What is the What by Dave Eggers

I’ll open with an apology: my normal voracious reading appetite has been soured for the past few months by attending four funerals over the summer.  I’m not reading as much, and I’m reading with impatience and an intolerant eye.

Nonetheless, I think I’m still reading good books like Joan Didion’s “Blue Nights,” which makes one think that she and JCO are in some sort of high-stakes poker game for who can open their veins wider.  For leitmotif, I’m gobbling up John Grisham’s latest, “The Litigators,” which is great fun.  My pulp-fiction bathroom book is “House Divided,” by Mike Lawson: a spy/murder/lawyer book about the NSA (like the Peace Corps, one of the few regrets at not joining from my post-college possibilities).  But back to the mortality memoirs, I recently finished JCO’s “The Corn Maidens” and am now setting out on the Julian Barnes book, “The Sense of an Ending.”  Even with the fluff reading, this is all well-written stuff: thoughtful, well-researched, and thoroughly life-relevant, even life-enhancing.

O.K., I guess I can’t avoid commenting on this month’s installment in our library book club text collection of dry, acidic diction.  “What” is right up there with “Envy” and “Sanctuary” as a compilation of words that characterize TMI: Too Much Information.  “Bliss” was in the running for this year’s prize, but wound up fourth – it was too accommodating to the reader.  These journalism articles, overly long and repetitive, were examples of bad memoirs – boring content, instead of exciting novels – emotive and insightful.

One lesson I’ve learned this year, and wish I could enforce, is that journalists should not be allowed to publish books.  There’s so much good stuff available, why encourage the proven bad writers.  One should: encourage youth and encourage fledgling authors; but hacks .??. – no advances – make them self-publish.

The cases in point are Eric “Bliss” Weiner, Neil “Sanctuary” White, and Dave “What” Eggers.  To me, these are men who beg, borrow, steal, and/or whatever to get their words out.  They’re con-men – out to sell a newspaper (Please see all the old Barbara Stanwick and/or Gary Cooper movies from the thirties).  These people changed that industry.  Reporters are now characterized as soulless jerks and creeps, male and female, who lust after the salacious and will go to any end to find gossipy items (just Google: Murdoch, Sun).

[But see, here I go: reacting to the loss of my mother, a radio friend, a church friend, and a local neighbor.]  I want to [and will of course] continue to say that my mother’s parents were both lifelong newspaper people.  My grandma opened her first paper at 19, as publisher/editor on the Louisiana/Texas border.  My mom’s father taught me to run the linotype at a young age.  They jointly ran the county papers, including the Waterloo {where my mother was raised} Gazette.  These kind of people are the genesis and inheritors of “the freedom of the press.”

My three minutes are running out.  I have hardly spoken of Eggers or his book.  Eggers is a bad writer – it’s a shame he had to drop out of Cal-Berkeley.  One reviewer tactfully says, “it defies categorization” – biography or novel – fiction or memoir.  I answer that an author knows what they are writing.  The story is not “engaging”, as another reviewer says; it is completely boring – I read it all – I never was interested in anyone’s story ---- whether they lived or died ---- nor what they were living or dying for ---- not in anything from the book.

Eggers didn’t do the number one thing an author must do: make me care whether they lived or died, whether they thrived or succumbed, whether they became relevant or not.  Journalists only have to achieve a buy-in for two minutes of one or two days. 

Good writers make you think about their characters for weeks, months and years afterward.  I will not remember Achak Deng next week. 

Will You .?