Another Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius

I hate fiction with an unreliable narrator. Or do I?
--Brian Beatty

Opening paragraph: I am not Dave Eggers. I am Robin Wood. That must be said first. This is a story about the Eggers family, though, just as you expected. All your favorite characters will be here, such as Beth and Bill and little Toph, who I may say is no longer so little, though still endearing, and Moodie and Shal and Dave, of course, and the sexologist, and some others you’ve yet to meet, like Midge and Toby and Will Mathers, book editor, and his wife, Kiplinger, and the harpist, Renata, and the Restaurateur, Coby Clawson, and the wise professor, Dr. Titian, and the gospel singer, Stacey Godsend, and Watson, the quiz game writer, and others, such as a pet parrot for the boys, a steady girlfriend first for Dave, then for Toph, a drug dealer who is more than a drug dealer, a cosmopolitan mentor-type who swears his furs are faux, a Christian evangelist turned transsexual, a husband and ex-husband for Beth, and some events that you’ll be expecting, like the book deal, the move to and from Brooklyn, the kernel for Timothy McSweeney’s Internet Tendency, the conversations with teaching buddies that lead to the foundation of the nonprofit gig 826 Valencia, and some events that may surprise you, among these the loss of a toenail that never does regenerate, the premeditated killing of a domesticated animal, the mugging and its psychological import, the near-loss of virginity and its psychological import, the death of another close relation (which you may in fact have been expecting), the resurrection of that same close relation, the establishment of a winsome but unsuccessful steel band, a brief period of religious fervor followed by a brief period of forlorn self-pity and hyper self-consciousness followed by a brief period of kick-ass unmitigated decadence and self-flagellating experimentation, and then the epiphany that signals the denouement and the few things that follow that, like a Whitmanesque or Ginsbergian flourish of an ending, a couple of appendices that were missing from the first book, and a couple of impossible Sudoku puzzles that delayed the completion of this book for a good two months.

Remember that I am not Dave Eggers, but rather Reed Wright, the narrator. You, along with others, including some friends, may call me Lefty. It’s a term of endearment, and I fully intend to endear myself to you as Dave did.

Having said that, my disclaimer: I am an unwilling participant in the process of this retelling, but as Poppins says, if I must, I must. And someone must because the people clamor, are clamoring! And since Eggers won’t pony up, someone else has to. The reason I’m that someone is the result of numerous innocuous coincidences between me and Dave that the publisher noticed one day during rush hour on the L train and thereafter over $3 bottles of Miller Lite at Daddy’s. These are:

(1) a genetic tendency toward volubility and self-love

(2) a love of lists and a camaraderie with the metaphysical that attends that love

(3) bad hair that everyone really likes, i.e., a meager but successful attempt at endearing self-deprecation to avoid the dismissal that comes with an arrogant-style of self-confidence

(4) an addiction to drama and tragedy

(5) an abiding Napoleonic sense of my own fate, a hint of megalomania

(6) an ambivalence that amounts to an irremediable fatalism and/or nihilism

(7) a strong belief that I’m right and others are assholes

(8) an ability to rationalize the commodification of personal tragedy with the self-effacing but trumped-up value of admitting awareness of that fact

(9) a love of maxims and the uncanny ability to create them

(10) a love of run-on sentences and the not-so-uncanny ability to write them

(11) the ability to recreate something, like a hyper self-conscious novel a la Cervantes (etc.) and pass the re-creation off as fresh and hip

(12) in the shroud of my own arrogance, never knowing when to stop

(13) a bona fide big heart and a natural tendency toward confession without apology that despite everything will endear me to you and make you wish that you knew me, that we could do drinks sometime, maybe coffee, lunch, Frisbee, origami, yoga, a road trip

(14) an abiding sense of entitlement that has been both reinforced and diluted over time (though mine comes not from a cruel fate that has subjugated me to loss, but rather from a voluntary ascetic lifestyle marked by self-deprecation and self-sacrifice as a result of an epidemic sense of social responsibility, which originated in a discarded but inescapable fundamental religious upbringing), so that while busy getting mine, I’m busily giving back.

As your narrator I recognize several serious requirements, which I will strive against the odds and maybe fate to fulfill. These include credibility, veracity, and vocal mimesis. Though I will fail at times to sound like Dave Eggers, I will always be trying, and once in a while, likely in a nondescript phrase, in some dependent clause, maybe in the painting of the New York landscape on one cold February evening when I’m alone at a bar putting this or that off, I’ll get the voice spot on, and you, you’ll do this thing that you rarely do--maybe only do when you remember a good joke ten minutes after it’s been told: you’ll smile despite yourself. If that ever happens, good intangible God, I’ll do the same. It’ll be you and me watching our brother’s wedding video ten years after the event, us seeing us at age fifteen strapped in tuxes, small, bright, wide-eyed, with our hair flung into ratted nests by the wind. The smiles we’ll share despite ourselves in front of that TV screen!

I will not be as funny as Dave, I’ll say that up front. This is my biggest deficit, and I was open about it during the interview, but they still gave me the job. Here’s how it happened.

Them: Can you write like Dave?

Me: I don’t know, to be honest, but I have read Heartbreaking a couple of times and one of his other books, too, and I’ve been writing since I was three—there were great hopes for me—and though I haven’t yet been published, I know I was always meant to be published, and when I was sixteen I got very close to being published. I was heavy into poetry at the time, you know, Ginsberg, Coleridge, Hafiz, Presley, the Lowells, W.C. Williams, the Dylans, Merrill, Mary Oliver and Philip Levine, and I had written a chapbook titled Where the Red Furniture Upholstery Sells in which there was one especially compelling poem on the lack of a term for words that have the same or similar meaning but sound different. It goes on for three quatrains in harried desperation until at the turn there’s this big epiphany via a fatal encounter with a thesaurus. Want me to recite it?

Them: Must you?

Me: It’s a loose Shakespearean sonnet.

Them: Then by all means.

Me:
At once the morgue and nursery, the start and end
of all you’ve ever said or wished to say.
You went into a dictionary one day, all
cognizant you’d need a word to lend
itself at once to higher thought, pretending
all the while to keep it real, gay,
buoyant but serene, academic and staid,
but bona fide and honest. There were friends,
past friends, who formed gold from lead and verse
from newspaper clippings: U.S. Briefing Mis-
spells Kuba. Fact or Fiction? Nixon, Kiss-
inger: Dog Lovers? Foreign words, perverse
translations, midday trips to Borders: for us
the repetitiousness of life: thesaurus.

Them: Thank you.

Me: It wasn’t published because President Nixon had just taken office and, what with the Vietnam War, and the probable end of free love, and the growing cognizance of general U.S. impotency, the country wasn’t much in the mood for poetry.

Them: No.

Me: So then I began to write humanistic essays on the Old Testament, my purpose being to prove that Jehovah always had that soft streak that gets so much attention in the New Testament, but I got sidetracked by a woman in a beautiful indigo-chartreuse dress, very form fitting, and when I woke up the next morning to the smell of her scrambled eggs, both the God of the O.T. and the God of the N.T. seemed superfluous.

Them: You’re ambitious, and we like that, but we wonder whether you’re voluble enough. For example, would you have any compunction about interru—

Me: My mother, it should be stated, often said, you ask too many questions, but it’s something I’ve never been able to modify or control.

Them: Do you want to ask us any questions now?

Me: I actually don’t have any questions left. I asked them all. I mean, I’ve answered all the questions that had answers. Now it’s just a matter of answering the answerable questions that others pose. Maybe you have a question.

Them: Are you at all hyperbolic in your depictions or descriptions?

Me: What?

Them: Do you ever exaggerate?

Me: No, never.

Them: Any other deficits?

Me: I’m not at all funny. I try to be funny, but my attempts always fall flat or make me look stupid or silly. I’m altogether too self-conscious to manage a joke that I don’t laugh at myself. I mean, I think I’m funny, but no one else does. I’ve taken that to mean that I’m not funny. Also, that no one gets me. I’m misunderstood. A loner, a lone wolf, a woman in a man’s world.

Them: That’s good enough. You’re hired. When can you start?

Me: Do you offer benefits? I have this tooth thing. At night it’s terrible pain.

So here I am. I spent the first half of the advance on a futon, a month’s supply of kitty litter for Mr. Fortune 500, and a used electric guitar, which I lent to Dave for his lessons. Bastard took it with him to S.F. The lessons lasted three months, during which Dave met Gwyneth, who swept our boy off his feet, entranced him with the long hair, the subtle body, the quick tongue, the cat eyes. She made casual sex undesirable and disrupted the Dave-Toph dynamic and thus single-handedly rearranged the tenor of the second book. On this point, Dave’s own words:

There is no second book! How many times do I have to tell you people? Huh? HUH? Would it help if I said it in Russian? ___ _______ ______ _____ _ __ _____! I wrote one goddamn book about my life and I’m not going to write another one. Not for you, not for me, not for the kids or world peace or for all the flower faces in the world. At least not for another fucking twenty-five years! Okay? You come back in twenty-five years and ask me whether I’m going to write a second memoir. Maybe then you’ll get another answer. Okay? OKAY?

You can see what she’s done, the vixen. Well, we’re here to correct it, we meaning me and the people backing the project who agree with practically the remainder of the reading world, which is clamoring, CLAMORING for another book, a family update, a novel-length Eggers Newsletter (the NewslEgger), a sequel, a second run, a second date, a second coming!
Denials of a second book were always only staged for the media hype anyway, like the suspense a would-be presidential candidate rallies when he denies aiming for the ovate office with the ergonomic leather throne and says he just wants to serve the American people in any capacity, wink wink. How do I know? you ask. I’ve read the NewslEgger. Cover to cover, every issue since its inception in 1997. The pertinent passage (one of several and the most compelling) comes from the April 2004 issue in an article written by Toph and titled, “Bright Lights, Big Shitty.”

It’s not a matter of there being enough genius left. There’s plenty of genius left for twenty more heartbreaking works. And God knows it’s not a matter of public interest or marketability. And any decision not to write it would have nothing to do with avoiding a windfall sales figure on some kind of moral ground, as if Dave owed anybody anything at this point in his life.

Of course the recurring question of motivation is nothing to the recurring question of justification. Why write the book? On what literary or personal or even public grounds should a second heartbreaking work be written? To satisfy the bulging eyes of the insatiable public voyeur? No. To further indulge the author’s vulgar sense of self-importance? No. To pilfer the private tragedies and tombs of more Eggerses? No. To apologize for the first pilfering and pillaging? No. To recapitulate another quasi-original work as original to get a second go at the Pulitzer? No. There is only one reason to write book two, and Dave said it himself, although I’ve paraphrased it here better than he originally put it:

Between you and me, Toph, I’m tired. I’ve been doing a lot of thinking lately—in addition to all the other things I’ve been doing—and I’ve come to the conclusion that to write another heartbreaking work may be impossible. I mean, how many chucks can a woodchuck chuck? But assuming I could write it, I can only conceive of one viable reason to do it, which I can sum up in a stunning re-vision of a worn-out idiom: the grass is not greener anywhere, let alone on the other side. You know, I wrote Heartbreaking with a couple of goals in mind: one, to make money and, two, to exorcise the demons of the past, in the tradition of the confessional poets or Maugham in Of Human Bondage, in order to move on with my life as so many other brow-beaten boys have moved on with their lives, fate be damned, via pen and paper and a self-indulgent streak. It’s a long, hardy tradition. Listen to Maugham:

Fact and fiction are inextricably mingled: the emotions are my own, but not all the incidents are related as they happened, and some of them are transferred to my hero not from my own life but from that of persons with whom I was intimate.

The effect of writing Of Human Bondage was as Maugham had hoped. Early demons were exorcised, and Maugham’s work turned into new and more exotic channels.

That last bit was from some critic’s beloved editorial. But do you know what I got for my troubles aside from the money? An ulcer, Toph. I got an ulcer the size of New Hampshire and an addiction to Tylenol with codeine. And this: a realization that in order to expiate myself I can’t excoriate others. Turns out I’m just burning everyone’s grass with my self-indulgent exposé, and so now I can take my idiom further: it’s not just that the grass isn’t greener on the other side, Toph, it’s that it’s simply not green, anywhere. I don’t care where you are. You could be standing in the middle of the goddamn Scottish links and the grass would still be some variation on the theme of brown, and so do you now see what I’m saying? Do you see what I’m getting at here, Toph? The only reason I might do a sequel would be to express, however futile those attempts, the one truth that seems to hold universally: that the world is weary and brown, and that inside me as inside countless others it is shrinking. Topher, I’m not sure that any of us can handle another heart break at the sight of the incredible shrinking world.

You cannot fail to miss the conflict, nascent to the nature of so many artists, between one’s creative impulse and one’s nagging self-doubt. But then, what is indecision if not the sensitivity to oneself and the world context that comprises the artistic temperament?

But if you failed to pay proper attention, you may have missed what Toph euphemistically calls the “one reason to write book two.” I did. Which is why I decided to write the book: to figure it out. So this book is a grail-search, if I may be so dramatic. By the end of the book I hope to elucidate that “one reason” and with one smooth motion solve the mystery of the unwritten book, satiate our collective urge to peep once more at the Eggers’s family album and drink the grail fluid of piggy-backed book fame.