Day Twelve: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

Before I start this review, I have to apologize for the untimely posts this week. I’ve told several people that I would try to post a review every weekday during my lunch, but lately we’ve been having a lot of Internet outages. So, I’m posting when I can.

A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius is based upon true events of Dave Eggers’s life. When he was 22 years old, his mother and father died within months of each other, leaving his family to split up and himself in charge of his eight-year-old brother, Toph. They live in bachelor squalor while Eggers obsesses. Eventually, they move to San Francisco, where he becomes a founder of Might Magazine.

I didn’t read this book for a long time because I was put off by its title, but it received so many good reviews that I finally picked it up from curiosity. I have to preface my remarks by saying that I have lately gotten some clues that I don’t understand modern humor (i.e., I am officially a geezer), especially when I’ve tried to watch movies that are dubbed “hilarious.”

Readers might get a clue about how this book is going to proceed from its set of “Rules and Suggestions for the Enjoyment of this Book.” One of them is to skip the middle of the book. Good suggestion.

I found the first 100 pages or so about his parents’ deaths and his subsequent struggles affecting and absorbing. However, this is one of the few books that I just couldn’t finish. I found it so juvenile and smug that it was absolutely grating, but that’s not why I stopped. When Eggers abandons his straight narrative, he begins musing, and his prose devolves into unbelievably long, rambling paragraphs. His approach has been deemed “inventive” and even “the memoir as metafiction” (yikes!). I was actually only 30 pages from the end of the book when he started another of his lengthy asides, and I just couldn’t take it anymore. I gave up.