‘Genius’ An Emotional Roller-Coaster Ride

“A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” (Simon & Schuster, 375 pages, $23) by Dave Eggers

To understand what the 20-something memoir “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” has to offer, just consider the title.

Yes, the book tells a “heartbreaking” back story. And, yes, author Dave Eggers demonstrates some obvious talent - if not exactly what I would call “genius.”

Yet the title reveals something else, too.

To explain what that something else is, consider how Eggers handles the obligatory legal phrasing regarding fiction that takes up space on the book’s copyright page:

“NOTE: This is a work of fiction, only in that in many cases, the author could not remember the exact words said by certain people, and exact descriptions of certain things, so had to fill in gaps as best he could. Otherwise, all characters and incidents and dialogue are real, are not products of the author’s imagination, because at the time of this writing, the author had no imagination whatsoever for those sorts of things, and could not conceive of making up (author’s italics) a story or characters - it felt like driving a car in a clown suit - especially when there was so much to say about his own, true, sorry, and inspirational story, the actual people that he had known, and of course the many twists and turns of his own thrilling and complex mind.”

Without taking a breath, Eggers forges on for another few lines, ending with the declaration that everything actually happened as reported, aside from “certain, very small, liberties with chronology” that he took “because that is his right as an American.”

Bear in mind, this passage comes on the third page with any printing on it. Over the book’s next 30-odd pages is a preface, table of contents, lengthy list of acknowledgments and six “rules and suggestions for enjoyment of this book.”

And don’t forget the drawing of a stapler.

Only after Eggers has pulled us through all this does he plunge us into the white-noise mix that he calls everyday life.

He begins, innocently enough, with an extended scene of seeming, domestic bliss. Gradually, though, we learn that his mother is dying of cancer. Our main clue: She’s continually spitting some sort of vile body fluid into a cup.

Meanwhile, caught up in moments that feel as immense as they do mundane, Eggers and his older sister Beth flit around. They offer comfort where they can and endure mom’s jibes when they fail.

“This thing is handy, huh?” Eggers asks, referring to the half-moon plastic receptacle into which his mother spits.

“Yeah,” she replies, “it’s the cat’s meow.”

This blend of tones, from the intense to the merely routine, mark the roller-coaster kind of emotional ride that “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” is at its core. We’ve seen its likes before, the attempt by a writer to tackle family calamity with a stab at humor amid the growing recognition of horror.

But this is where Eggers does something modern (or maybe postmodern, I can’t keep the labels straight): He again switches tones.

Eggers resorts to irony - a self-referential, self-aware, often self-indulgent kind of irony.

With his eye caught firmly in a literary mirror, its focus on him watching us react to what he’s written, Eggers makes “A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius” one extended chronicle of the few years following his parents’ death. (Incredibly enough, they died within a few weeks of each other.)

Along with his older brother and sister, Eggers is forced to don adult responsibilities - not the least of which is the obligation to provide a home for the family baby, named Toph, who when the book opens is just in third grade. At the time, Eggers himself was only barely more mature, being still, more or less, in college.

But he doesn’t go gently, and he refuses to go alone. He pulls us along on his and Toph’s moves from the Midwest to Oakland, Calif., and from Oakland across the bay to San Francisco - the moves being necessary because it’s clear that no one place can be the sanctuary that they both need. What place could be?

More important, though, Eggers makes sure that we, too, suffer through the emotional trials of a precocious adolescence marked by family losses suffered way too soon. He protests, all along, that he’s in control even as he demonstrates all too clearly that he is not. All he does is find a way for Toph and him to survive.

Not everything that Eggers the writer tries works. His constant carping at authority, profanitydriven rage being the natural refuge of teenage powerlessness, gets old. And his stories of trying to keep an underground magazine going are, at best, cute. At their worst, they’re simply mean-spirited. In fact, much of the book’s latter half feels like one long wail at the world.

But that, of course, is exactly the point. In the end, Eggers proves winning if only because he works so hard at it. And because the kind of talent that he has is, in the end, so beguiling.

Family dysfunction has never before seemed so contemporary.

Not since the last episode of “Party of Five,” anyway.