Book Review 7 of 52: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Berry

I should probably start this by saying that I've been avoiding this book for years. I've heard the title before and thought it would be some incredibly pretentious piece of crap by the likes of David Foster Wallace. It even has a nice little notice on the cover letting you know that it was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. It's also a memoir, the height of pretentiousness.

Then I saw that Dave Eggers was co-writing the screenplay to Where the Wild Things Are and I know I want to see that movie so I thought I'd give the book a chance to see what kind of hack they hired to write the movie.

The book starts off with a long disclaimer letting you know that most of the book can be skipped, most of the characters are fictionalized versions of real people that wanted nothing to do with the book or wanted parts of their stories changed to protect the guilty. It starts off what turns into a wonderfully self aware memoir the way all memoirs should be written.

It starts off with Dave, his sister Beth, and his little brother Toph as their parents both succumb to cancer within a week of each other. Their brother Bill is off at some think tank, Beth has things of her own going on and Dave is pretty much stuck with the task of raising his little brother Toph. They live pretty much like how you'd expect a 21 year old and a 9 year old to live, meaning in borderline squalor but there is this awareness that their situation is amazing, that child services could knock down the door at any moment and take Toph away, that the babysitter may in fact be some sadistic child killer commiting all sorts of unmentionable acts while Dave goes out on dates juggling parental and personal responsibilities.

The book really starts to shine when it tears down the 4th wall. Dave's recounting of his audition for MTV's Real World (back in 1993 or so when the show was actually socially relevant) turns to the surreal when the interviewer mentions that this wasn't how the interview turned out at all and Dave acknowledges that it's completely fictional but it gives him grounds to explain things about his parents and his situation that he wouldn't have been able to do otherwise and the actual interview was a lot more boring. Also there are times when Toph, and another semi-made up character break character, one of them threatening to leave the book for being made up and being named after his dead father.

I've read a handful of memoirs before and they're so boring because it's basically like you're sitting at lunch with the person and they're telling you things they think are amazingly important like their silly childhood or how they turned into the person they are today because of "insert childhood tragedy here." What I got from this book is that Dave's parents death didn't really affect him too much, at least not as much as he could have gone into. What it focuses on is him and Toph and their take-over-the-world attitude.

The book is never really heartbreaking but there's a lot of staggering genius going on here. It's the perfect memoir, a wonderful admission that all recounted thoughts are pretty much made up (Can you recount a conversation you had with a friend fifteen years ago?), and that Dave's story isn't really exciting or particularly interesting but it's written so wonderfully that you don't really notice that nothing really happens.

The only complaints I would have is that Dave can be long winded at times, but it serves to the grandiose thinking of his character, but the book is so beautifully written that it's easy to overlook. Also it was good to know that the title is more tongue in cheek than anything else and not really Dave trying to jerk himself off on the book cover, that was a relief.