A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
I’m not sure when I first saw the title of Dave Eggers’ A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, but I vaguely remember thinking how brilliant of a title it was (without knowing anything whatsoever about the book). It wasn’t until some time later that I learned who Eggers was (one of the guys behind McSweeney’s), at which time I knew I had to get this book (again, not knowing anything whatsoever about the story).
I also remember spending way too much time thinking about how cleverly I would caption my post on the book, by playing off of its epic-sounding title, or, better yet, how I would write a book and call it something similar (A Hardworking Break of a Struggling Gymnast, or something equally brilliant). But I digress.
I finished the book last night, and I think it’s a pretty good book. The book tells Eggers’ story of how his parents passed away very close together in time, while he was in college, and how he basically had to become the guardian for his younger brother (who I think was 7 at the time). They moved to San Francisco, where his older sister lived, and he went through the process of raising his brother while trying to lead a social life and start a world-changing magazine (called Might).
I generally like Eggers’ writing style, which is at times plainly narrative, but at other times is very stream-of-consciousness. And I love how he spent a ton of time at the beginning of the book explaining who had helped him with it, while apologizing to those folks whose names he didn’t change, or who had given him material without getting credit. At the same time, I found a startling number of grammatical errors in the book (not due to the stream-of-consciousnless style, but just poor editing), as well as a few difficult to believe retellings of conversations with his younger brother (who used language and talked with the experience of a fifty year-old).
But all in all a pretty good read. Except for the end. Not the end of the story, mind you, but the end of the book, in which Eggers goes off on some random rant that I can’t really understand, but in which he inexplicably drops twenty-three F-bombs in the final paragraph.
March 7, 2007 8:15 am 
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By DJ Cayenne, March 7, 2007 @ 9:39 am
Hmm, our mileage varied considerable on this one. I’d say, without any embellishment, that this was a life-changing book for me. I was amazed by this book. It changed (for me) what a book could be and how books could be written. I was handing out that book for months after I read it – essentially forcing it on one and all. I hounded a friend in another city for over a year to get my copy back when she was slow in returning my copy. Some people loved it – others were all “meh” – some even hated it to the point of being angry with me.
I’m just fine with people having a different opinion. It’s becoming obvious to me that I am more of an enthusiast than a critic. I wouldn’t have it any other way. I just get bummed out when I have a profound reading experience and I don’t get to share it with people who had an entirely different take.
I don’t remember the editorial problems that you mentioned. Did you get a knock off at Sam’s Club or something?
It’s been a while since I read the book (Amazon tells me that I bought it in Feb. 2000), so I had to go back and read that last part this morning to refresh my memory about the “random rant” at the end. In the scene, Dave and Topher are whipping a frisbee around, and we are treated to some fine stream of consciousness writing. My take on that scene is that it is an incredibly powerful one.
There they are, throwing the frisbee around park at the marina in San Francisco. The thoughts that are running around his head, all at once, are the exhileration of that day, love for his brother, love/hate for everyone else in the world, frustration at the hand that life has dealt him, and it ends with an open challenge for the world to do its worst – he’s ready. The anger, compassion, and defiance of the rant are incredible. Blew my mind all over again.
That scene calls for exactly 23 f-bombs. Any less would have undersold it, 25 would have been showboating. Eggers played it perfectly.
By Shaft, March 7, 2007 @ 4:00 pm
I don’t mean to slight the book — I liked it. And I, too, found it encouraging and inspiring that someone could pretty much write how they felt like writing and have it be successful. And you apparently seem to think that I was offended by the f-bombs. Haven’t we spoken in real life before? I can handle all of you can throw at me; I just didn’t understand the shift here (which you’ve actually done a pretty good job of characterizing).
By DJ Cayenne, March 8, 2007 @ 10:03 am
“I liked it” and “pretty good read” are relatively mild praise. I needed to see, “it changed my worldview” or “one of the single greatest books I have read” or even “I can’t stop thinking/talking about this book.”