thwarted in that first bid for fame, Dave & Co. found a magazine. It's a "daring" journal, as "daring" would be imagined by a conservative midwestern jock asshole. But here, let Dave tell it himself, in the excerpt he provides, taken from "the premiere issue's opening essay": "Could there really be more to a generation than illiterate, uninspired, flannel-wearing 'slackers'? Could a bunch of people under twenty-five put out a national magazine with no corporate backing [note: as Dave unwisely confesses elsewhere, his mag was started by dipping into his inheritance; thus his career is founded quite literally on his parents' deaths, just like his narrative, and no clue about marketing? With actual views about actual issues? With a sense of purpose and a sense of humor? With guts and goals and hope? Who would read a magazine like that? You might." Then again, you might not. Especially if you read Dave's truly shockingly lame explanations of the magazine's purpose. Just listen to this:

They do daring things like publish pictures of all their friends naked (with the heads cropped so nobody knows who they are). This gets Dave so excited, it's just so daring, so far from his midwestern roots, that he has a realization: "These people are _freaks_."

It just gets wilder from there. You wouldn't believe the pranks they pull! In response to the New York Times Magazine's "Thirty in Their Thirties," Dave and his merry band do "Twenty in Their Twenties"! And they make up some of the people, taking on all the big targets in the process: "And of course we take a swipe at Lead or Leave." No! Not Lead or Leave! Good God! These people are freaks!

Well no. These people are the sort of people who get together on decks in Pacific Heights, having migrated to the Bay Area from Lake Forest, Illinois, to drive rents up and IQs down all over northern California. They stand on the deck telling each other how daring they are, sipping mixed drinks with names. Unfortunately, the decks don't usually collapse.

And unless another deck collapses, Dave's got only one way to crank out another book. It comes down to this, Dave: Are you Toph enoph to kill off the little brother?

Check out Dr. Dolan’s new book, "Poetic Occasion From Milton To Wordsworth" published by St. Martin’s Press, or order it on amazon.com .

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