A.p.w.o.a.c.*
In the 'Acknowledgements' section of A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, Dave Eggers states that while there are already 'too many memoir-sorts of books' on the market, and while this is a bad thing, we could all do a lot worse. And indeed we could, for A.H.W.O.S.G. (its own modest abbreviation) isn't as pretentious and annoying as it initially might appear, and is more than just a 'memoir-sort of book. Once the 'Rules and Suggestions for Enjoyment of This Book' have been digested, and the reader has fully appreciated the marvel of the 'Incomplete Guide to Symbols and Metaphors', a touching tale of modern life and modern problems begins.
The media-savvy, self-referential Eggers (one of the founders of the infamous Might Magazine) details, with wit and irony, how at the age of 22, after losing both his parents to cancer, he began bringing up his eight-year-old brother Toph (Christopher). Both live together in relative squalor, as you'd expect two men to live when deprived of any regulatory and paternal influence, and Eggers experiences the unique problems of being a young parent in nineties America. However, it is the peculiar conjunction of these problems with those of an ambitious, Generation X, twenty-something male that provides the source of much of the book's humour. Also, the pathos that accompanies the humour rings true, pulling few punches, and vindicating a work that at moments feels a little too self aware.
Discreetly embossed on the front of A.H.W.O.S.G. are two maxims. The first reads: 'Mercy Is Not A Cure', the second: 'Quiet Has Its Own Set Of Problems'. On the cover of a book in which irony is piled upon irony, defying interpretation, the phrases demonstrate a remarkable honesty. Bringing together notions of suffering and discourse they delineate the concerns of Eggers' book, and testify, perhaps, to the pain present in the writing of A.H.W.O.S.G. Or they could be part of the gag. Who knows?
There is nothing either radically new or numbingly staid about A.H.W.O.S.G. As a memoir it will be neither canonized nor forgotten. Not that it really matters. Underneath the ironic and post-modern delivery is a true (or fictional, if you believe Eggers) story that at turns is very funny and very sad. The final pages - an angry out-burst building to a disorderly, Joycean crescendo - represent the same fin-de-siecle confusion and frustration voiced by Radiohead in Kid A, and put on to paper in the fiction of Bret Easton Ellis. Beginning by satirising the ordered, clinical pretension of the book-as-media-product, Eggers ends refusing - with the flourish of a departing artist - to become an easily defined commercial artifact. If you believe him, that is.
19th Oct 2000